Dr. Sam Lamerson

For those of you who have spent a year learning Koine Greek, now comes your first real test. Will you keep up with it over the summer or will you let it slide away like a ball rolling downhill while you stand off to the side and watch all of your hard work simply slide away? Here are a few hints to help you keep the ball rolling, no matter how slowly, uphill.

First, read your Greek every day for at least fifteen minutes. This will do you a world of good and you will be amazed at how much you will retain just by reading for a few minutes a day. Of course you will need to study harder and longer if you want to get better, but at least you will not be going backwards.

There are a variety of tools that you can use to help you in reading over the summer, one is Zondervan summer Greek reader . This is a work that has a small section of Greek to read for each day of the summer with some helps for the difficult vocabulary.

A second work, also by Zondervan is Mounce Graded Reader . Mounce gives you a number of sections from the NT, starting out with the very easy and moving on to the fairly difficult, ending with passages from the LXX and the Didache. Mounce also has a very helpful appendix with a list of the grammatical categories from Wallace’s grammar.

A third such work, from Kregel, is R. Decker’s Koine Greek Reader . Decker’s work is very helpful in terms of giving the student things to review as well as teaching him or her how to use BDAG and giving careful notes to each of the passages.

All in all the student can simply read a Greek NT over the summer. The pressure of having a workbook staring at them, which remains undone if the laziness overtakes them can be quite motivating, however so the purchase of one of these readers can be a small price to pay for a good summer’s work in the language.

Years ago, when I was doing magic for a living, I took a trip out to the Magic Castle in Hollywood. While there I met the legend that had caused many, many people to move to the area to study close-up magic. His name was Dai Vernon and he had a couch in the corner of the room with a sign above it which said “Reserved for the Professor When He Is In the Castle.” Vernon was a man who lived, ate, and drank close up magic. Nothing was so important to him as a pack of cards or a set of cups and balls. I arrived at the Castle when it opened at eight p.m. (as I remember) and not too long after I saw Professor Vernon (he had no academic degree but was called the professor because of his deep knowledge of magic) sitting in his corner with a pack of cards in his hands, staring at them. I walked up to him to express my admiration and it was as if I had interrupted him. He thanked me in a rather gruff manner and went back to looking at the deck he had in his hand. I left the Castle that night at two a.m. when it closed (again as I remember) and as I was leaving I still recall seeing Vernon, sitting there, hours and hours later still looking at that deck of cards. Undoubtedly considering a move he had thought about for years and yet was still not satisfied with. If he could spend that kind of time working with a deck of cards, how much more should I be willing to spend working on what I believe to be the word of God?

Don’t let your Greek get away from you. No toil is too great if by it we are able to know the Lord better.

DSL