Featured Favorite and First Greek Textbooks

Well, I am not admitting to learning Greek -- I sometimes say I have studied five languages and can barely speak one. Nevertheless, my first Greek textbook was Essentials of New Testament Greek by Ray Summers. A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament by Dana and Mantey was second year. Both are good, so far as I know, but probably very dated.

 

I have Strong's Exhaustive Concordance Of The Bible, The New Strong's Expanded Dictionary Of Bible Words and Vine's Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, keyed to Strong's... I don't know Greek or Hebrew but if I do have a question on any word I am not short of finding an answer... My wife is a retired English teacher and shes told I still haven't mastered the English language... And you want me to learn Greek... Oy vey!... Brother Glen

 

I learned under two beginning textbooks, New Testament Greek for Beginners, by J. Gresham Machen (1923) and
Beginner's Grammar of the Greek New Testament, by William Hersey Davis (1923). Both were good, but Davis is tough to handle because of it's 8 case system. I taught from Machen in Japan because that was the only one available in Japanese, and it helped that I had the English edition. It's still a good grammar, but with 33 chapters kind of hard to get through in a semester. Both of these textbooks are mostly passe now.

I have taught from Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar, by William D. Mounce (2009). This is an excellent textbook, with some good resources based on it at teknia.com. One thing about Mounce's approach is that he relates Greek grammar to the English grammar you already know--helpful to a certain extent as long as the differences are made clear. I think you can actually skip the textbook and learn right from the website.

For five years now I've taught from David Alan Black's Learn to Read New Testament Greek, 3rd ed. (2009), This is an excellent textbook, and I plan to keep using it. It lays a good foundation in the first chapters. The 26 chapters are achieved by such common sense things as including the future active indicative in the same chapter as the present active indicative, which makes sense because the only difference is the addition of the future time morpheme in the future.

I understand from my son that Dr. Black is working on the 4th edition, and it should be good. (Dr. Black was my son's mentor for his PhD.)

 

This is a helpful way to learn Greek semantics. If you want to progress in the grammar, you could read through Mounce's textbook, which relates the English grammar to the Greek. Your wife could lecture you about that in the mean time.

 

ditto

 

I wonder at this. I think you said the textbook was Black. For my students, I would not recommend going through two textbooks at once. It seems to me that would be confusing. The reason is that each author has a different approach to laying the foundation in the first few chapters. If a student reads two texts at once, they are not getting the proper foundation laid for the main textbook, but will end up mixing up the two approaches. For example, Black builds off the pres. act. ind. in Ch. 3 to introduce the future right away, but Machen doesn't get to the future until Ch. 13.

 

Do It Yourself Hebrew and Greek: Everybody's Guide to the Language Tools (English, Greek and Hebrew Edition) (Hebrew)By Edward Goodrick
Best one to get into learning the languages as a starter!
Best after that Grammar Bill Mounce
Then daniel wallace
Then AT Robinson big daddy grammar!

 

Amazon has that for about 20 bucks, you learn Hebrew and Greek alphabet, and get shown how to use word studies and intro to Hebrew and Greek lexicons!

 

Would really recommend starting out with this book!

 

Interesting. I taught for one year with Mounce, and found it difficult to teach from, but some Greek teachers think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.

 

Don't forget Eric Jay, "New Testament Greek: an introductory grammar" and John Wenham, "Elements of NT Greek".