LEARNING GREEK?

It appears to me that the use of commentaries could be a help here. Any study of Greek or Hebrew couldn't be a waste, but really for the average pastor to feel that he would be an expert would be an illusion. How many on here could really pick up a Greek text and really know the depths of the individual words? Scholars who write commentaries give all their time to that kind of thing and can be a great friend to us. I think you need more than 1 commentary or you may be a parrot, but get 3 or 4 and you can get a sense of what's said. Plus they "interact" with others (even lunatics) to almost the point of boring us readers. Plus there is other Greek aids if we need more on an important word.

 

But the minister trying to decide between two commentators probably doesn't have all the training that either of them had. Can he really decide which is right?

Paidagogos suggests we take it all with a grain of salt.

Well said. We should do this.

When I read a commentary I realize that the person writing it certainly has more training than I have. As such I respect the fact the he/she perhaps has considered other angles or reasons that are not apparent to me.

Conversely I also realize that I probably have just as much grey matter as most commentators and thus my opinions are not automatically wrong just because I disagree with the expert.

My minimalistic stance here is determined by the fact that I see a pastor with a little knowledge, reading things into the Greek text, not realizing his own shortcomings is more dangerous than the pastor who has no knowledge and simply "relies on the experts".

 

That is not always true. Some pastors are highly skilled. Some commentaries are written to make money. There are pastors who are very highly skilled and have very goood training in biblical backgrounds and other languages, etc.

 

Without a good knowledge one cannot even begin ot understand some of the critical commentaries.

Imagine pastoring a church and in that church are some who have taken Greek at a Bible college or secular university. What would a pastor do who encountered that after preaching a sermon and one of them told him he was wrong because of his lack of knowledge. It is one thing to make an honest mistake and quite another to specualate from ignorance.

 

Bill,

Please , Charles, just take a few minutes and humor me by looking at your Greek Testament in places where this construction is used to see for yourself if that dictum by Hodge is right or not.

I concur with you that Hodge is likely going to far. The partitive use of "de" here likely is intended to set apart the last two nouns from the others, but there is not an indication that they must be the same thing.

I'd agree to your points with slight modification.

The pastor trained in some Greek will be able to look at this and see why Hodge says what he does but also be ableto understand why others disagree with Hodge. To say that he will be able to look at two commentators and decide decisively which is right is a little ambitious.

And it wouldn't bother me if an inept pastor wrote a grammar. If it were lousy no one would buy it!

But the inept pastor who preaches pseudo-Greek can misinform believers!!