A Reader’s Greek New Testament, 3rd Edition, edited by Richard J. Goodrich and Albert L. Lukaszewski (Zondervan, 2015), 592 pages.
What is the best way to keep up with your vocabulary? Flashcards are definitely a big help, but there’s no substitute for simply immersing yourself in a language day after day. And for that, you need to choose the right Bible.
Goodrich and Lukaszewski understand this. As they note in the introduction, if you were to learn all the vocab words Mounce requires in his Basics of Biblical Greek, you would still be far from being able to sit down in your armchair with the Greek. if you wanted to read the Greek NT in a year, it would take 22 verses a day on average, and you would not know 3.5 words per verse, on average. At 30 seconds per word (which is really fast), you would spend 38 minutes a day in the lexicon for your daily reading (p. 8).
You should definitely learn more vocab than Mounce has in his textbook, but even if you learn down to ten occurrences based on Metzger’s frequency list, you will still find many words you do not know. And that’s where a reader’s Bible comes in handy. With such a Bible, as long as you know your paradigms and syntax, you should be able to read through large chunks of your Bible–even in your armchair.
This Reader’s Greek New Testament is now in its third edition. The first two were successful (I owned the first one) and many have found it useful. This new edition was spawned mostly because of the updated text editions NA28 and UBS5, which have been taken into consideration in this text. If I remember correctly from my first edition (which I no longer have), the font has been upgraded to a more appealing and sleek-looking font. It reminds me of SBL Greek but less italicized.
The text itself is based on an eclectic text that underlies the NIV translation, which was then later updated by Gordon Fee and which adopted many of the UBS variants. The result is that the text much resembles UBS5 and the spots that differ are noted in the small apparatus at the bottom of each page.
One of the greatest features of this Bible is its size. It is thin, coming in at just under 600 thin pages with a smooth imitation leather cover. These covers do tend to get bent out of shape easily, but after wearing it in it should sit closed easier (after one night of use my cover already sticks up at a 30 degree angle from the rest of the book).
In the back are four colored maps of the Holy Land in the time of Jesus, Jerusalem in the time of Jesus, Paul’s early journeys, and Paul’s missionary journeys. While perhaps an afterthought to some, these can be helpful references while reading in a foreign language, since being able to view an image of the geographical region being mentioned in the text might help solidify the scene better in the reader’s mind.
Using the text is simple. Each vocabulary word that occurs thirty times or less in the New Testament is footnoted. The footnote gives standard information such as the lexical form, genitive endings and articles for nouns, alternative nominative singular endings for adjectives, and possible meanings. The editors typically followed BDAG in deriving the possible meanings of the word, but also consulted other standard lexicons and listed meanings they thought most possible in the context.
The major difference between this reader and UBS’s Greek reader is that the UBS reader gives parsings while this Zondervan reader does not. But the Zondervan volume wins outright on its slender size and light weight, if that’s your priority. The Zondervan volume is also about 1/3 the price.
As you begin reading, as soon as you hit a word you don’t know you can check the footnote for that word’s meaning. As long as you can figure out the parsing from the given lexical form, and as long as you’re good with grammar and syntax, you should be able to work your way through paragraphs without any outside help. This Reader is one of the most encouraging tools to help you retain and improve your Greek.
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