For two decades, Wallace’s Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics has been the favorite textbook for intermediate Greek courses in seminaries and Christian colleges and universities. As much as we all owe a debt to Wallace’s grammar with its comprehensiveness, exegetical discussions, and useful charts, it is now two decades old and….
Attention to the Greek word for Korah’s “rebellion” reveals its application also to Israel during their wilderness period.
Do we need to get inside the Hebrew minds of the New Testament authors?
The Claim
Someone in the modern Messianic movement posted the following on Facebook….
Dr. William Varner discusses our English convention of calling Jesus’ brother Ἰάκωβος “James,” even though his Greek name means “Jacob.”
This video is an excerpt from Dr. Varner’s James Greek Reading Videos….
Based on A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, Second and Third Editions with references to Wallace’s Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics and Harris’ Prepositions and Theology in the Greek New Testament,…
The history of early Christianity has taken one of the prime spots in recent NT research. Revisionist histories abound, and new perspectives on old data are welcome. But the attempts to canvas in detail the first 150 years of Christianity are few and far between….
One of the most time-consuming aspects of studying Greek or doing exegesis is looking up difficult or irregular forms. One might see the perfect form of a verb in a passage and decide to write a note about how the author could have used the aorist tense here but chose not to…but what is the aorist form you need to write in your notes?…
Our last post in this series on word study fallacies gave five fallacies you want to avoid. This post will give you five more, with a third post completing the series on word studies. Make sure to avoid these mistakes in your preaching, teaching, research, and individual study….
Learning Greek can be a fun and rewarding exercise. While the work of memorizing vocabulary and paradigms can be tedious, the payoff is worthwhile and worth the effort it takes. But what about after you spent those many months memorizing vocabulary, case endings, and principal parts? How do you keep from losing the hours you spent learning Greek? This is where Rodney Whitacre’s Using and Enjoying Biblical Greek: Reading the New Testament with Fluency and Devotion (UEBG) comes in handy. Consisting of seven chapters and 5 appendices, UEBG is the just the resource needed for both the beginner and the rusty student of Biblical Greek….
Preparing a sermon on difficult texts can be extremely time-consuming. In Philippians 1, what does Paul mean when he says “I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my salvation” (1:19)? How should the difficult Greek phrase τοῦτο φρονεῖτε ἐν ὑμῖν ὃ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ (2:5) be understood? What does the word ἁρπαγμὸν mean in 2:6? To give one more example, what about everyone’s favorite word in Philippians, σκύβαλα – just exactly how strong is that word? For each of these exegetical problems, and the many more you would find in almost every paragraph of Philippians, you might need to consult a few commentaries and a couple lexicons, assuming you’re working from the Greek….