It's Greek to me

When I went back to college in '84 after a year and a half dropout, I registered for New Testament Greek. I didn't know why. At that time I would have said that I was a Christian, but to say I was horribly backslidden would have been an understatement. I lied about why I was taking the class, claiming I wanted to learn classical Greek, but it wasn't available. I did two years of Koine, some Homer and Plato, all sloppily, then moved on. In '96, I pulled my Greek New Testament off of the shelf. I didn't know why. I was still backslidden, and I had no idea why I was trying Greek again. I got three chapters into the Gospel of John. In '01, I got a New Testament with Greek and Latin on facing pages and started working through it. I wasn't sure why. I was still backslidden, but lots of things seemed to be cleaning themselves up, with little effort on my part. In '05, I pulled the Greek/Latin NT back off of the shelf. It didn't matter to me why, it was something I had to do. God had pulled me out of the mire of my past and blessed me with a growing family at the age when most men are becoming grandparents, and I knew that He had been nudging me at this Greek thing for 21 years, and there must be a reason. I'm still sloppy at it, but I spend alot of time with it.

There's a need out there for broadening Greek literacy in the Christian community. Islam is the fastest growing religion in this country, and their converts are learning Arabic because they are taught that their god revealed himself through that language, and he only truly hears prayer in that language. Most of their critiques of Christianity are based on questioning the reliability of scripture, precisely the thing that learning Greek prepares one to defend. Learning enough Greek to talk about the three words for love in the NT, or to fake it to people with an interlinear NT isn't enough. If we are going to defend the faith in the future, we must be able to defend the documents which are our primary evidence. I've got six kids to try to get this passed on to, I'll let you know how the experiment proceeds.