NEW TESTAMENT: KEY GREEK WORDS AND MODELS

by Robert Brow  February 1999

Introduction

On Ash Wednesday, 17 Feb 1999, Rev. Bill Dickson of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, persuaded me to join a group of others to read the whole New Testament in Greek during the forty days of Lent. We use an interesting sequence of daily readings prepared by Father Carter Paden. And we were invited to send our impressions and comments to the others on our list.

I noted from my interleaved Nestle's Novum Testamentum Graece, 1956, that this was my twentieth reading through the Greek Testament in forty years. Each time I tend to be looking for answers to particular questions that interest me. This time I decided to look for key Greek words that would have quite different meanings depending on the explanatory model that the writer may have had in mind.

That suggested collecting my comments as a book on the Model Theology web site. Les Potter, who minds the site, set up files for all the NT books under New Testament: Greek Words and Models. And I began slotting in every day what I had shared with the reading group. It's a wonderful way to write a book because this donkey has the carrot of seeing progress and the stick of having to keep up the pace.

So this is a very hurriedly written series of comments from a very rapid reading of the Greek New Testament. It is therefore neither scholarly with footnotes nor exhaustive of all the hundreds of words that could be commented on. It just a collection of alternative models that interested me as I went along. Readers should not expect anything else. But it will illustrate what Model Theology is about from many examples in the Greek text. If you happen to be puzzled by a section I have focused on, my comments might be useful as one way of looking at the problem.

Greek words are transliterated into Roman characters, and this is by no means uniformly done. I was taught classical Greek as a boy of ten with one Greek pronunciation, and then I was given another pronunciation when I learned New Testament Greek. When Mollie and I visited Crete, Mainland Greece and Cyprus I could read the signs but could hardly understand a word of what was said in Modern Greek. But what I began to learn then also modified the way I heard and transliterated the words.

I hope purists will not complain, and those who are just beginning to learn New Testament Greek will see that in most cases the Greek words are also translated into English. So back to this whirlwind reading which will hopefully be completed by Good Friday.

Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
Acts
Romans
1 Corinthians
2 Corinthians
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
1 Thessalonians
2 Thessalonians
1 Timothy
2 Timothy
Titus
Philemon
Hebrews
James
1 Peter
2 Peter
1 John
2 John
3 John
Jude
Revelations


 model theology home | essays and articles | books | sermons | letters to surfers | comments