Thoughts on the Way Home

Monday, April 06, 2009

Necessity of Knowing Greek?

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This has been brought up on here before, but I thought Frank Turk's comments on JT's post were helpful. Here are a couple:

"JT is right about something in his counter-comment: we don't have a huge problem with most pastors spending too much time in the Greek. But that symptom comes from pastors not really seeing the text as necessary, valuable and sufficient. My opinion -- and of course, I have many of them -- is that if we did more, better work extolling the sufficiency and necessity of the text people can actually read for themselves, the work of the men who can and should read the original languages would be far more useful to the church than it is today."

". . . the impression I get often from people who wield the Greek as if it was a spiritual necessity is that those who read the Bible in English aren't getting fed and aren't able to feed others. I think that impression is one we should do war against in order to teach people that reading the Bible in English is better for them than anything else they can do for themselves wherever they are today."

Read more HERE, and especially note that Frank DOES say that "There is no question that the original languages are precious, and that the church ought to have a phalanx of faithful men who can and do read these languages in order to maintain our modern-language texts." I think that's absolutely right and, taken together with his other comments, is a good summation of what I would say on the issue.


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