Magic Words

Or, why it's ok not to know Greek.

When I was getting my Masters degree, I took a few Greek classes with a really excellent professor. In addition to teaching Greek, this man was a pastor and a part of an organization who translated the Bible into other languages. He really knew his stuff. But he was not some ivory tower pontificator, airily lecturing us about the genitive case etc. etc. He had pastored real people – he was a practical, very normal sort of guy.

One day after class I asked him how much Greek, on average, he included in the sermons he preached. I knew he would have it figured out – I was sure that I was about to hear how a master balanced the need to educate people, while not going over their heads. He said, “I include the same amount every week.” And then he held up his hand with his index finger touching his thumb.

“Zero.”

I couldn’t believe it. I loved having him as a Greek teacher – and let me tell you, that feeling is not easy to engender among your students when your subject is the dead dialect of an ancient language – and I felt that he was doing his congregation a disservice by not passing on his knowledge to them.

I think I actually said something like that to him. He smiled, and I will never forget what he said next:

“I know Greek so they don’t have to.” He went on to say that a congregation shouldn’t have to bear the burden of knowing Greek, that’s the whole point of us learning it ourselves. We studied Greek so that we could go on to make the Scriptures come alive for people who didn’t know the difference between omicron and omega.

I think about that conversation a lot. It has shaped my approach to writing (sermons and otherwise) about the Bible in a fundamental way. It also opened my eyes to the ways that I think people tend to view and use the Greek of the New Testament.

I have a lot of pastor friends and all of them mean well – they genuinely want to write good sermons and see Greek as a potentially helpful way of making a passage come alive or adding helpful context. Sometimes it does. But how can you teach people about another language if you don’t have a depth of knowledge and a degree of fluency? It just seems like the pastoral version of getting a tattoo in Japanese. Even if you are really, really sure what it says, if you don’t speak Japanese it’s probably not worth the risk.

Often, the Greek I hear pastors use doesn’t add anything at all. Years ago, I listened to a friend of mine teach a message to a group of college students. It was from one of Paul’s writings and contained the word “friend.” He decided to dive into the Greek and it went something like this:

“Here we see the word ‘friend’ which in Greek can mean companion, compatriot, comrade. Someone who comes alongside of you to help.”

After his message I said to him, “so, in other words, the Greek for ‘friend’ is… ‘friend.’”

Sometimes pastors think they are helping people understand the meaning of a Greek word but are basically just reading a thesaurus entry for what we already find in our English translation. Here’s an insider secret about the Bible: translators generally have done an excellent job. When you read your English Bible you are, believe it or not, getting an excellent sense for what the Greek says!

Sometimes we unintentionally (indeed, with the best of intentions) treat Greek like magic words. We act as though if we know the special, secret words, we will have some sort of power, or higher truth. This, in turn, communicates to people that knowing a few Greek words is a shortcut to wisdom.

You wouldn’t fly to Paris with total confidence after one French lesson, yet people are ready at a moment’s notice to whip out the biblical Greek they just looked up on Logos. Even Harry Potter wasn’t throwing around charms his first day at Hogwarts, people. Greek shouldn’t feel like a burden, but neither should we regard it as a super power, possessed by the super spiritual.

The truth is, you don’t need to know Greek to read and understand the Bible. The best thing to do is find a translation that you will actually read. Not a big reader? Well, thanks for reading Matter at Hand first of all. But if that’s you, try the NLT or NIV. Both are very accessible for any reading level. If you want translations that are maybe a bit more challenging but capture more of the poetry and movement of the narrative and language, try the ESV or NRSV.

Maybe the most important thing the Protestant reformers got right was that everyone should be able to read the Bible in their own language. We are blessed to have unprecedented access to it and nothing should stand in anyone’s way of reading it.