Greek - Ελληνις

So I have begun a whole new adventure this semester. I am starting a journey in the Greek language, and I have already encountered the first problem. I have been in Greek class for about a week now, and at first things went well. But now that we are starting the translating, it is beginning to get a little harder. So why am I telling you this?

I have come to realize that translating the Bible was no easy task. I think a lot of times we have some misconceptions that some men sat down and translated each word, and that it all fell into place easily for them. Well, I will just tell you that that is far from the truth! All I have learned are a few vocab words and how to translate and identify different types of nouns. But that is complicating enough. When you look at a Greek sentence, the words are just there. There is no certain order that any of the words go in. You have to figure out which one is the subject, verb, and direct object based on the spelling. For example, subjects and direct objects end with different letters, and that clues you in on the word's function.

I do not want to get too technical with you, but I am trying to say that it really is a lot more complicated than I expected. I took French, and that language has a word order to its sentences much like English. But Greek is a lot different. So my point is that it was a lot of work for these men to sit down and translate the Bible for us. They had to really concentrate and piece each word together to make the language make sense. They did not just read each word in order and put an English parallel beside it. They had to manipulate the words, unscramble the sentence, and try to figure out the meaning as a whole.

I thank God for giving us men to be dedicated enough to work hard at this task so that we can have an English translation of the Bible (a lot more so now than i did a few weeks ago). But one more thing, this is also why there are so many different translations. Dr. Van Neste said that each word in Greek, when translated, produces an idea, not necessarily a word. For instance the Greek word for angel can also mean messenger. So sometimes there are debates over what the author meant with their word choice. And this produces different English translations of the same text.

Now you are probably lost in this blog post, and you may not even care. But I am just saying that God is amazing that he would give the gift of translation to men so that people of every language could read His Word. Thank God for the men who translated the Hebrew and Greek texts into English!

By the way, that Greek word in the title means Greek or the Greek language. I just thought I would throw that out there.

Matt