Greek Exegesis – Mark 1:1-20

Greek exegesis: mark chapter one

This was the first day of Greek where we just looked at bible verses, and translated them / watched the new lecturer translate them.

You can see the OHP in action: the Greek text is on overhead projector slides double-spaced, and projected onto a whiteboard. The lecturer points at the words as he goes, writes down notes (like the base form of the verb we’re looking at), and invites students to chip in with questions.

It’s slow going, because we actually parse every word (work out the number / case / gender for nouns, or the number / person / mood / voice / tense for verbs). In three hours (less about 20 minutes for the general “new lecturer” introductions), we covered 20 verses of Mark, but even in those few verses, I noticed things I’d never seen before.

Talking to some of the other students afterwards, it seems that to try and translate a chapter beforehand, by yourself, looking up any unfamiliar words in a lexicon, would take about 3 hours. I managed to get through most of the chapter in a lunch hour, but if I didn’t know a word, I just left a blank line: – much easier.

Oh, and I passed the exam from last week, in case you were worried for me.

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