greek exegesis week 2: Mark 1:20-2:4

Now that my essay is out of the way, I can catch up on blogging about Greek. As you can tell from the lack of Greek posts, I haven’t been spending as much time revising as in previous weeks: I often carry the textbook somewhere, but then end up working on something else instead. As a result, my vocab is starting to get a bit more blurry.

This was beginning to be evident all those weeks ago (I think it’s been four weeks) when Greek Exegesis week 2 took hold. Most obvious was that we hadn’t covered the entire textbook: we kept encountering constructs (adverbs and periphrastics – the latter is a combination of the verb ‘to be’ and a participle… I never thought that I’d use such a phrase to try and explain something).

As we ploughed through this chapter, watching as the lecturer parsed the different verbs, the study that we’ve done this year started to make sense. To really understand what’s going on in the Greek sentences of the NT, you need to know a lot of grammar.

Even more obscure, though, are the occasions where an idiom is used – a figure of speech: often a Hebrew figure of speech, that has a particular meaning. The one that springs to mind? You don’t say “the sick”, you say “the having bad ones”… this is the kind of understanding that would only come through classroom (or commentary) learning.

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