Daniel R Street PhD's associate professor at Houston Baptist University wrote this article.
Greek professors, do they know Greek?
In November 2008, here's his blog post.
In November 2008, I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological
Society on teaching Greek communicatively.
As an experiment, I began my presentation by passing out a quiz for attendees to take.
I'm guessing it was the first time that that had ever happened.
Attendance was pretty good, about 30 audience members.
Here's the quiz, see how you can do.
So he gives this quiz to the people
at this theological society meeting.
All they have to do is write the Greek for this English.
I'm gonna give you the 10 questions on the quiz.
Number one, yes.
Number two, chair or seat.
Number three, ball.
Number four, cat.
Number five, monkey.
Number nine, the number nine, or number six, sorry.
Did somebody correct me?
Six is nine.
Okay, number seven, red.
Cold is number eight.
Nose is number nine.
And to jump is number 10.
And then for the bonus points,
hello, how are you, goodbye.
Does this sound like pretty hard quiz?
Again, this is yes, chair, ball, cat, monkey,
nine, red, cold, nose, jump.
Hello, how are you, bye.
Who thinks they can do pretty well on that in Spanish?
Okay, now, okay, you got your, oh, so you're ready to,
you're an expert grandmaster wizard in Spanish, right?
No, because this is something that you would all learn in Spanish one. Am I right? Okay. Let's see how these guys did.
I'm gonna continue with the blog post. My audience was made up of mostly Greek professors and
doctoral level students who had probably taken on average four to seven years of Greek by now and some of whom had been teaching Greek for
20 to 30 years by now. After the audience had finished, I collected their quizzes. The average grade was
0.4 out of 10. The average grade was 0.4 out of 10. Most testees could not answer any of the questions correctly, although they tried.
The highest grade was 2 out of 10. Now this audience included many scholars who had written
best-selling Greek textbooks and grammars, and of course, I won't name their names. I would have, but that's what he's saying. Folks,
did you hear that? By the way, I took the same test, and I'm not bragging here because it's such an easy,
ridiculously easy test. I took the same test. I got 9 out of 10, right, and I got the bonus.
I just didn't know the word for jump, but I learned it since then. So, listen to this. Greek professors admit
they don't know Greek. Let me relate to you,
this is the same blog post, the nearly universal response that I received from Greek professors when I advocate for a communicative method.
Many are very receptive to, even enthusiastic about, the possibilities in such a method, but without exception,
I hear from them, "I simply don't know Greek well enough to teach it this way." "I could never carry on a whole class in Greek" and so on.
Give these professors a little credit. At least they're being honest and open about the problem.
Not really, because should they be teaching Greek for a living if they don't know the language?
At least they're being honest and open about the problem. We Greek professors can parse till the cows come home.
We're experts at filling out paradigm charts. We love to explain the historical role of the digamma in irregular verbs.
We can nerd out and on and on about proclitics and enclytics, but what we lack is simple proficiency in Greek.
This is written by a Greek professor, a PhD at a Baptist university, gave a seminar to 30 guys who are supposedly getting doctorates in Greek,
and they could not even answer more than two questions right. The average score was 0.4 on this quiz.
So folks, this is what we're dealing with. These guys don't know Greek, but they're ready to tell you how wrong your King James Bible is.
Folks, they're a bunch of liars and frauds is what they are. It's a joke. It's ridiculous. How do they get away with this?