Hello, this is Pastor Steven Anderson from Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona,
and today I want to talk to you about learning Greek, and I'm going to give you a few reasons
to learn Greek.
But first, let me talk about a reason that many people learn Greek, which I believe is
not legitimate.
A lot of people think that you need to learn Greek in order to understand what the Bible
really says, and that somehow if we go back to the original Greek that the New Testament
was written in, we're going to find all kinds of underlying, hidden meanings or nuances
or things that are just lost in the translation.
I do not believe that that is legitimate.
Let me just start out by saying that I believe that the English King James Bible is the word
of God without error.
I believe that it is a perfectly accurate translation from the original Greek and Hebrew,
so I do not believe that you need to go to a foreign language in order to understand
the Bible.
I believe that God simply expects you to read the Bible in the language that you speak,
in the tongue wherein you were born, and I don't believe that anything is lost in the
translation if you're reading a King James.
I think everything that you need to be saved, to grow in the Lord, and to learn everything
about the Lord Jesus Christ can be found just by reading a King James Bible.
Now a lot of people will say that you lose something in the translation.
That's simply not true.
I speak a few languages, actually.
My wife and I speak German at home pretty much every single day, and I've done some
professional translation work.
My wife and I both have done freelance translation of medical articles from German into English,
and that was my main source of income for about four months.
My wife and I have done that on the side over the years.
I speak several other languages, and I can tell you that you can express the same thing
in multiple languages.
You're not always going to say it exactly the same way, but you can get the exact same
meaning across, and we have to remember that God is the one who created languages in the
first place.
Mankind all spoke one language before the Tower of Babel, and it was at the Tower of
Babel that God divided up the languages, and all throughout the Bible we see God using
different languages.
Just the fact that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament was written
in Greek should show you that God is not limited to one single language.
Not only that, but at the day of Pentecost, if you remember, the apostles speak in various
languages.
There are 17 minimum languages listed there in Acts chapter 2, where the apostles were
speaking in other tongues or other languages as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
Now obviously if the Holy Ghost was the one leading them to speak God's word in these
various languages, we know that what they said was a perfect translation of the original.
Even the New Testament itself in many places is a translation because Jesus and the apostles
and the people that are in the stories of the four gospels, for example, were probably
not speaking Greek, yet it's being written down in Greek.
So to say that God can only speak through the Greek New Testament or only through the
Hebrew Old Testament is false.
God can speak to us in English through the King James Bible.
God does not expect us all to learn a foreign language in order to read his word.
I don't believe that people who speak Spanish should have to learn English and read the
King James or that they should have to learn Greek and Hebrew, but that rather the Bible
should be translated into all languages.
The Spanish speaker should read it in Spanish.
You're going to get the most out of it if you're reading it in your native tongue.
So with that out of the way, I just wanted to explain that I don't believe we should
learn Greek in order to try to understand the Bible in a deeper way because I believe
that all of the depth is present in our English Bible.
Not only that, but you'll hear a lot of preachers in their sermons go back to the Greek quote
unquote and here's why I have a big problem with that.
First of all, the person in the pew doesn't have any idea whether what's being said is
true or not.
And if you remember, God is constantly telling us in the New Testament to search the Scriptures
and to see whether the things we're hearing are really so.
The Bible tells us that we should judge preaching when we hear it.
We shouldn't just blindly accept it.
The Bible says prove all things, hold fast that which is good.
We should check things out and test things out.
Now if an English speaker is sitting in the congregation of the church and the pastor
says well if you go back to the Greek it actually says this, or if you go back to the Hebrew
it actually says this, the person in the pew has no way of knowing whether that's really
true or not.
So they have to just trust the pastor, they just have to take his word for it.
And that's pretty dangerous because a lot of pastors will just flat out lie and just
say well in the Greek it says this and they're just making it up, they're lying.
Or they're repeating a lie that they read somewhere else.
They read it in some lexicon or commentary or whatever.
So what I'm saying is that it's a way for pastors to get up and preach lies and the
congregation has no idea whether it's true or not.
But not only that, most of the pastors, my guess would be 99% of pastors who go back
to the Greek or go back to the Hebrew in their sermons don't actually know the language.
And I remember I used to test a lot of pastors, when I was a teenager I was studying a lot
of Greek and I walked up to a guy in my Baptist church who was supposedly the Greek expert
and everybody said, oh this guy is the Greek expert, I mean this guy knows the Greek.
And if you have any questions about Greek go ask him.
So I went to him and I began to speak to him in Greek and I began to show him a passage
in the Greek New Testament to ask him a question about it.
And as I'm speaking to him in Greek he said, whoa, whoa, whoa, he couldn't understand what
I was saying and he couldn't understand what I showed him and he basically admitted to
me that his knowledge of Greek was pretty much the fact that he knew the Greek alphabet,
he knew how to pronounce the words, and he knew how to look things up in a lexicon.
What's a lexicon?
It's basically like the cross between a dictionary and an encyclopedia.
So this guy's basically able to look things up in a dictionary and then he acts like he's
an expert in Greek, everybody pronounces him this expert, and what happens is pastors will
take two semesters of Bible college Greek.
They're not fluent in it, they can't read it fluently, they can't speak it fluently,
they don't understand it, they just have a little bit of knowledge from a couple semesters.
And then they're going to get up and say, oh unfortunately the King James Bible is wrong
at this point, what it really should say is this, and you have to understand the King
James Bible was translated by 54 first rate scholars, one of them, Lancelot Andrews, spoke
21 different languages, 6 ancient languages and 15 modern languages.
Many of the men that translated the King James Bible not only just spoke Greek and Hebrew,
but they spoke all kinds of other related languages.
These men were experts, these men ate, breathed, and slept these original languages.
They were fluent in them, and these experts are just brushed off by a guy who knows how
to look things up in a dictionary, and he just, oh unfortunately the King James translator
has got this wrong.
So he sloughs off all their knowledge because he has this amateurish, dilettante knowledge
of Greek.
That's a really bad reason to learn Greek, if you just want to undermine what the English
Bible says and just criticize the King James and just go back to the Greek to try to find
some hidden mystical meaning, that's a bad reason.
But let me just go into some good reasons for you to learn Greek, and first of all,
I don't believe that this is for everybody, I don't believe that the average Christian
should learn Greek, I don't believe there's any reason to.
But there are some people who would benefit from learning Greek.
So reason number one for learning to speak Greek is to be able to speak to Greek people.
Now you say, Pastor Anderson, come on, the Greek in the Bible is a completely different
kind of Greek than what people speak today, and a lot of people will tell you that, you
know, modern Greek is a completely different language than Koine Greek, but actually that's
simply not true.
The Koine Greek of the New Testament is different than modern Greek, it's a different dialect,
but it is not a different language.
They are the same language.
For example, the King James Bible is written in English that's different than the way that
we speak today, but I don't think anyone would try to say that the King James Bible is written
in a completely different language.
It's a different dialect, it's a different style of language, but it's not completely
different.
If you look at the difference between modern Greek and Koine Greek, most of the words are
going to be the same, most of the grammar is going to be the same.
Are there differences?
Of course.
There are different words used, different grammar used, but a modern day Greek speaker
can understand a Greek New Testament that's written in Koine Greek, and if someone actually
really knew Koine Greek, they would be able to also read a modern Greek newspaper in addition
to being able to read the Bible.
Obviously there are modern words that they might not know, like the words for car and
computer, those type of words aren't in the Bible, but to say that modern Greek and ancient
Greek are two completely different languages is just false.
They are variations of the same language.
Now the biggest difference between modern Greek and Koine Greek is in the pronunciation,
but here's a quick way to solve that, pronounce the Koine like modern Greek.
In fact, how in the world does anyone know what Koine Greek was pronounced like 2,000
years ago anyway?
There was no tape recorder available back then, therefore what we have today is a lot
of scholars who have what's called the reconstructed pronunciation of what they think it was pronounced
like 2,000 years ago, but in reality they're guessing on those pronunciations, and I understand
that they have ways that they use to discern that.
But especially when it comes to the vowel sounds, you can't really be sure that that's
how those vowel sounds were even pronounced back then.
And even if you could be sure that the reconstructed pronunciation of Koine Greek were accurate,
why learn it?
If no one talks that way today, it would make much more sense to learn the modern Greek
pronunciation so that you could speak to Greek people.
If you learn the Koine Biblical Greek with a modern pronunciation, you will be able to
speak to Greek people using that language.
In fact, scholars and educated people in Greece, in the nation of Greece, that are native Greek
speakers, when they study classical Greek and Koine Greek, they use the modern pronunciation.
In fact, they laugh at and mock the so-called reconstructed pronunciation, and they say
it sounds American, it sounds artificial, it sounds fake, it doesn't sound the way that
Greek is supposed to sound.
So therefore, I believe that you should learn the modern pronunciation, because it's really
the only pronunciation that can be proven to be legitimate.
The reconstructed, well, it's a theory that that's how they actually spoke.
So number one, you can speak to Greek people.
I've actually won someone to Christ that was from Greece using my knowledge of Greek.
So there's a benefit right there to be able to actually talk to people that are Greek.
Number two, a good reason to learn Greek is to be able to translate the Bible into obscure
languages.
And again, this is not for everybody, of course, but there are people, there are missionaries
and people that are trying to bring the Word of God to a lot of tribes and primitive people
that don't have the entire Bible in their language, and I know that there are missionaries
that translate directly from the King James Bible into obscure languages, and that's great.
I'm definitely not against that.
I think that that's fantastic.
But obviously, ideally, the best thing would be to translate from the original language
so that it's not a translation of a translation.
But even translating the King James Bible is great.
I'm not down on that whatsoever.
But obviously, it would be better to translate it from the original Greek into one of these
obscure languages, and there are people out there that are trying to get the Gospel to
different tribes.
Maybe all they have is a John and Romans and they want to get them the whole New Testament
or maybe they don't even have that.
So learning Greek is great for translating the Bible into obscure languages.
We already have the kings in English, but does every nation in the world have a Bible
as good as the King James?
Well, obviously not.
Number three, you could use learning Greek to defend the King James Bible.
You see, there are a lot of people that attack the King James and they claim that it has
all these mistakes and all these errors and it's wrong on this and wrong on that.
Well, let me tell you something.
The more that you study the original Greek and the more that you even study the original
Hebrew, you're going to realize that the King James Bible is right and you're going
to be able to debunk some of these lies and some of these attacks that are aimed at the
King James Bible.
And so obviously, again, not everybody needs to learn it, but it would be great if in every
generation there would be some men that would become an expert in Greek and Hebrew that
would stand up for the King James Bible and defend the King James.
You see, most of the people out there who speak Greek and Hebrew or who at least have
studied the biblical languages, they're doing it in these seminaries that don't believe
that the King James Bible is the Word of God.
For example, we talked to a pastor who is King James only and he studied in one of these
type of seminaries and he said that he was issued a New American Standard Version and
a Nestle-Allen Greek New Testament and he was required to use these corrupt versions.
Even though he was a King James guy, if you go to these seminaries, they're going to require
you to use these corrupted Westcott and Hort type New Testament, today the Nestle-Allen,
or else in the English they want you to use a New American Standard.
So they have a way of corrupting everybody through these Bible colleges and seminaries,
but there have to be some people that are going to learn the original languages and
use them to defend the King James Bible more effectively and to be able to debunk some
of the lies and things.
And like I said earlier, preachers will go back to the Greek and say, oh well here's
what it really says.
Well, you know, obviously if people know Greek and Hebrew they're going to know that what's
being said is a lie because so often it's fraudulent.
And so you could use knowledge of Greek to be able to defend the King James Bible.
And then a fourth reason for learning Greek is basically just as a hobby or for entertainment.
You know, I enjoy learning foreign languages, it's something that's always been a hobby
of mine.
And so you could learn Greek just because it's interesting, just because it's fun.
And although there is no revelation, you know, when you go to the original language
to read the Bible, it's not going to say anything different than what you're reading in your
English Bible.
Sometimes it's interesting, it's just fun to read in a different language.
I enjoy reading the Bible in German, in Spanish, in Norwegian.
I've read it cover to cover, I've read the New Testament cover to cover in five languages,
and it's interesting.
It's just fun to read it in a different language, not because you're getting some hidden secret
mystical truth, but rather because it's just a hobby that some people like to learn languages.
So here are four legitimate reasons for learning Greek.
Use it to speak to Greek people.
I believe there are 14 million people who live in Greece who speak Greek.
You could translate the Bible into obscure languages.
You could defend the King James Bible or you could just learn it because it's interesting
and you could just increase your general knowledge.
Obviously, learning languages like Greek and Latin will teach you a lot about English
because a lot of our English words are derived from Greek and Latin roots.
So anyway, just wanted to give you some reasons why you may want to learn Greek.
On the next video, I'm going to teach you about the Greek alphabet.