Hello, this is Pastor Steven Anderson from Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona.
And today I want to just talk about some strategies for learning Greek.
Now, if you haven't already watched the introduction, you may want to watch that just for reasons
for learning Greek or, you know, whether learning Greek is even something that you want to do
and invest a lot of time and energy into.
So I would strongly recommend that you watch the introduction if you haven't already.
But today I just want to talk about some strategies of how to learn Greek.
Now I learned a lot of Greek as a teenager just from books that I got at the library,
books from used bookstores on Biblical Greek.
I studied those for a while.
And then also when I was in Bible college I had a few semesters of Biblical Greek.
But mostly I just learned Greek on my own.
And a lot of the stuff that I learned in Bible college Greek class was bogus.
And most of what's taught in Bible colleges and seminaries across America and across the
world is bogus.
Okay?
You can't trust these people.
And so the Bible's got to be our final authority.
And we've got to beware that there are a lot of people that are out there to trick us and
to deceive us.
And I don't think that the people who were teaching me Greek in Bible college were bad
people.
But they were just repeating a lot of the lies and fraudulent things that are found
in the lexicons and in the Greek materials.
So here's a strategy for learning Greek for someone who believes that the King James Bible
is the Word of God and for somebody who wants to learn the Greek underlying the King James
Bible and doesn't want to learn all this Westcott and Hord, Nestle Island garbage.
Okay?
The first thing that you're going to need to do is buy yourself a Greek New Testament.
And of course you want to get a Greek Textus Receptus, not the critical edition put out
by the UBS or the Nestle Island 28th edition or whatever it is, which relies on Westcott
and Hord, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, all these corrupt things.
Okay.
So to get a good Textus Receptus, you go to the Trinitarian Bible Society.
So you can just Google Trinitarian Bible Society and they sell a Greek Textus Receptus.
And this edition that they sell is the exact Greek text underlying the King James Bible.
This basically represents the textual choices of the King James Bible translators.
So this Greek New Testament is going to match up exactly with your King James Bible.
It's going to be identical to what you have in your King James Bible, but it's in the
biblical Greek.
So this can be purchased on the Trinitarian Bible Society website.
I think it's about $10 or $12 for a hard copy, so it's pretty easy to get that.
Now you can buy a nice leather-bound one too, like I have here, for I think $60, but the
hard bound is only like $10.
So this is the first thing you should get if you're interested in learning Greek, because
this is where you're going to want to be doing your reading and your Bible memorization.
This is the most important tool that you have is your Greek New Testament, Trinitarian Bible
Society.
And then another thing that I would highly recommend is the Pimsleur audio course for
modern Greek.
And you say, wait a minute Pastor Anderson, I'm not interested in modern Greek.
I highly recommend that you learn modern Greek at the same time that you're learning biblical
Greek.
Here's why.
They're not that different.
I know there are differences in grammar, there are some vocabulary differences, but honestly
they are the same language, they're just different dialects.
And the great thing about learning modern Greek is that you'll be able to actually
communicate with Greek-speaking people and you'll learn how to actually pronounce it
like a Greek person.
You know, you hear a lot of people that read from a Greek New Testament and they pronounce
it in a way that's just crazy.
You know, they pronounce it in this reconstructed, so-called Americanized pronunciation.
It's better to learn the real Greek pronunciation like Greek people actually speak and so learning
modern Greek is a good way to do that and you'll be able to communicate with people.
This is a really good course.
This is the first thing I would recommend.
And here's the great thing about learning modern Greek.
The people who are teaching modern Greek, they don't have a doctrinal agenda to try
to attack the King James Version and try to insert their doctrinal slant into everything.
You can just learn the language from actual flesh and blood, normal human beings that
are still alive, than just from books and lexicons and theologians and people that have
an agenda.
Okay, so this Pimsleur Greek course, here's the cool thing about it.
It's all audio, so there's no books or anything, you just listen to it and you speak along
with it and it asks you questions and you answer the questions.
So it's an interactive audio, takes about 30 minutes a day.
So you do a 30 minute lesson once per day and after a month of this, you've learned
a lot.
It will really help you learn it fast and not only that, but it's easy.
It's something that pretty much anybody can keep up with.
Now sometimes you'll come to a lesson that's particularly difficult and at that point,
I would say to just repeat that lesson and then you'll keep on moving forward and be
doing great.
So this Pimsleur audio program is a very good program and the great thing is you don't have
to buy the whole thing at once because that would be pretty expensive.
You can just buy it five lessons at a time.
So if this is something where you get five lessons in and say, hey, this is not for me,
you can walk away and you haven't invested a bunch of money.
One way to do this is to go to audible.com.
You can get a membership at audible.com for either like $7.50 a month or $15 a month and
it gives you one free download a month and you can use that free download to download
one of these Pimsleur courses.
And then if you go beyond one download per month, you still get a discount on everything
because you're a member.
So if you want to do the Pimsleur, I think the cheapest way to do it is to just go to
audible.com or you can just get a pirated version, that'd be even cheaper.
But anyway, of course you're going to go to audible.com and download it like I have done.
So anyway, Pimsleur course is a great course for learning modern Greek.
It'll get your pronunciation dialed in right away.
It'll teach you a lot that is the same as in biblical Greek.
Few differences of course, but most of it's going to be the same.
So Pimsleur Audio Greek.
Now another audio tool that's going to help you get your pronunciation right, especially
in regard to the Bible, is if you can get the Bible on MP3 being read by a modern Greek
speaker, a native of Greece, reading for you from the Greek New Testament.
Now here's the thing about this though, you've got to be aware of this because there's an
audio CD that you can download or you can purchase a physical CD of it on Amazon.
I think it's like 12 bucks and it's the Greek New Testament being read out loud by a Greek
speaker, but the problem is it's the corrupt Nestle Alland edition of the Greek New Testament.
It's not going to be Textus Receptus, but here's the good thing about it though.
What you can do is you can buy it like I did for 12 bucks.
Well it's got 260 different files because there's 260 different chapters in the New
Testament, right?
Well not every chapter in the Nestle Alland Greek New Testament is corrupt.
Some chapters in the Greek New Testament that underlines the phony modern versions, the
Nestle Alland, are identical to the Greek Textus Receptus.
So in the places where it's identical, those are the chapters that I would listen to.
So basically what you can do is, I've gone through and just compared the Textus Receptus
with the Nestle Alland Greek New Testament, and I only have put the MP3s in my MP3 player
of chapters that are identical in the Textus Receptus.
So I checked them out, you know, I can read along in my Textus Receptus and find chapters
where there's no discrepancy, and then those are the ones that I'm going to use.
Obviously I'm not going to use Acts chapter 8, you know, because verse 37 is going to
be missing in the Nestle Alland.
Obviously I'm not going to use 1 John 5, 7, because verse 7 is going to be gone.
Obviously I'm not going to use the file of the MP3 for Matthew chapter 1, because the
word firstborn is going to be gone in Matthew 1.25, prototokon, okay?
So this audio Bible is not complete junk, because what you can do is just delete all
the chapters that have textual variants and just get a few clean chapters and throw them
on your MP3 player that are identical to the Textus Receptus.
Then you can listen to the Bible in the original Greek, and that way you'll get your pronunciation
right, okay, and you'll be able to pronounce it properly, and it'll help you with your
reading if you do that.
Then obviously you're going to need some books on the grammar.
You know, Pimsleur's great just to get you speaking Greek, the New Testament's great,
you can start reading it, memorizing it, and you know it's right because it's the Greek
text underlying the King James Version, but obviously you're going to need some grammar
books.
As far as modern Greek grammar books, that's pretty easy.
This is a good one, it's called Essential Modern Greek by Douglas Q. Adams.
You know, this is just a nice stripped down little book that just gives you the most important
information, it covers all the alphabet, pronunciation, and just all the basic important grammar of
modern Greek.
So this is a great tool right here.
Now when it comes to grammar books on Biblical Greek, you've got to be really careful, because
you know, I've got a ton of books on Biblical Greek in my library, but they're all based
off of the corrupt Greek text.
You know, and if anybody in the comments wants to recommend a grammar on Biblical Greek that's
based off the text of Septus, you know, maybe that'd be a better tool to use, because most
of them are going to quote from the Westcott and Hort type of a Greek text.
So for example, this one that I've got in my hand, Beginning Greek by Stephen Payne.
You know, it's got all the grammar and all the paradigms and all the verb conjugations
and all, you know, all the things that you're going to need, but whenever it quotes scripture,
it quotes the wrong one.
So you know, if you're going to use a book like this, you better make sure that you're
getting all your scriptures from this, you know, from your Texas Receptus that you download
or I'm sorry, order from the Trinitarian Bible Society.
Now another thing that I use is a box of a thousand flashcards, which is great for teaching
someone Beginning Greek, because what it does is it puts all the words in order of how often
they're used in the New Testament, okay.
So you start out by learning the words that are used most frequently, okay.
The last words you learn are words that are not used that much, okay.
So obviously this is going to get you going on the language faster when you learn the
common words first and the uncommon words last.
So I believe there are 5,300 and some different words used in the Greek New Testament.
So if you learn these thousand words, they're the most thousand, I'm sorry, they're the
thousand most common words.
So if you learn them, you can read like literally 80 to 90% of the words in the Greek New Testament
because the rest of them aren't really used that often, okay.
Obviously, eventually you want to learn them all, but you want to start by learning the
thousand most common.
But again, I have to caution you that if you get that Zondervan, you know, thousand Greek
flashcards, the people behind those flashcards are not King James only, and they don't believe
that the King James Bible is correct.
So even some of the definitions will be a little tainted.
So as far as your final authority on what these Greek words mean, you're going to want
to compare your Greek Texas Receptus with your English King James to figure out what
these words really mean, if you really want to make sure that you're getting the right
definition.
So for example, you know, one of the flashcards had the word thoulos, and the word thoulos,
it said was servant or slave.
Well, we know that the King James Bible never uses the word slave, and we know that in the
Greek New Testament when the Bible uses the word servant, it's not talking about a slave,
and you know, I've preached about that, I'm not going to preach about it now, but that's
not a correct translation of that word in regard to New Testament biblical Greek.
That word in the New Testament should be translated as servant, like the King James translates
it.
So therefore, on that flashcard, you know, I crossed out the word slave, and I just left
the word servant.
Another thing about those thousand Greek flashcards is that they have them arranged going from
where you look at the Greek word, and then you have to tell, you know, what it is in
English.
Well, the first thing I did when I bought that box of a thousand flashcards is I turned
them all around.
I flipped all thousand of them around backwards, okay.
The reason why is that when you're learning a foreign language, you should always use
flashcards where you see it in English, and you have to come up with the Greek word.
Recognizing the Greek word and knowing what it is in English is a lot easier.
It's much harder when you flip them around.
So I like to learn them the hard way because then you actually learn the word a lot better
because you have to produce that word instead of just seeing it and recognizing it.
So, you know, you get a deeper understanding of the vocabulary if you learn it that way
in my opinion.
So I turn all the cards around backwards and do them the right way, okay.
So anyway, I just want to give you a strategy for learning if you do want to learn Greek
that, you know, you're going to want to make sure you get the right Greek New Testament,
a lot of good audio programs out there that can help you do it.
Flashcards are obviously great.
Grammar books are a necessary evil and, you know, with these tools, you can learn how
to speak Greek and also read Greek.
Well, that's it for today.
In the next video, I'm going to teach you your first Bible verse in Greek.