Hey everybody, Pastor Steven Anderson here from Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe,
Arizona. I'm here with Anselm, and we're going to be actually doing a walkthrough of this
book right here, Homeric Greek by Clyde Farr. Now, here's the older version of this book.
This is the book that I actually used to go through it, and it's from 1920, so the good
thing about that is that it's in the public domain. So in the link for this video, I'm actually going
to put a PDF to this book. So if you're interested in learning ancient Greek, you could use the PDF,
you can use these videos, and we're going to basically walk you through this book. These books
are pretty much the same thing. This one's just a nicer, larger print, a little bit easier to use.
It explains things a little more. So you can either just get the free one off the PDF, or you can buy
the nice one on Amazon. It's still pretty cheap. So, you know, why learn Homeric Greek? What's the
point? Or why this book? Well, ultimately, the thing that I'm the most interested in,
and I'm sure you're the most interested in, is reading the New Testament in Greek, right? I mean,
we want to master New Testament Greek, and here's the thing about that. A lot of people have this
philosophy that you just only study New Testament Greek to do that. That's not the best way to
learn. You really want to learn the entire Greek language if you're going to be good at reading
the New Testament in Greek. And especially if you're going to master the older Greek of the New
Testament, it's good to know classical Greek, Homeric Greek, modern Greek, all of those things.
And so, you know, I believe in a more holistic approach to learning Greek. Let me explain to you
some of the reasons why. Because, for example, in the New Testament, there are lots of words that are
only used one time in the whole New Testament. So, you know, you're barely ever going to see
these words in the New Testament. But if you read other Greek literature, you're going to see these
words over and over again, and you'll actually be able to learn those words really well. So in Bible
colleges and seminaries, a lot of them will only teach you like 300 vocabulary words. Well, you
need to know a lot more than that to be able to fluently read the Greek New Testament. So there
are 5000 some different vocabulary words in the Greek New Testament. And, you know, if you learn
313, then they tell you, hey, you know, 80% of the words on the page. But here's the thing about that
Anselm is that knowing 80% of the words on the page is not enough to read, because that means
every fifth word you don't know. You read four words, you get to fifth word, you don't know it.
Well, you're not going to get very far. It's ridiculous. Okay. So if you learn 1000 words,
they'll tell you, you know, now you know about 80, excuse me, 90% of the words on the page. Well,
here's the thing about that 90% still not enough. Every 10 words, you don't know. So really, you
need to know like 95% of those vocabulary words in order to be able to fluently read the New
Testament without having to go grab a lexicon all the time or use a bunch of, you know, training
wheels and cheat sheets and stuff like that. You know, I want to just be able to pick up the New
Testament and just read it, which is what I do every morning, by the way. You know, I just pick
it up and I just read it and I can just fluently read it because I've learned 1000s and 1000s of
words. And part of how you do that is by going outside of the New Testament and reading other
ancient Greek literature. Okay. Including Homer. Okay. Now why Homer? Well, when the New Testament
was written, you know, Homer was basically the standard Greek text for people to learn how to
read Greek. So, uh, children who are growing up in the Roman empire and learning Greek, they learned
it from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Um, you know, it was just something that was just ubiquitous
and everybody's studying the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's really in many ways a foundation of
the ancient Greek language. And so the Iliad and the Odyssey are linguistically super important
for the Greek language. And so, you know, I promise you this, for example, that the King James
translators, you know, the guys who translated the King James version into English 400 years ago,
I guarantee you that 100% of them had read the Iliad and the Odyssey cover to cover in the
original Greek and the Iliad and the Odyssey are super long. 24 books of the Iliad, 24 books of the
Odyssey. I guarantee you that they've all read it. Okay. Now, how many of the translators of the NIV
do you think have read the Iliad and the Odyssey cover to cover? Probably zero. I don't know,
but I wouldn't really be shocked if it's zero because the NIV guys that I've seen,
I, you know, probably wouldn't even be able to make heads or tails of a page from the Iliad.
Okay. Now I'm not saying that about all of them because I don't know all of them,
but the scholarship that was on the King James translation committee was of a much higher level
and it started right here. You know, so if we're going to be serious about our studies of New
Testament Greek, I think it just stands to reason that, that we would be able to read
the Iliad and the Odyssey. Now here's, here's what's so cool about this book.
Most Greek courses are just giving you kind of just little made up sentences, random sentences,
and you do that for a really long time. Now, obviously this book kind of starts out the
same way because you got to walk before you can run. So it starts out basically just giving you
little made up sentences to help you get a feel for the verbs and the nouns and the adjectives
and just kind of how it works. But by the time you get to like lesson 12, there's 77 lessons
in this book. By the time you get to lesson 12, you're actually reading the Iliad and you start
book one, line one. So like lesson 12, boom, it's the first five lines of the Iliad,
you're actually reading the real stuff from the beginning. And if you get all the way through
lesson 77 in this book, you read the entire book one of the Iliad, which is 600 lines, 611 lines
of Greek poetry. Okay. So like I said, there's 24 books in the Iliad. 611 lines is, you know,
like an average length of a book, right? So, I mean, you're going to read the first 24th of
the Iliad. You're going to read the entire book one of the Iliad if you go through this course
and understand all of it. Okay. That's really cool to be able to read and understand an entire book
of the Iliad. And so that you'll be well on your way toward actually being a serious student of
ancient Greek and not just one of these bozos who pretends to know Greek because the guy's
little Bible software and his little lexicon and whatever, you know, you can actually learn
the language for real and pick up the New Testament and read it and actually know what's
going on. And when you see those words that are only used once, the Apax Lagomenon, when you see
those, you'll be like, okay, it's only once in the New Testament, but I've seen it over here. I've
seen it in the Iliad. I've seen it in the Odyssey. I've seen it in Herodotus. I've seen it in
Sophocles. You see what I'm saying? Does that sound good? And plus, you know, the Iliad is
entertaining. Okay. So, you know, it's actually something that could kind of hold your interest
a little bit as you're learning this. So I hope that that explains a little bit why we're going
to be going through this ancient literature that's obviously not spiritual from a Christian
perspective at all. It's a worldly book, but for the language, we need to go outside the
New Testament just in order to really learn the language well and get more practice with the
language. Now, Homeric Greek and New Testament Greek are not exactly the same. Obviously,
these are different dialects, but I'll put it this way. Ninety percent of what we learn in this book
is going to apply to New Testament Greek. And by the way, 90 percent of modern Greek is also going
to apply to reading the New Testament. So you're not wasting your time studying Homer or studying
modern Greek if you really care about learning the New Testament in Greek. So anyway, that's just an
introduction to the series. We're going to be going through this chapter by chapter. We're
going to be using the modern pronunciation because if we're taking a holistic approach,
I think it just makes sense to use the modern pronunciation. We can speak modern. We can read
the Bible in modern pronunciation. We can read this in modern pronunciation. And nobody really
knows what it sounded like, you know, 2700 years ago anyway. So we might as well just go modern.
All right. Very good. So we'll see you in the first lesson.