The Simplest of Delights: My Greek New Testament

One of my most cherished possessions is my fourth edition Greek New Testament, edited by Kurt Aland et. al., with concordance. I received it in Seminary, as a gift from my second year Greek instructor, and over the last fifteen years, it has been one of my most constant companions in the spiritual life. It is dog-eared and worn. The fore edge is filthy from thumbing continually back to the concordance to look up words. It’s on its second cover (the first wore out about two years in, and I had it rebound at the Seminary library). Yet for all that, it is the most precious book I own.

When I was finishing my fourth semester of Greek in seminary, my instructor told our class a story on the last day of class that I never forgot. Looking back, this strange story has probably had more influence over my devotional life than any sermon I’ve ever heard.

“Imagine a fish,” he said, “Who was trying to swim up stream to spawn, when he came to a mighty waterfall. He struggled with all his heart to swim to the top of that waterfall, getting pounded back by the current with every swish of his tail. Finally, he reached the top. He was so relieved to get there that he splashed up out of the water, onto the riverbank to rest. And then, lying there in the open air, he died.”

The end.

It wasn’t exactly Aesop’s Fable material, but while we were all blinking at him and wondering what on earth he was talking about, he said to us: “You all have been struggling to learn your Greek for two years, and here you are, finally through all the hard work. And because you did it, you might be tempted to take a break from the Greek and rest. But just know that if you do, most likely within a month or two, it will all be gone. You'll have forgotten everything and all this hard work will have been for nothing.”

“So try to form a habit,” he said, “of reading a little bit of Greek each day.”

Not wanting to be that exhausted fish gasping for breath on the riverbank of Greek exegesis, I took his story deeply to heart. I went home that day and made it my goal to read the entire Greek New Testament, front to back, in a year. I worked out the math and figured that if I read 3 pages each day, I’d be able to do it with a few days to spare.

It was really tough slugging, at first. I had four semesters of Greek under my belt, so I wasn’t completely lost, but it wasn’t long till I realized how much swimming there was left to do. But I stuck to my 3-pages-a-day routine, and gradually it got easier and easier, and by the end of the year I had made it from Biblos geneseōs Iēsou Xristou (Matthew 1:1) to Hē charis tou kuriou Iēsou meta pantōn (Revelation 22:21). It was such a joy to think I had actually heard the Word of God in its original language like that, right from the beginning to the end, that I started over at the beginning the next morning. Matthew 1:1: Biblos geneseōs Iēsou Xristou.

This has been my habit pretty much ever since, reading three pages of Greek each morning, with a consistent goal of reading the whole New Testament in a year. And though I do miss a day or two here or there, still, in the last 15 years, I’ve made it through the whole thing about a dozen times or more.

A few weeks ago I started this series talking about the simple things in my life that give me joy. If you missed the first post, the idea comes from some research I heard about in the field of Positive Psychology. It suggested that incorporating regular experiences of every-day happiness into our routine (maintaining your “positivity hygiene,” they called it), is a simple way we can care for our mental health and build our emotional resilience.

As I’ve been reflecting on some of the things that help me maintain my “positivity hygiene,” it’s occurred to me that those three pages of Greek each morning have been a rich source of daily delight for me over the years. Some days are very taxing, I’ll admit. Even after fifteen years of reading, I still find the last half of the Book of Acts, all of Second Peter, and most of the Book of Hebrews pretty challenging, but even the challenge is joyful.

Reading the Greek New Testament has become far more than just a personal goal for me. Something beautiful seems to happen when I open that tattered book each morning. A world unfolds before me where the Word of God is mysteriously familiar, but just foreign enough that I have to slow myself down, and ponder deeply what it’s really saying, and wrestle with it word by word. As I do, it comes to life for me in all sorts of unexpected ways.

I can still remember reading through Luke’s account of the Lord’s Supper (Luke 22:14-35) for the first time in the original Greek. I had to look up basically every second word, at the time, and wrestle with the parsing, and untwist the syntax, but as I did, the scene, of our Lord’s giving of himself by hosting his followers at a final meal that would be, forever after, his body and blood, took on dimensions I had never experienced before. It has forever changed, not just how I read the passage, but how I participate in the Lord’s Supper itself.

There’s a place in the Psalms where it talks about how the Word of God gives joy to the heart. Of course, I did not need to keep on swimming in the river of New Testament Greek all these years to discover how true that statement is. I didn’t need to learn Greek at all, and neither do you. This is the beauty of the Bible, that it meets us wherever we’re at, and speaks to all of us no matter where we’re coming from.

Even so, I have come to cherish my daily pages of Greek; and my tattered Greek Bible—when I stop to consider how tattered it’s become—is a beautiful reminder to me of how much sweeter than honey from the comb the Word of God really is.