When a healthy 70-year-old man is bedridden for ten days, he can lose up to 10% of lean muscle mass in his legs, according to Dr D. P. Jones of the University of Texas. Likewise, if you don’t use a learned language at all, or if you rely too heavily on tools like software, your fluency will atrophy like unused muscle. That is what we looked into last week. Next week I will supply some strategies for regaining reading fluency of Greek.

Today I want to clarify what we are trying to do. We need to understand the difference between reading Greek, and translating Greek.

These are two distinct skills, and each has its place. You will need to adjust your approach at retention, based on which of these skills you are aiming to improve.

Translating Greek refers to the ability to render a Greek word, phrase, or sentence into a suitable English equivalent. Now, of course, you can just skip this step by reading your English Bible, which people a lot better at translation than you will ever be, already did.

But for preachers digging for exegetical insights or nuances in the Greek, translating the passage yourself is the way to go. Or at the very least looking at the Greek words one at a time with your helps, to get a feel for what is lying beneath the veil of translation.

Greek words are made of parts, for example, the lexical stem (which is the definition of the word given in a lexicon), the augment (an added vowel on/near the front of some verb forms that indicates something about which English tense to use in the rendering), and the ending, which are letters on the end of the stem that signal the case (nominative/accusative, etc.) gender (masculine/feminine/neuter), the number (singular/plural), etc.

So, to translate a sentence from Greek to English you need to be able to figure out (“parse”) what’s going on in the words, OR… you can consult a tool to parse it for you. The most helpful “helps” are interlinear Bibles (that put an English gloss above the Greek word), analytical Greek texts (that list the parsing), and Bible software, like Logos, BibleWorks, or Accordance, which allow the user to float a mouse pointer over the Greek word and have the parts and gloss supplied.

I put “helps” in quotes because they certainly do “help” with translation… but they do not help you to improve your reading skills. That is why you need to know the difference between translating and reading—so you know which skill you want to improve.

Reading is the ability to look at the letters, words, phrases, and sentences of the New Testament, and recognize enough of what is going on with the forms so that you know what is being communicated without help. Reading is not analyzing, it is grasping the sense of the letter, the story, the poem, or prophecy without the help of English. A good reader of Greek is literally thinking in Greek as they read, even if they don’t know every word’s meaning or its exact form.

Think of it this way. If you know no Afrikaans (a dialect of Dutch spoken only in South Africa), and I type a paragraph of this blog post in Afrikaans, and you wanted to know what it said, you could use Google translate to tell you, and you would have a pretty good idea of what I said. You would be trusting entirely on the software. Or you could look up every word, one at a time, in an Afrikaans-English dictionary. And yes, you could figure out what I was saying, especially if you had had a semester or two of Afrikaans studies, so you would understand the changes you see that are different from the dictionary entry.

But that’s not reading Afrikaans. That’s translating.

If you want to try that, here is a sample:

Want so lief het God die wêreld gehad, dat Hy sy eniggebore Seun gegee het, sodat elkeen wat in Hom glo, nie verlore mag gaan nie, maar die ewige lewe kan hê.

Translating would feel like this…

Want (Because) so (thus) lief (love) het (have) God (God) die (the) wêreld (world) gehad (had), dat (that) Hy (He) sy (his) eniggebore (only-born) Seun (Son) gegee (gave) het (did), sodat (so that) elkeen (each one) wat (that) in (in) Hom (Him) glo (believe), nie (not) verlore (lost) mag (may) gaan (go) nie (not), maar (but) die (the) ewige (eternal) lewe (life) kan (can) hê (have).

Pretty cool, huh?

You can understand that a word at a time. But a fluent reader of Afrikaans would have a different experience taking it all in as it flows into their understanding, and they would have a different appreciation for how powerfully and beautifully it is being said.

Translating is not immoral.

If you took Greek in seminary, and then, after five years of using software and an interlinear, you can translate the passage you are preaching on into English a word at a time (or just compare it carefully to the ESV, NASB, LSB or another more literal translation), then that’s great—if that’s your goal.

However, if your goal is to read Greek, to think in Greek as it streams into your consciousness, then you will need some strategies to help you acquire that reading fluency.

And for some suggested strategies, sien julle hier weer volgende week! (see y’all back here next week!)