Greek in the Seminary: Impressions
Studying Biblical Greek is an important part of the Seminary curriculum. It allows students to immerse themselves even more into the world of the New Testament and helps them find more tools to work with the Scriptures. In the Fall of 2021, an online introductory Seminary course in the New Testament Greek was attended by both Knowing Christ and Distance Learning students. It was taught by Daniil Kalinov, who has taken over this position from Rev. Matthias Giles.
Below are a few impressions of this course from the students.
If you are interested in taking a Greek course in the Seminary this year, please see naseminarygreek.com.
Jonitha Hasse, first-year Distant Learning student:
Last Fall we students in the Distant Learning Program (DLP) were invited to join the Seminary Greek Class with Daniil Kalinov. As with any elementary language class, we learned grammar and vocabulary and translated simple sentences. But unique to this class, our translation exercises were taken from the New Testament. Daniil built the class up methodically, was compassionate when we struggled to keep up, and was always positive and encouraging.
The mental challenges were fun, like working on puzzles with a group of friends. I continue to use my little Greek every week when contemplating the Gospel Readings. It helps me see through the familiar words to a new heart level.
For instance: Luke 1:38: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord." Handmaid is "doula". Probably most birth doulas and death doulas are very aware of the holiness of the service they perform at the thresholds of heaven and earth. Relating to Mary as doula, handmaid, and humble servant can also inspire us in the holy deeds we are called to by the Lord.
Cecilia Velasquez, first-year Distance Learning student:
I am grateful for the opportunity to be part of the Greek Course taught by Daniil. This came as an unexpected gift of my participation in the Seminary’s first year of the Distance Learning Program. The gifts of the pandemic, I like to call them. All of a sudden, windows opened for me to connect to the Seminary. And Daniil was at that time in Germany, which was a surprise for me.
In the beginning, we learned the alphabet, and very soon we jumped into the reading of the first verses of the Gospel of John. Every week we would open the class with one of us reading that verse in Greek. Which gave us right away a connection with the music of the language. We all have read before those verses of the gospel. We knew them. We had an idea of the content. And so, we could connect with a sense of reverence, with The Word even though we did not understand the words or know the grammar.
The way Daniil structured the classes was quite organic. They had a well-ordered flow and the pace was good, not too fast, not too slow. We had plenty of opportunities to practice in class and also through homework.
Since we were mostly using Bible words and phrases, the fact that the meaning was familiar to all of us provided a stable ground to support the learning. The work we were doing as part of the DLP was also in tune with the Greek Course. Both courses support and complement each other, which was really a plus.
As with the learning of any language, getting to know about the culture and the context of the language is really important. In this regard, having some background about the content of the Bible was an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time. On the one hand, we all had some idea about the content of the Bible; on the other hand, these ideas sometimes were not correct or were incomplete. The fact that the content of the Bible has been around for a long time was sometimes helpful and other times not helpful at all. We needed to approach the words with clean eyes and tried not to limit their meaning to one translation. Instead, we learned to look at the meaning in Greek and to be curious about the context of Biblical times, of the different ways the word was used. It was interesting to discover connections between Greek words and English words. In my case, since my mother tongue is Spanish, I also found some grammar similarities.
As a closing of the course, we did a final project about a word from the New Testament. That helped us apply what we have learned and take with us these new skills and have them at our disposal to support our Bible readings in the future. Preparing my final project, I even dared to go one step further and used what I have learned to find out about the meaning of the word I was working on in the Old Testament, which is written in Hebrew.
Elisabeth Chomcko, second-year Distance Learning student:
I very much appreciated being able to take part in Daniil’s online Greek class this fall - once a week from September to December 2021. These lessons were a great experience, for which I am very grateful to Daniil.
I teach French as a second language, and sometimes wonder why the students don’t remember simple vocabulary from one lesson to the next. But now that I was the student, I was reminded how new vocabulary doesn’t necessarily ‘stick’ after only going over it once or twice, no matter how eager one is to remember.
I also saw how learning something with others enriches the language experience. Daniil gave us well-sequenced tasks which were not too overwhelming. The weekly quizzes encouraged us to stay on top of our studies. We learned from each other by comparing our translations and by listening to each other’s questions and to Daniil's answers.
I was fascinated to reacquaint myself with numerous Biblical Greek words that are currently in use in our modern English.
And a final wonderful result of the course was, of course, as Jonitha already has described so eloquently with her example, that we received a glimpse into the multiple layers of meaning in a text that can be experienced when studying the language in which the text was originally written.