Anonymous Asks (316)

“Is it important to know Greek and Hebrew when studying the Bible?”

My father used to caution us to beware of “little Greeks”. Seminary students know a little Greek in about the same way I know “a little French” because I studied it for five years in high school. If I went to Quebec today, I wouldn’t dare utter a word of it. Around any genuine expert, my paucity of actual language knowledge would be laughable.

In the Right Hands

Higher learning in the right hands is exceedingly useful. A little bit of higher learning in the wrong hands can become a barrier to understanding, a source of spiritual confusion and even the cause of despair. The trick is being able to identify when subject matter experts are using their knowledge to benefit the people of God and when they are just showing off. A “little Greek” (or Hebrew) does not know what he does not know. That is to say, he thinks he understands his subject better than he actually does, and may make statements in confidence that any real expert would find absurd.

So then, there is expert knowledge of Greek or Hebrew, as in someone who is qualified to work on a Bible translation team or produce an English equivalent of the relevant Dead Sea Scrolls, then there is seminary-level knowledge. They are not the same thing. A true expert in both Greek AND Hebrew is a unicorn. You will not find him on an evangelical podium Sunday morning holding forth on the Pauline usage of some obscure noun.

It’s also a lot harder to become an expert in Greek or Hebrew than for an Anglo to become expert-level French. If you want to really know how to use French in Canada, just go live in Quebec for a few years and immerse yourself in the language and culture. In contrast, both Hebrew and Greek are dead languages (though modern Hebrew bears greater similarities to biblical Hebrew than today’s Greek does to koine Greek). The point is that you cannot go anywhere on the planet today to immerse yourself in either language as it sounded in 1000 BC or AD55.

The Average Bible Student

So then, specialized knowledge like language study has its place. Somebody has to possess it or else we would never have had the Bible translated into languages we can understand. However, it is by no means the general expectation for all responsible Bible teachers. Every moment you spend studying Greek or Hebrew is a moment you don’t spend analyzing and thinking about the text itself, which is actually far more important to Christian living. To become truly expert in either language is the study of a lifetime, and would shortchange you in other areas of your Christian life.

Furthermore, there is no need for the average Bible student or platform speaker to learn Greek and Hebrew at the expert level. For thousands of years, believers made do with a fraction of the word of God that we now enjoy and none of the tools we have that allow independent study. Those who could not read or write had to make do with memorizing what they heard read aloud by religious authorities. Did they live lives less pleasing to God on that account? Probably not.

What is Required?

Today, with the tools available free to almost everyone, what is required of Bible teachers is not exhaustive study of Greek and Hebrew, but careful attention to the English text to understand the writer’s thought flow in context. Any reasonably intelligent and committed Christian can use a concordance or look up a word in Hebrew or Greek online. You do not need special language expertise to look at a list of verses that use a certain ancient word and determine for yourself how the original hearers understood the apostles. You just need patience and willingness to spend the necessary time. Any reasonably intelligent and committed Christian can pull up twenty or thirty different translations of the same verse on Bible Hub and compare them to see which are most common and which are outliers. Any reasonably intelligent and committed Christian can plug a Greek word into a search engine and look for it in in the works of famous Greek contemporaries of the Bible’s writers and editors; for example, Plato or Aristotle (for the Septuagint) or Plutarch (for first century Greek). For that matter, any reasonably intelligent and committed Christian can read a scholarly debate between the experts on what Paul or Matthew meant when he used the word ecclesia and draw his own relatively well informed second-hand conclusions from the evidence presented. The vast majority of the time, Christians who do their due diligence in this way will come to the same conclusions as the majority of Bible translators about the intended meaning of the text.

But be wary of the local platform “language expert” who regularly delights in telling you the English text you are reading means the precise opposite of what it says. Assuming you are reading a Bible translated by a team rather than an individual with a theological ax to grind (like The Message), the occasions on which your English text is truly questionable are rare indeed. Individuals who perpetually know better than all the translators are frequently contrarians with personality defects, not experts.