Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar

Rating:
Summary: Best Tool On the Market for Learning Biblical Greek
Review: "Memorize these paradigm charts, and you will know Biblical Greek," were the words of my first-year Greek teacher. Oh, how I wish now that William Mounce's grammar was available back then! Mounce offers a new, inductive approach to learning Biblical Greek that actually makes learning Biblical Greek exciting and fun! The student will no longer have to rely on mere rote memorization to "learn" Greek. Mounce explains why some Greek words do what they do when they change tenses/cases. Even the most diffcult of forms become sensible. Thank you Dr. Mounce for making learning Greek enjoyable. PS: If you're beyond the basics of Biblical Greek but wish to dig a little deeper, check out Mounce's Graded Reader of Biblical Greek and Morphology of Biblical Greek. Also part of the Series is Daniel Wallace's monumental work, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics. Amazon.com has them. You need them.

Rating:
Summary: Best Tool On the Market for Learning Biblical Greek
Review: "Memorize these paradigm charts, and you will know Biblical Greek," were the words of my first-year Greek teacher. Oh, how I wish now that William Mounce's grammar was available back then! Mounce offers a new, inductive approach to learning Biblical Greek that actually makes learning Biblical Greek exciting and fun! The student will no longer have to rely on mere rote memorization to "learn" Greek. Mounce explains why some Greek words do what they do when they change tenses/cases. Even the most diffcult of forms become sensible. Thank you Dr. Mounce for making learning Greek enjoyable. PS: If you're beyond the basics of Biblical Greek but wish to dig a little deeper, check out Mounce's Graded Reader of Biblical Greek and Morphology of Biblical Greek. Also part of the Series is Daniel Wallace's monumental work, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics. Amazon.com has them. You need them.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent heuristic presentation, but...
Review: Do not get me wrong. I enjoyed working through this book. It is one of a very few books that tries to make learning Greek fun, instead of just "interesting." I want to point out some very strong features in the approach to teaching Greek, before taking it apart in the hope that the many heuristic devices created by Mr. Mounce find their way into other Greek testbooks and grammars.

The book delays the presentation of the Greek verb until after the student has mastered Greek substantives--nouns, adjectices, and pronouns. The Greek verb is a daunting obstacle to students unused to inflected languages. The mastery of the other parts of speech will provide hints and nuances of context that will aid the student in the correct parsing of the Greek verb. So, contrary to many critics of this approach, I find that this is an excellent idea, and one that is well thought out.

The second positive feature of this book is the correct approach to present the Greek verb as it is, with the present tense indicative being the irregular form of the verb. Many Greek verbs have present tense stems which are radically different from the other tense stems which all follow a predictable pattern. It is the present tense indicative that is the odd one out, not the other five! Just the simple recognition of this fact makes memorizing the Greek verb a simple matter of memorizing three parts, instead of all six stems, and deriving the rest from a "root" part.

The third positive feature of this books is the presentaion of the rules of contraction in reverse. Mr. Mounce points out that when one is reading Greek, one already has the contracted form in front of him, and needs to know the form prior to its contraction. Developing the ability to "uncontract" the vowels is much more useful than learning how to contract them.

Now, the reason I gave only three stars. The text of the New Testament is not the most robust presentation of the Koine Greek language, both in terms of grammar and lexically. This book, and its accompanying workbook restrict themselves to the New Testament, and as such this is a serious shortcoming. For example, the conditional sentence using a variety of inflections including subjunctive, and optative moods, is simply not well represented in the New Testament. It is true that there is a whole cluster of them in 1 John 1, but otherwise they are quite infrequent. The student will simply not learn this grammatical feature very well, due to a lack of exposure. From a lexical point of view, some of the verbs that are used in the New Testament only appear in certain forms, particularly the passive. For example "poreuw" only appears in its passive form, "poreuomai." The novice student, not fully understanding the existence of the active form of this verb, will open his Middle Liddel-Scott lexicon, expecting to find "poreuomai." He will not find it. This can only serve to increase his frustration.

The second detraction against this book is the most serious one, but it is sadly not an uncommon failing of Modern Christianity. Mr. Mounce implies that it is necessary to understand the subtleties of the Greek syntax in order to correctly understand the theology of the New Testament. To a limitted extent, this is true, but in the large, the New Testament is not, and has never been a systematic or a complete presentation of what Christ taught. Sadly, I feel that many people who have sincere and genuine questions about very important theological issues in our belief believe that learning and understanding the Greek will answer those questions. Mastering the Greek language is not a panacaea for the theological confusion of Christianity today. Where in the Greek does it say that children are to be or not to be baptised? Where in the Greek New Testament is the phrase "panagia trias," or Holy Trinity?

The solution to the theological confusion today is not to learn the ancient language. One will only remove the modern confusion, and replace it with the ancient confusion, as C.S. Lewis points out in his translation of St. Cyril of Jerusalem's Catechetical Lectures. The solution is to read the Scriptures within the larger context of the writings of the Apostoclic and Church Fathers of the first Seven Ecumenical Councils.

To presume that we can "decipher" the meaning of Scripture with more expertise than St. Polycarp who studied directly under the Apostle John. or Clement of Alexandria who studied under the Apostle Mark, is just our modern Egoistic humanism speaking. It is sheer arrogance! St. Basil the Great says to ignore the Holy Fathers is to "reduce scripture to mere letters on the page."

I urge everyone to learn the Greek, but to do it out of love and devotion to the Scripture, not out of a desire to discern the theology of the New Testment as the Ancient Christians did. If that is your goal, then I suggest you read their writings, since they are available and accessible.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: First off, I have to confess that I am basing this review on a comparison with the texts that we used during my year's worth of studying Biblical Hebrew (seminary level), so if you're looking for an exhaustive comparison of Greek grammars you need to look elsewhere. I was disappointed with the Mounce text in three primary areas. First, the absence of substantive examples in the text. Mounce simply doesn't show a student enough to give him/her the confidence to tackle parsing and translation exercises. Second, the text has an overabundance of footnotes that contain key points and concepts. If the information is worth knowing and is essential to "getting the Greek thing", why not just put it into the main body of the text? Third, the corresponding workbook exercises definitely do not subscribe to the "you've got to be able to walk before you can run" school of thought. Having been in school for some 25 years (no, not the same school wiseguy) I know what works and what doesn't and Mounce's text definitely doesn't.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Grammar
Review: Having studied German, Arabic, Akkadian, Hebrew (in modern and ancient forms), and several Aramaic dialects in addition to Greek, I feel that I should say that this intro grammar is not only the best New Testament Greek grammar there is, but it is the best intro grammar that I have every seen for any language that I have studied. And I have used scores of them written in both English and German. Huehnergard's Akkadian grammar comes in second. Though Mounce's techniques are not fully applicable to all the world's languages, every author of any intro grammar for an ancient language should adopt as much of his methodology as possible.

Rating:
Summary: best available intro grammar
Review: here it is folks, the best available introductory grammar for the nt. for those who don't know, greek is an inflected language with similarities to latin and sanskrit; that means lots and lots of endings and exceptions to memorize. the system mounce offers is optimal, facilitating learning of the mechanics of the language (if one understands how letters change when endings are added, then the apparent exceptions are not really exceptions). this text treats all major verb forms that one will need to know. it does not deal extensively with less common forms such as the future participle or pluperfect tense and an intermediate level grammar (d wallace's "beyond the basics" is good)will be necessary as well for serious students. incidentally, it is written from an evangelical perspective and offers some introductory applications for exegesis.

Rating:
Summary: Professor adds his two bits along with the basic facts.
Review: I am attempting to teach myself New Testament Greek. This text offers the benefits of a lecturing professor and his wisdom. William D. Mounce shares his a wealth of knowledge in an interesting manner along side of the basic facts of the NT Greek language. I am enjoying this book.

Rating:
Summary: Mouncey goo
Review: I am currently a sem student in the city of Chicago and have been studying out of this text book now for three weeks. To sum up... it is a piece of market driven textual goo- Zondervan strikes again! Do not believe the hype. Do not buy Mounce's text book! Croy's "Primer..." from Eerdman's is much more to the point and dare I say academic and much more helpful. Croy even provides a systematic way of learning unlike Mounce's approach of throwing everything to the student at once but then holding off essential elements like saving verbs for chapter 16. Croy is great also for his inclusion of excercises from the LXX. Mounce is a mess.

Rating:
Summary: Great, Easy to Use Grammar!
Review: I am in the first 3 months of trying to teach myself New Testament Greek. I have found William Mounce's Textbook to be exceptional, the accompanying CD is excellent with flashworks and parseworks, a great tool to learn the vocab. Great for any beginning Greek student!

UPDATE: I tested out of both Beginning Greek and Intermediate Greek at Seminary, with no previous Greek knowledge. This book is an excellent resource!

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Greek Grammar
Review: I am one of Dr. Mounce's students. I studied Greek with him in the 98-99 school year and I still have retained almost all of what I learned through this book and Dr. Mounce. The book is informative and easy to use and study.

The CD ROM is excellent as well, and is a good tool for review.

If you want to learn Biblical Greek, but don't want to memorize the many, many paradigms that the traditional method requires, you should get this book.