Since I have some free time, I am in the process of relearning how to pronounce Greek. I am tired of sounding like an idiot every time I say something in Greek; I sound like President Bush does when he speaks Spanish—I sound wrong. So does every New Testament Greek student in the U.S.; we learned some strange bastard hybrid of Erasmus’s hypothetical Hellenistic Greek pronunciation mixed with a lot of American accent. So I got a Modern Greek-English dictionary—and confirmed the pronunciation scheme with a few other Modern Greek resources—and I spent today relearning.
Yes, I have odd hobbies. But there’s nothing as much fun as startling overzealous Bib/Theo majors when I can read straight out of the Greek New Testament and they can’t.
Blame Dr. Richard Israel. He gave me that idea when I had his Greek class back in ’97. “One of the cool things you can do,” he once told us, “is when your pastor knows you can read Greek, you can sit in the front row with your Greek New Testament, and whenever he uses a Greek word, he’ll look at you to make sure he did it right.”
“Is that what happens at your church?” one of us asked.
“Yes,” he said, “and just to keep him on his toes, I usually shake my head.”