Do they know Greek?

On his Biblical Studies and Reviews blog, Stephen Hackett calls attention to a statement by textual scholar Bart Ehrman. It is from Ehrman’s “What Kind of a Text is the King James Bible? Manuscripts, Translation, and the Legacy of the KJV” keynote address at the “Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible” exhibition at the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University in 2013.

Comments start about 21:43:00 and go to about 22:43:00 (and about 1:35:00 on Hackett’s blog)

There are questions among scholars about how many people actually participated in the translation; but the best answer is that there were forty-seven translators, who were all skilled, highly skilled, in Greek and Hebrew. Today when somebody is highly skilled in Greek, like Jeff Siker and me, we’re considered highly skilled – that means we can kind of slosh our way through a Greek text if we have a good dictionary sitting next to us. These guys, including King James, could speak Greek and did speak Greek to each other when they felt like it. They could read Hebrew like the newspaper. These were serious serious scholars. They didn’t have TV – no ESPN. So what did they do? They sat around and studied Greek. This is what they did. And Latin, and Hebrew…

In Greek Professors: Do They Know Greek?, Daniel R. Streett writes of passing out a quiz at the Evangelical Theological Society in November 2008. 

...my audience was made up of mostly Greek professors and doctoral-level students who had probably taken, on average, 4-7 years of Greek by now and some of whom had been teaching Greek for 20-30 years by now.

After the audience had finished, I collected their quizzes. The average “grade” was 0.4 out 10 correct.

Over the course of many years, I have come to the conclusion that many who claim to read Greek (or Hebrew) do not read Greek (or Hebrew) in the way we mean that statement when we speak of reading our native tongue. I have not called out anyone on the claim, seeing most likely they read Greek better than I do! However, I think the two quotes above come from men who are qualified to make the assessment. When people tell us “regular folk” that they can read Greek, it is likely “regular folk” assume the claimants are much more fluent in the language than they actually are.

• Bart Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor in the Department Of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, with degrees from Wheaton College (BA, 1978) and Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv, 1981; PhD, 1985).
• Daniel R. Streett is an Associate Professor in Biblical Studies at Houston Baptist University in Houston, Texas, with degrees from Criswell College (BA in Biblical Studies), Yale Divinity School (MA in Biblical Studies), and Southeastern Seminary (PhD in New Testament).