ByRev.ALFRED A. WRIGHT, A.M.[M]
1.It is easily learned by any one who can easily learn anything.A lady complained to her pastor that she was greatly in doubt about her Christian character, because she could not recollect Bible passages, though she had just read them. The pastor did not tell her the old story of a similar case where the hermit answered by pouring water into a basin; wiping it dry, he said, “You see the basin holds none of the water, yet it is cleaner.” But he instantly suspected the true state of the case. “How much of anything you read do you retain in mind?” “Why, nothing,” she replied; “I’ve been that way always.” Here was mental defect, not moral obliquity. She couldn’t learn Greek any more readily than anything else.
Now to all persons not mentally incapable of learning anything, Bible Greek presents special helps to enthusiasm, and hence to success.
2.It is the language God chose as the vehicle of his Gospel.There must be in it the qualities suited to the needs of an Apocalypse of God, or he would have selected a language more capable of containing and of expressing such a revelation. Hence this fact is inspirational as a sentiment. We study the very words of God. We come nearest and most directly to the oracle, to the secrets of Deity.
We are admitted to thesanctum sanctorumof his counsels, who spake in Jesus Christ and his apostles the “wonderful words of life.” But we need not rely upon the sentimental virtues of Bible Greek inspiration for evidence in proof that the language itself helps the student of it.
3.Bible Greek, like Bible Hebrew, is essentially the vehicle of spiritual conceptions and of spiritual truths.The spiritual in man can find no loftier expressions of “what is in man,” than in New Testament Greek.
4.The very construction of the language, its idioms, the mental view points involved in its structure and mechanism, are themselves helps.With the Greeks thought was not indefinite as too largely is the case with us. They never dealt in that commodity of which certain æsthetes recently in this country appeared to have possessed the monopoly;i. e.“unthunk thoughts.”
The Greeks did not think “about” things. They thought at things, or they thought out things, or they thought things. Thucydides said that the Greeks could not bear to think of things future as though not already within their grasp. Hence we find their language largely uses the present for the future tense. This present tense mode of thought, bringing everything directly before their eyes, contributed not a little to that definiteness of conception and of expression which characterizes the language throughout. It was both the cause and the effect of Greek exactness and of tetheredness in thought and speech.
Every preacher should at least read Blackstone: if possible, he should take the full law course, not alone to know the principles of common law, but also and especially for style’s sake; to know how to state things exactly, economically. Verbiage is expensive. It burdens speed. It weakens force. It is the mark of a mind untrained. Bible Greek helps the preacher just at this point. Let him master the language and he will unconsciously think in the very channels along which the tides of Greek thought, feeling, emotion, and sentiment glide, never overflowing their banks into the flat and boundless marshes of nowhereness.
1.The Bible Greek student is continually helped in his studies by the fascinations of his journey.On every side arise new friends to call him blessed. It is no arid desert which invites his footsteps. The land flows with milk and honey. No wild beasts are there: no enemy. It is God’s land: his Eden where he walks and talks with the true Adam.
Here, for example, is a grand plane of literary observation and loftiness. The air is bracing, a tonic to weak chests surfeited with library hot house forcings and environments. Then too the moral upliftings which one gets! The sense of presences invisible to eye, unheard, untouched: presences recent from heaven. Oh how one’s littlenesses and inferiorities, one’s shortcomings and dwarfedness feel the rebuke of loftier spirits, speechless, but loftier. Here are theologic forests and drives through green carpeted woods that smell of myrrh and balsam, even as though his footsteps and his garments had just passed.
Yonder is an apocalyptic plateau, an island of the sky, from whose top all heaven is visible. Are not these things helps? to preacher? teacher? scholar? Hear just one word from Paul. It puts us on that plateau yonder. He tells the Romans (i:20), “For the invisible things of him, since the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being perceived through thethings that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.” He tells the Ephesians (ii:10), “For we are hisworkmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” In these two passages the italicized words are the same. They are not found elsewhere in all the Bible. The word ispoiema. From its plateau we discover the harmonies and the unity of the uni-verse of God—the oneness of Deity with us dirt. God is discovered,un-covered in thepoiema—the poem of Nature: so that the heathen are excuseless. We are God’spoiema—the poem of Grace recreated in Jesus Christ.
Ah, to find that one word, to stand upon its apocalyptic summit and to see, is worth four years’ climbing, though it should be harder than up Katahdin’s gorges, steeper than the icy sides horrific of Mt. Blanc.
But, in addition to this telescopic vision-range, the Greek student gets at the infinities below him. The water drop is essentially, if not integrally, an ocean. Infinity is unthinkable in any direction: just as unthinkable when one thinks along the diameter towards the center of a sphere as when one thinks in reverse direction.
So there is here philological microscopy; of words and letters even: all valuable, sometimes necessary to any knowledge, always disciplinary. Paul writes to Timothy, (iii: 16) “Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh.” Thus some Mss. But others make Paul say, “Great is the mystery, etc., he who was manifested in the flesh.” The Mss. differ only in a letter, scarcely that. The difference is just that between an Ο and a θ. Hair splitting? Yet on that one hair hangs doctrine, and duty, and destiny. And Ellicott has split this hair out of the Alexandrine Ms. One case of intricate and extraordinary surgery well performed, establishes the surgeon’s fame and fortune in a day. Ellicott’s treatment of this passage—fascinating as a romance, and romantic in its fascination, the very quality of reading which the ill-trained judicial faculties of some pastors need—his treatment of this passage is one of the triumphs of philological microscopy. Of no utility? Do this kind of work and the use will appear in one’s own self.
[To be continued.]