Teaching Koine?

As part of our continuing efforts to improve the Greek program, we are considering making Koine or Biblical Greek a larger part of our offerings at some point in the near future. The thinking is that this offers two advantages:

1) Koine is easier to learn, at least initially. We have a growing problem with students who won't (and perhaps don't know how) to put in the effort required to learn classical Greek.

2) Students interested in ministry have a vested interest in learning Greek well; a few students who are there for a practical purpose can raise the level of the whole class, we hope. (Not that learning Greek for its own sake is wrong or doesn't happen -- goodness no! -- but we get a lot of students who take Greek to 'feel smart' and then find that the challenges of first year have the exact opposite effect.)

Has anyone else started incorporating more Koine into their program? Is it something you would recommend?

(I should note that we are still planning to offer classical texts in second and third year. A student who learns classical Greek and then takes a course in lyric poetry has to become comfortable in a new dialect or dialects -- the same principle would seem to hold for a student who learn Koine and then reads Plato or Herodotus.)

photo credit

Pin It