Greek interlinear bible gospel of john Patch#
Over the years, I’ve collected two dozen or so others: a red-letter version in which the words of Christ appear in color a handful of editions annotated by scholars, some illustrated with sketches or maps and a few truly wild editions, such as the novelist Reynolds Price’s “ Three Gospels,” which leaves out Matthew and Luke but includes one Price himself wrote called “An Honest Account of a Memorable Life: An Apocryphal Gospel.” The Bible has been translated into more than seven hundred languages, and there are hundreds of versions in English alone, going as far back as the one produced by the fourteenth-century reformer John Wycliffe and his Bible Men (better known as Lollards), and continuing in the last half century with everything from “ The Living Bible,” a plainspoken paraphrase by Kenneth Taylor first published in the nineteen-seventies, to Clarence Jordan’s civil-rights-era “ Cotton Patch Gospel,” in which the Holy Land is transposed to the American South instead of being crucified in Jerusalem, Jesus is lynched in Atlanta. My grandmother raised me on the King James Version, but my childhood church followed the common lectionary, with weekly readings from the New Revised Standard Version, which is also what we were required to use when we went through confirmation. It’s not that I lacked for other Biblical translations at the time. In the end, all of the hours that I poured into my pidgin Greek resulted in little more than an abiding admiration for those whose calling it is to translate sacred literature.
It should have helped that I knew these texts well enough to summarize whole chapters and quote many verses from memory, but it didn’t. After memorizing a grammar book and what seemed like enough flash cards to account for all five thousand or so distinct words that appear in the New Testament, I began trying to get through the Gospel of John, supposedly the easiest of the books, and then the Apostle Paul’s more difficult letter to the Galatians. I remember all of this somewhat bitterly because I still struggled with Koine.
I was heartened when a classicist friend, knowing how bad I was at learning languages, reassured me that the kind of Greek I needed to learn for this project was not the difficult kind-the Attic Greek that he and his colleagues read-but Koine Greek, which he described as “Dick and Jane” primer Greek, which would be much easier. This was so that I could read the New Testament in its original language, a desire I could not really explain, other than as a general sense that I was seeking more from Scripture. Some years ago, in a fit of religious enthusiasm, I decided that I wanted to learn Greek.