It Actually *Is* Greek to Me

I've decided to learn Greek. My wife and I were talking and we decided we needed hobbies or something to dedicate our minds to. We were spending too much time just hanging out and not doing anything; a human being needs something to occupy his mind and heart. For some people TV does the trick. We don't have TV and our internet is painfully slow, so even Youtube videos are out. So, um, Greek it is.

I realize that doesn't really make sense. But according to Meyers-Brigg, I'm an Intuitive person and we I's don't need things like "logic" to explain our decisions. My gut said "learn Greek", so I am. My gut rarely does me wrong. Of course, my gut isn't the one that has to do all the work of memorizing vocabulary, but so far my brain hasn't complained. My shoulders are certainly not happy about it though. But then they grumble whenever there's too much computer involved and that's not necessarily a result of the Greek. I think my shoulders have already become the grumpy old man I fear lies in my own future someday.

There's an interesting thing about Koine Greek--the dialect of Greek that the New Testament is written in. It seems that there's very little written in it outside of the Bible. For a long time, scholars thought that it was basically "God's Dialect", a language that must have come straight out of heaven since no one else wrote anything in it. But then they found some receipts and shopping lists in various places around the Mediterranean and decided that it's just another plain old language. There's not much written in it because it was basically the Greek Pigeon of the day--the Greek that everyone learned to speak because they had to in order to communicate with everyone else, especially their rulers (or conquerors rather). If you were going to write something really deep and profound and important, you would have used a more formal version of the language, or maybe even your local language instead of Koine. Its like writing the constitution in Southern Hick English with Ebonics.

And therein lies the beauty of the Bible. The people it was written to didn't speak proper Greek. They spoke Koine Greek because everybody spoke Koine Greek. So, that's what Paul and Company decided to write their letters in. The book that we consider to be the Very Words of God Himself was written on legal pad in everyday language--probably with lots of spelling errors (though I haven't gotten that far yet). This really impresses me about my God. That he is so plain and ordinary sometimes. Of course, he's also freaking amazing in a way I cannot find the words to describe ("freaking amazing" comes close though), but he's also simple. And ordinary. And that means he's accessible no matter what is happening, no matter where I am and what I'm doing. I could be picking up after the dog or shaking the president's hand in the Oval Office--God matters.

We'll see how I feel about the simplicity of God once I get into parsing nouns and verbs though. I have a feeling I'm going to be wishing I was walking that dog again.