Madingley Hall Greek Texts 2012

Picture of Lucian

Here are the Greek texts presently planned for Madingley weekend courses in 2012 (more details here).

17 – 19 February
Homer, Iliad 23.229-end (897). Ed. Willcock, Books 13-24 (Bristol Classical Press, £20.00)

18 – 20 May
Hesiod, Theogony 1-232; Works and Days 1-307 [‘Essential Hesiod’, ed CJ Rowe, BCP £10.99 or Hesiod, Oxford Classical Texts £17.00 or Hesiod Loeb £15.95]
or
Lucian, selection ed Hopkinson (Cambridge green-and-yellow, £17.99); students to prepare 3: The Ignorant Book-Collector; 4: Praise of the Fly; and 5: Sigma vs Tau

14 – 16 September
Lysias, 1. ‘On the murder of Eratosthenes’ and 7. ‘On the olive-stump’ [in Lysias, Select Speeches ed. C Carey, CUP green-and-yellow £19.99]
or
Aristophanes, Lysistrata, ed Sommerstein (Aris & Phillips, £18.00) 1-657

23 – 25 November
Lysias, 3. ‘Against Simon’ and 14. ‘Against Alcibiades’ [same edition]
or
Aristophanes 658-end (1321)

John Taylor has also kindly sent me details of the texts for New Testament Greek, as follows:

Texts are:

three OT choice snippets – Genesis 18: 1-15, Ezekiel 37: 1-14, Isaiah 53: 1-12

I Maccabees chapter 2

John chapters 1 – 3

Colossians chapters 1 – 4.

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New Testament Greek, Madingley Hall 4-6 February

 

1 Peter with anxious annotations

 

I had set myself some simple performance targets this time:

i)  do not have a cold;

ii) do not lose return ticket.

In the event, I found that I had managed to leave most of the course papers behind.  I also managed to leave my glasses in the taxi.  And on the Sunday I woke up with a cold.

This time round, there were nine of us, and we managed our quota of 50 verses in a 90-minute session easily enough.  The texts covered were:

Luke  1-15

1 Peter 1-5

1 Maccabees 1

Psalms 22 and 137.

Of these, Peter was a bit tricky at the beginning, while people definitely appreciated 1 Maccabees.  Dr John Taylor, our tutor, gave a talk entitled ‘Between the testaments’ on the Saturday evening; he also seemed to have decided it was his job to keep the course members supplied with wine.

We had a sensible and non-garrulous female taxi driver for the drive to the station at the end, and I didn’t lose my return ticket.

New Testament Greek at Madingley Hall, 4-6 February 2011

Madingley Hall

I have received from the tutor John Taylor the following suggestions for texts for next February’s NT Greek at Madingley Hall:

Psalms 22 and 137 (=LXX 21 and 136) [40 verses]
I Maccabees ch 1 [64 verses]
Luke chs 13-15 [101 verses]
I Peter chs 1-5 [105 verses]

In this context, it’s probably a good thing that the Hebrew original of Maccabees has disappeared–that will stop people from worrying about what the text really said, which is often a cause of concern when reading the Septuagint.

If you’re interested in the course, I’m sure it will be fine to email John Taylor with queries about the course content.   Or you can also consult my posting on the 2010 course here.

New Testament Greek Madingley Hall 12-14 February

 

Picture of Madingley Hall--it's outside Cambridge

 

This course took place over the weekend, from Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime.  There were 7 teaching sessions of 90 minutes each: one on Saturday evening, four on Saturday and two on Sunday.  Six of these sessions consisted of the students in turn reading two or three verses aloud and translating them, while in the after-dinner talk on Saturday the lecturer gave a talk on ‘Acts and the Classical World’.

To give some specifics:  there were 17 students in the group–the age deistribution can be inferred from the class photo below.  Our tutor was Dr John Taylor, compiler of New Testament Greek:  A Reader, who took great care to make sure that nobody should feel embarrassed or humiliated because of not knowing something or making a mistake.  We covered Mark chapters 14-16, Acts chapters 12-14, Isaiah chapter 40 and Wisdom of Solomon chapter 3 (these last two being from the Septuagint and the Apocrypha rather than the NT of course).  There was a rough quota of 50 verses per session, and we finished bang on the end of the last session.

Participants were very enthusiastic about the course (and about Madingley Hall in general) and several had already been on many previous years’ editions of the same course.

 

Class photo from Mair's Facebook page

 

At one meal, I had an interesting chat with a woman who had been coming to Madingley to teach Latin for 27 years.  She felt that the facilities had improved markedly over that time, while the actual Latin teaching had been more cyclical–to start off with, it had been people who had done Latin in the past and now wanted to revive it, then Beginners and Improvers had been introduced, and finally these had died off in response to last year’s increase in prices, so it was back to people reading texts.

The course will very probably run again next February, and you can see details of all Madingley Hall courses here.

There’s a general overview of what I know about provision for studying NT Greek here.

Studying New Testament Greek

To a large extent, the answer here is ‘See Ancient Greek’, or as Stephanie Winder from Edinburgh puts it:  For absolute beginners, we recommend the Beginning Ancient Greek course because at that level the grammar/ morphology is virtually identical.

Notwithstanding this, there tends to be a week of non-beginners’ NT Greek at the Edinburgh Summer School. There is also a weekend at Madingley Hall and an Intermediate-level course at City Lit.

Provision at Birkbeck seems to have entirely disappeared over the past couple of years.

I’ve plagiarised some literature references for NT Greek from Paul Parvis at Edinburgh here.  And I’ve posted my experiences of doing NT Greek in Edinburgh here (see under ‘Edinburgh’, strangely enough) and at Magingley Hall here.

The rest is silence or…’See Ancient Greek’.

Some references on New Testament Greek

Here are some references for New Testament Greek, kindly supplied by Paul Parvis (the more stars, the more recommended):

Nestle-Aland: Novum Testamemtum Graece, 27th edn Barbara and Kurt Aland (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1993)***

Danker, Frederick William, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)***

Abbott-Smith, G., A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, 3rd (rev.) edn (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1937 (and many subsequent printings))*

Moulton, William Fiddian and Alred Shenington Geden, A Concordance to the Greek New Testament According to the Texts of Westcott and Hort, Tischendorf, and the English Revisers (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1937 (and many subsequent printings))

Blass, F., and A. Debrunner, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, tr. Robert W. Funk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961)*

Moulton, James Hope, A Grammar of New Testament Greek, 4 vols (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1906-76)

Vol 1, by Moulton, Prolegomena
Vol 2, by Moulton and Wilbert Francis Howard, Accidence and Word Formation**
Vol 3, by Nigel Turner, Syntax
Vol 4, by Turner, Style

Burton, Ernest De Witt, Syntax of the Moods and Tenses in New Testament Greek, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1894)

Moule, C. F. D., An Idiom Book of New Testament Greek, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959)