In BI 502: Introduction to New Testament Greek, BI 507: Greek Translation, and the Greek Exegesis courses, one of the aims is that students develop a foundation for reading and using the Greek language throughout the course of their ministries. A few objectives from these courses are related to this aim.
From BI 502: Introduction to New Testament Greek:
- Translate accurately passages of easy-to-moderate difficulty from the Greek New Testament.
- Demonstrate the skill to sight translate passages of easy difficulty from the Greek New Testament silently and aloud, with accuracy.
- Analyze and translate accurately moderate-to-difficult passages from the Greek New Testament
- Demonstrate the skill to sight translate passages of moderate difficulty from a critical edition of the Greek New Testament.
- Demonstrate the ability to utilize a variety of Greek translation tools, including grammars, Bible software, lexica, concordances, and commentaries.
- As part of the interpretive process, make use of multiple biblical commentaries that adopt various exegetical, theological, and ideological perspectives.
In these classes students there is one required, shared commentary that every student engages. In addition, each students chooses another commentary and becomes that commentary's representative for the semester. This allows them to practice using multiple commentaries but also to see how different commentaries approach the biblical text differently. Here are the instructions from the BI 673: Exegesis of Romans course with respect to choosing commentaries:
Each student will choose one of the following commentaries on Romans. Reading from this commentary will inform their forum posts. The intention is that several different interpretive perspectives will be brought into the online discussion on a given portion of Romans. Of course students may purchase more than one of these commentaries (and this is recommended for the purpose of future preaching, teaching, and research), but students will only be responsible to read and report on one of these commentaries for the purposes of the course.
Greek Exegesis students *must* choose a commentary from the second list. The reason for this is that the commentaries in the second list presume knowledge of Greek and attend to issues of translation and grammar to a much greater extent than the commentaries in the first list. English Exegesis students may choose a commentary from either list but should be aware that commentaries in the second list presume a working knowledge of Greek.