Passages Where Greek Helps

In general, Greek raises possibilities of interpretation we would not think from the English wording. Sometimes the Greek eliminates ideas the English wording might suggest. The Greek helps us understand why translations differ at certain points, and alerts us to ambiguities in the original text so we do not get dogmatic about a certain idea in the passage. Greek awareness enables us to use study tools like Greek concordance, lexicons, and commentaries that discuss the original text.

            Knowing biblical languages does not leave you so much at the mercy of translations. One disadvantage of having to work through a translation is that (a) no two languages match up exactly. A vocabulary item in one language seldom has the same range of denotations and connotations as the closest corresponding word(s) in another. The same thing applies to phrases, sentences, word endings, and particularly idioms, a culture’s customary usages of its language’s mechanisms.