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DALLAS—Easter and Christmas pageants in ancient Greek? Texas college students texting each other in the language of Paul’s day? A Chihuahua that obeys the command to sit—when she hears it said the way the apostle Peter would have?
This is the not-so-far off world of Daniel Streett, associate professor of Greek and New Testament at Criswell College. Along with a handful of others worldwide, Streett is paving the way for his students to learn New Testament Greek the way other students learn modern Spanish, French, or German—as a living, oral language. Through simple commands, such as sit, stand, walk, the use of common objects and everyday phrases, as well as pictures and games like Jeopardy and UNO, Streett brings not only learning and fluency to the classroom, but also fun.
“This method keeps the students engaged and enthusiastic,” Streett said. “They find that Greek class is actually fun, and they begin to get a feel for the language.”
Streett began using this oral language method for Greek instruction six years ago while teaching at Criswell. He was inspired by Randall Buth, a Greek and Hebrew scholar in Jerusalem who was teaching biblical languages using this approach.
“I also knew that everyone who was actually fluent in a second language had become that way through immersion, not by learning grammatical terminology and translating texts,” Streett explained.
Typical Greek instruction, he noted, focuses on learning grammatical terminology, memorizing charts of word-forms, and learning rules of grammar, with students memorizing one-word definitions of countless Greek terms. Streett described the process as “tedious, mind-numbing, and ineffective.”
“I quickly found that there was an overwhelming consensus that the best way to learn a language was by immersion in that language, beginning with simple, easily understood words, motions, and commands, and slowly and incrementally increasing in complexity.”
In Streett’s experience, this was also the way that not only children but also successful adult learners learned a language.
“Many of my graduate school peers had attended guided immersion experiences in Germany. They came back in six months much more proficient in German than they were in Greek or Hebrew, which they had studied for many years.”
To Streett, the concept of true language fluency—the ability to pick up the New Testament and read and comprehend it as easily as if it were written in English—should be the goal of biblical language instruction.
“It seems to me that as Greek teachers, we are usually teaching students who hope to be teaching the Bible for the rest of their lives,” Streett said. “The Bible is written in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, and true fluency in these languages is the only thing that will give the pastor legitimate authority and confidence to speak on the meaning of the text.
“Doesn’t it make sense to ask someone who will be spending 10 to 20 hours a week preparing to teach or teaching the Bible for the next 30 to 40 years to spend two or three years immersed in the original languages, to gain a feel for the Greek and the ability to read the text fluently for pleasure and understanding? I look at Jewish rabbis who routinely memorize the Torah and Mishnah in Hebrew. I look at the Muslim Huffadh who memorize the entire Quran in Arabic. And then I see the dearth of Greek and Hebrew proficiency among evangelical pastors and I can’t help but think what that would say to an outsider about how seriously or unseriously we take our sacred texts.”
Despite the potential benefits of God’s people when pastors become fully fluent in Greek, the greatest opposition Streett found to the method was the notion that biblical Greek was a “dead” language. Therefore ministry students didn’t need to speak ancient Greek, they just needed to read it. But Streett didn’t accept this notion.
“Was it really dead? I could accept that a language like Ugaritic or Hittite, for which we possess only fragments of a language, was dead. But we have more ancient Greek than we could read in 10 lifetimes. There is appropriate vocabulary for everything under the sun. And, to top it off, we have a modern version of the language that provides us with words for modern items. Most words in modern Greek are based off classical roots and require only slight modification to transform them in ancient Greek structure.”
Excited about the possibilities of providing his students an alternative means to embrace biblical Greek, Streett began to adapt an oral language learning approach to his own classroom. He soon realized this would be far more difficult than a more traditional approach—despite having studied biblical Greek for six years, for the first time in his life Streett would have to think in Greek. John Schwandt, senior fellow of classical languages at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, and director of the National Biblical Greek Exam, has also been teaching Greek as well as Latin orally for a number of years. A fellow member with Streett of the Society of Biblical Literature, Schwandt commiserates with Streett’s struggle to teach in this manner.
“I had to relearn how I learned Greek. Often in Greek courses we talk about the language, but we don’t actually learn the language. So we have this shell game going on where we call this learning the language. If there is no meaning for the Greek text to us, then we are trusting in our method, not the text itself.
“When you have students going around and talking in the language, then reading with ease, there is a great reward,” Schwandt continued. “It makes such a difference to read the Bible and realize that Greek can actually live—you can read God’s Word as he actually preserved it. It’s an amazing experience.”
As one of Streett’s students, David Burnett agrees with Schwandt.
“For students who are training to be effective pastors and teachers of God’s Word, Dr. Streett has removed the fear from learning Greek,” Burnett said. “He is making it possible for someone who is not inherently a linguist to have the ability to learn the ancient language in which our holy text was penned.”
For his part, Streett is troubled by the false sense of comfort typical Greek instruction offers Bible students.
“The Bible wasn’t written in English, so when we read it in English, in a sense we’re seeing through a veil. When a student learns to use tools like lexicons and grammar texts, we think they’ve lifted the veil, but they’ve actually only thinned it.”
The only way to lift that veil, Streett argued, is to follow the natural linguistic pattern for learning languages, where reading comes after hearing and speaking, not before.
“Language is internalized by hearing and speaking. Reading is as easy as recognizing the written form of the words that you already know. Put simply, if you want to learn to read a language, the best way to do it is first to learn to converse in the language. To read for enjoyment you must be fluent in the language. But you cannot become fluent in the language solely by reading.”
Having joined Streett’s class after having become discouraged by his own inability to comprehend the Greek text, Burnett said he has seen remarkable progress in his own Greek abilities.
“After a year of studying Greek, I felt as though I might be able to parse a few verbs here and there, but I wouldn’t be able to simply pick up my Greek New Testament and read it with any level of comprehension,” Burnett explained. “In the first year of Dr. Streett’s immersive method of teaching Greek, we learned triple the vocabulary of a normal first year Greek student—over 1,000 words—and most of them were learned intuitively through spoken and heard repetition.”
All of this, Streett said, came from rudimentary beginnings.
“When I began, I had no worthwhile functional ability in Greek, and I had virtually no ability to speak Greek, or to understand Greek texts read out loud—which incidentally is the way early Christians would have originally encountered them!” he said.
“My wife and I acquired a Chihuahua, whom we named Athena, and we trained her in Greek. Chihuahuas are not very smart—their brains being about the size of a pea—but Athena has done well with her limited resources. Due to my wife’s rigorous training, Athena now responds to sit, lay down, come, eat, walk, outside, well done, stretch, fetch, and heel.”
Streett’s point: “My dog now knows more Greek now than I knew when I began teaching!”
