I suppose you have all heard of the saying ‘be careful what you ask for – you might get it!’ and its Christian equivalent ‘be careful what you pray for – you might get it!’.
Some months ago, at our Theology Group, I asked one of our members whether he knew of a Hebrew course I could take somewhere
The answer I expected was along the lines of, well, you could try such and such a course at so and so or there is another one somewhere else, and so forth. After looking at me somewhat sideways he then announced, ‘Well, I could teach you’. This put the ball firmly back into my court and I was obliged to consider (a) was I really that keen and (b) did I have the time and energy to do it? Andrew then said, ‘and if I am going to teach you, I might as well teach other people as well’.
This all led to a notice in our pew leaflet and in January 2013 five of us started learning Classical Hebrew from ‘A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew’ by J. Weingreen. I have to say that none of us found it easy, and for myself, I almost despaired of ever getting to grips with it. However, we all persevered. I still can’t follow it as easily as I can New Testament Greek, but the only way to improve is to practise it.
After the course had been going for a few weeks it occurred to me that there might be an interest in New Testament Greek at our Church. So, I put a notice in the pew leaflet asking whether anyone wanted to study the New Testament in the original language. At the time I had no intention of teaching New Testament Greek to anyone; I wanted to see whether there was sufficient interest to start a New Testament Greek Study Group. A House Group with a difference.
As time went on and the Hebrew course continued, I received quite a few unsolicited enquiries so much so that I accumulated a list of about 25 people who had expressed some sort of interest. I did not expect that everyone would actually sign up on the dotted line but we ran a couple of ‘Open Mornings’ to explain what it was all about. These were encouragingly successful so in January 2014 we started our Greek Class with about 12 members, nine of whom are still with us. We are using ‘Elements of New Testament Greek’ by J. W. Wenham, now out of print but I have managed to obtain about 15 second hand copies, two of which came from the JACT Summer School at Durham to whom my thanks.
Naturally, we had to plan for people missing lessons; it is not possible for everyone to attend every single lesson. On those occasions we split the class into 2 and one of us teaches the main class while the other teaches a ‘catch-up’ lesson to those who may have missed one or two.
Neither Andrew nor myself had any idea how this would go; as is often said we stepped out in faith trusting in the Lord himself. We were fully prepared for the eventuality that people would get tired or lose interest, but this did not happen. On the the contrary, we found that we needed to arrange extra lessons.
We started out by using one of the rooms Ss Pter and Paul, Buckingham but when I planned the first term (Hilary Term 2014) I found that I could not get the room every week, so I simply abandoned a lesson for that week, thinking that everyone would like a break. Completely wrong! After we had progressed a couple of weeks the whole group unanimously requested that we should continue without a break so I was asked to find an alternative venue.
So now we meet every single week in three terms (Hilary, Trinity and Michaelmas) throughout the year.
Does everyone find it easy? Not a bit of it, but the difficulty is actually part of the attraction. If it were easy it would not be fun! At the moment everyone is still getting to grips with the accidence and syntax of the langauage but sometime in Michaelmas Term the group will begin the study of a New Testament text.
I am glad to say that we have a very varied group. Some studied Latin at school a long time ago and have forgotten most of it, some have never studied languages at all, not even at school, some have tried to learn NT Greek by themselves and failed, and one person is expecting to go to Theological College in September. Everyone, however, is completely committed to learning this tongue so that I have quite a bit of marking to do!
We are thinking of starting a second NT Greek class later this year, but this has got no further than planning at the moment!
And this all arose from one innnocent question!
