David Kent
Continuing Historicist
- Aug 24, 2017
- 2,174
- 663
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- Country
- United Kingdom
- Faith
- Baptist
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- UK-Conservative
Here in England, may official functions were in Latin or French, such as law courts, till Oliver Cromwell in the 1640sWell think about it this way.... the Greek empire's were the Ptolamaic, the Seleucid, Byzantine, as far as Ukraine in modern day Russia there were Greek cities and even Afganistan, so all ancient books were written in Greek. The Roman empire collapsed around the 300s AD along with most books, there's podcast "Told in Stone"; now its not too apparent how dominant Greek over Latin was because the scribes could not continue to update the Greek books due to the Arab conquests, financing, the library of Alexandria was destroyed etc, but the whole Middle east and Turkey used Greek. However, at least in Byzantium they still had old Greek works lying around, the book "Sailing from Byzantium" goes over how Italian scholars used the Byzantine books that managed to survive in 1453 to spark the Renaissance, and Protestant reformation, because eventually the Lutherans (what would become Lutherans) could obtain these writings and study them to use in interpreting the Bible, so if we operated on the same premise as the reformers we would be conversant in at least Greek. Sure Melanchthon knew Latin and German too but the most essential was Greek. The advantage is you can literally pick up on the nuances in the Greek syntax that helps with interpreting certain prepositions, and connecting words that are hard to discern because each NT English translation differs on this and comes out with a different sentence structure, that's why Lutherans prefer ESV but a lot of Reformed follow New King James, it's all about the Greek--- so you can't make an informed decision for yourself unless you know Greek, you're trusting that the pastor of your denomination has figured all of this out.
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