Greek

Since I teach beginning Greek frequently, using BibleWorks 8 to help students learn is important to me. One simple feature that pays a wealth of dividends is the vocabulary module. Memorizing vocabulary is hard, and perhaps a little tedious, but it is absolutely essential if one is going to read the New Testament with any proficiency.

After a year of securing a contract, nine months of producing the manuscript, and 15 months of editing and waiting, the New Reader's Lexicon is finally here. It's been a fun couple of weeks to see it arrive in stages. Last Tuesday I arrived in my office in the morning to find my free author's copies had arrived. This week at ETS the book is being displayed by the publisher to many Greek professors and other New Testament scholars. My daughter even took it to show to her second grade class! If I can get second graders to read Greek, graduate students should be a piece of cake!

A new semester has begun at DTS, and week one is finished. I have always loved the start of classes. The fresh attitude, the new faces, the syllabi - it never ceases to lighten my heart. I realize that theology may be too lofty for something as mundane as the first week of classes, but my heart is lifted because we always start with a clean slate, and this reminds me of the Lord's forgiveness and graciousness to his erring children.

I spent most every free working minute last week on the copy-edited manuscript for the New Reader's Lexicon. It was an arduous process. I read through the entire manuscript (over 700+ pages in the printout we had) looking for any errors or problems. I found about 20 different problems to correct. Now my co-author Jeff Miller has the manuscript. He will do the same thing I did this week. We will likely meet together at the end of the week to compare notes and put our heads together on anything which needs a mutual decision.

I had initially planned to continue the topic of areas of NT study which need investigation, but some urgent publishing work has come up which has taken precedence. I thought it would be informative to let you know what that was.

NT104 is another course I teach. This is our course on introduction to exegesis. In it we focus on the method of exegesis, and we walk through the content of Ephesians in the process. We cover many different aspects of the method and then practice that in Ephesians with ample opportunity along the way to deal with important issues and problems in that book.

I teach within the New Testament Studies department at DTS, so as you can imagine most everything I do centers around the NT. We have seven required courses in NT here for students in the Master of Theology program, and I teach five of them.