Greek Summer Reading II: Get a Reader’s Greek New Testament

Continuing with the theme of my previous post–that the best way to learn Greek is to read Greek–let me recommend UBS’s Greek New Testament: Reader’s Edition.

The most difficult aspect of keeping up with Greek is limited time, especially if you are a busy pastor or student juggling multiple projects. A Reader’s Greek NT helps tremendously in this regard, as it will define words that occur infrequently in footnotes, keeping you in the text and not out and about searching through other books. Zondervan published one of these years back, but their version utilizes an awkward font, has hard to read footnotes, and most importantly does not make use of the of the “standard” UBS text (it uses a modified version, the basis of their NIV translation). The UBS edition makes up for all these deficiencies and additionally includes more words (occurrences up to 22 times or less, if I remember correctly), provides a comprehensive dictionary in the back (which you should never admit to using, since I’m sure you already know all the words that occur 22 times or more), and even parses out words that misbehave (a prize to the first person that provides the parsing and lexical form of ἐνέγκας).

All in all, I have found it incredibly helpful. They are available at the Westminster Bookstore, which offers great deals on shipping.

Next up in the summer Greek series: how to write ἐνέγκας in such a way that it does not look like evne,gkaj to half of your audience.

Related posts:

1. Reading Greek Online
2. How to Keep your Greek
3. How to Type in Greek Part III: The Best Greek Fonts
4. How to Type in Greek Part II: Setting Up the Microsoft Greek Polytonic Keyboard
5. How to Type in Greek Part IV: Polytonic Greek, Linux Edition (Ubuntu)

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