Ian W. Scott

May 19, 2022

Which Greek New Testament Should I Use?

Students who are learning Hellenistic Greek often ask me which version of the Greek New Testament they should use. In order to answer that question properly, we have to understand a bit about why there are different versions in the first place. Why are there different versions? Disagreements about details in the wording In part…

November 5, 2019November 5, 2019

Which Greek Dictionary Should I Buy?

There are quite a few Greek dictionaries (or lexica) floating around, but many of them are not particularly useful. Several of the dictionaries still being sold are unreliable. Others are little more than lists of a few common English translations for each Greek word. They do not provide a balanced definition or a sense of…

February 28, 2018June 28, 2018

Making Sense of Time and the Greek Tenses

The Greek tenses can really be confusing at first. The key, really, is to understand that they don’t mean what English tenses mean. Both the present and the aorist aren’t really indicating the time of the action. They’re indicating the way the speaker is viewing the action, the speaker’s focus in looking at the action.…

February 28, 2018June 28, 2018

Making Sense of the Middle Voice in Greek

The key point with the middle voice in Greek is that we don’t have anything equivalent in English. English lumps together actions that are active in Greek with actions that are middle in Greek and generally expresses those actions with the English active voice. This is why we find the middle so hard to wrap…

April 30, 2015

Python Programming: Proper Alphabetical Sorting for Polytonic Greek

I just spent an afternoon figuring out how to get Python 2.7 to sort some Greek (unicode) strings according to the Greek alphabet. Strangely, there wasn’t very much help for this online, so here is what I figured out if anyone else is facing the same task. There are actually three different resources I looked…