Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar

- Mounce tries to minimize the amount of memorization required. Greek is a difficult language, no two ways about it: but the way the material is presented can make learning easier or harder. For those of us who come at it as adults, memorization is difficult. Some grammars require massive amounts of rote memorization; Mounce takes instead the tack of giving you a number of rules to apply, then only requiring memorization where the rules don't apply. Using this method, the amount of memorization is cut dramatically, and the effort required is reduced accordingly.

- To ease the remaining memorization, Mounce includes lots of good vocabulary helps. Unfortunately, vocabulary acquisition is usually another rote memorization affair. Mounce includes either derivations or cognates in other languages (drawing in some cases on Metzger's "Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek"), or silly little memorization aids. An example of the latter is Mounce's memorable word play on the word ELPIS (="hope"): "Some people HOPE that ELVIS did not die." I think I can safely say I will never forget the meaning of ELPIS.

- In many ways (including the previous two items) Mounce includes the fruit of his years of experience as a teacher of New Testament Greek. Many books that I'm sure would be just fine when learning from a professor completely fall apart when an autodidact (like myself) attempts to use them. With this book, it's almost as good as Mounce being right there.

- Although I would not have believed it, Mounce has successfully integrated devotional sections at the beginning of most chapters. A combination textbook/devotional? Yes, believe it or not. The section for chapter 10, for example, is simply amazing - building off John 1:14, KAI hO LOGOS SARX EGENETO ("And the Word became flesh.") This answers another big problem for autodidacts, which is that you don't have much of an inducement to continue when the going gets tough. These devotional sections (I am assuming a Christian student, of course) add greatly to your experience and make you look forward to new chapters.

The end result is that this book makes it possible to learn New Testament Greek on your own to just about the same depth as you would get at a seminary. That's an amazing feat in itself.

But be aware, this book has no exercises in it. Rather, you need to buy the companion workbook, which has all the exercises.


The best book on Biblical Greek   February 16, 2001
 66 out of 69 found this review helpful

I was disappointed when I had to switch teachers following my first semester of Greek. However, it was well worth it--because I switched to a class using Mr. Mounce's book: "Basics of Biblical Greek." It is excellent!

Mr. Mounce is a genius at teaching Greek. It is simple that he should re-title the book to "Greek for Dummies" (lets face it--when it comes to Greek, we're all dummies).

The text book completely divides the nouns and verbs into two semesters. As a student who spent a semester trying to do both verbs and nouns at the same time with no system like the one Mounce uses...let me tell you: this book is very helpful.

Along the way Mr. Mounce explains concepts first in how they are used in English grammar. He then teaches the Greek grammar. This was most useful to me because my English grammar is a little sub-par.

Another quality of this book that I really enjoyed were the exegetical insights at the beginning of each chapter-it is always nice to know why what you are learning is of importance.

All in all, the "Basics of Biblical Greek" is a great book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. If you want to learn Biblical Greek, this book is the first book you will want to get a hold of.


Excellent heuristic presentation, but...   April 1, 2003
 42 out of 59 found this review helpful

Do not get me wrong. I enjoyed working through this book. It is one of a very few books that tries to make learning Greek fun, instead of just "interesting." I want to point out some very strong features in the approach to teaching Greek, before taking it apart in the hope that the many heuristic devices created by Mr. Mounce find their way into other Greek testbooks and grammars.

The book delays the presentation of the Greek verb until after the student has mastered Greek substantives--nouns, adjectices, and pronouns. The Greek verb is a daunting obstacle to students unused to inflected languages. The mastery of the other parts of speech will provide hints and nuances of context that will aid the student in the correct parsing of the Greek verb. So, contrary to many critics of this approach, I find that this is an excellent idea, and one that is well thought out.

The second positive feature of this book is the correct approach to present the Greek verb as it is, with the present tense indicative being the irregular form of the verb. Many Greek verbs have present tense stems which are radically different from the other tense stems which all follow a predictable pattern. It is the present tense indicative that is the odd one out, not the other five! Just the simple recognition of this fact makes memorizing the Greek verb a simple matter of memorizing three parts, instead of all six stems, and deriving the rest from a "root" part.

The third positive feature of this books is the presentaion of the rules of contraction in reverse. Mr. Mounce points out that when one is reading Greek, one already has the contracted form in front of him, and needs to know the form prior to its contraction. Developing the ability to "uncontract" the vowels is much more useful than learning how to contract them.

Now, the reason I gave only three stars. The text of the New Testament is not the most robust presentation of the Koine Greek language, both in terms of grammar and lexically. This book, and its accompanying workbook restrict themselves to the New Testament, and as such this is a serious shortcoming. For example, the conditional sentence using a variety of inflections including subjunctive, and optative moods, is simply not well represented in the New Testament. It is true that there is a whole cluster of them in 1 John 1, but otherwise they are quite infrequent. The student will simply not learn this grammatical feature very well, due to a lack of exposure. From a lexical point of view, some of the verbs that are used in the New Testament only appear in certain forms, particularly the passive. For example "poreuw" only appears in its passive form, "poreuomai." The novice student, not fully understanding the existence of the active form of this verb, will open his Middle Liddel-Scott lexicon, expecting to find "poreuomai." He will not find it. This can only serve to increase his frustration.

The second detraction against this book is the most serious one, but it is sadly not an uncommon failing of Modern Christianity. Mr. Mounce implies that it is necessary to understand the subtleties of the Greek syntax in order to correctly understand the theology of the New Testament. To a limitted extent, this is true, but in the large, the New Testament is not, and has never been a systematic or a complete presentation of what Christ taught. Sadly, I feel that many people who have sincere and genuine questions about very important theological issues in our belief believe that learning and understanding the Greek will answer those questions. Mastering the Greek language is not a panacaea for the theological confusion of Christianity today. Where in the Greek does it say that children are to be or not to be baptised? Where in the Greek New Testament is the phrase "panagia trias," or Holy Trinity?

The solution to the theological confusion today is not to learn the ancient language. One will only remove the modern confusion, and replace it with the ancient confusion, as C.S. Lewis points out in his translation of St. Cyril of Jerusalem's Catechetical Lectures. The solution is to read the Scriptures within the larger context of the writings of the Apostoclic and Church Fathers of the first Seven Ecumenical Councils.

To presume that we can "decipher" the meaning of Scripture with more expertise than St. Polycarp who studied directly under the Apostle John. or Clement of Alexandria who studied under the Apostle Mark, is just our modern Egoistic humanism speaking. It is sheer arrogance! St. Basil the Great says to ignore the Holy Fathers is to "reduce scripture to mere letters on the page."

I urge everyone to learn the Greek, but to do it out of love and devotion to the Scripture, not out of a desire to discern the theology of the New Testment as the Ancient Christians did. If that is your goal, then I suggest you read their writings, since they are available and accessible.


An outstanding learning tool   September 6, 2003
 35 out of 35 found this review helpful

If you've read "Greek for the Rest of Us" by William Mounce and decided that you really wanted to learn the basics of Biblical Greek including vocabulary then this is the book that you will want. William Mounce has a gift for taking the Greek language and making it approachable even to those who have tried before but not succeeded in learning Biblical Greek. While there are many, many grammar details to learn such as whether something is dative, nominative, accusative, genitive, active, passive, dependent, independent, etc. Mr. Mounce actually makes it interesting and finds ways to keep the student interested and feeling positive about their progress. All those grammar rules are very important in correctly interpreting the Greek texts and in understanding English translation. Sometimes there is no English equivalent for a Greek word, sometimes we can only approach a correct translation by approximating a similar word in English, but then our personal prejudices and beliefs affect the word that we choose. Understanding Greek is important to a serious level of study of New Testament writings. This book gives you the basic ability to look through a Greek text or Interlinear Translation of the Bible and understand not only what is said, but also what is actually meant but the text. This is a very highly recommended text for anyone desiring to learn Biblical Greek and one of the best books on the subject that I have ever read.


Very helpful well-written beginning grammar for me   January 2, 2001
 32 out of 37 found this review helpful

I was in Dr. Mounce's first summer intensive Greek class at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (1 year of Greek in 2 months!) and am now currently teaching this course from this text to a lay church audience. I find this book to be great for reference and look back to it to review a lot of grammar.

For myself, being a detail-oriented person and a natural at languages (Meyers-Briggs type: ESTJ/ISTJ) I found this fairly intuitive to pick up following the system that Dr. Mounce prescribes. Dr. Mounce and I have also discussed this grammarian compared to others (like J. Grescham Machen's), and I think he's right in that he puts third declension nouns in the beginning (Chapter 10) instead of at the end; some of Greek does build upon this material (e.g., square of stops).

The book is laid out into the first half being mostly article/adjective/noun/pronouns (including declensions, cases, prepositions) and the second half mostly related to verbs and participles (Tenses covered: Present, Future, 1st/2nd Aorist, Imperfect, Perfect, Voices: Active, Middle, Passive, Moods: Indicative, Subjunctive, Imperative, all types of participles, -mi verbs).

The best things include the exegetical insights and the vocabulary helps (some of these are from Dr. Bruce M. Metzger). Dr. Mounce also has two other tools that are useful for learning Greek, his Analytical Lexicon and the Workbook that accompanies this textbook. Dr. Mounce also held extra-curricular sessions where he and students offered their suggestions for mnemonics to memorize the vocabulary and also the grammar.

One thing that this textbook does not emphasize is that there often is no subtle/cool/nice way of learning grammar and vocabulary; sometimes you just need to "by-brute-force" rote-memorize-this-darn-paradigm. (Repetition is key.)

In teaching this book, I have found that most people have found this book to be good, but there are still some publishing errors and some difficult sections. Dr. Mounce would occasionally run off his computer re-worked sections (chapters) of his book, and ask for commentary, so I assume this is still in progress.

Again, repetition is key, and the better you know Greek, the more you can get out of the Greek New Testament.

Some people who are more inductive/intuitive learners (and also those who like to see the big picture/forest before they get into details/trees) will find this book rather frustrating; keep in mind that Mounce tries to teach the rules (rather than the exceptions, which he footnotes -- and these footnotes are mostly for the student who wants to understand the exceptions, trivia, and other information), and tries to find a system to organize the grammar. I've had at least one or two inductive/intuitive learners comment about this book, and if you are such, you may need to learn by grammar blocks (e.g., chapters 6-10, first second and third declensions, chapters 11-14 pronouns, chapters 16-24 verbs, etc.) Intuitive/inductive/big picture learners will have a hard time since Mounce teaches you block-by-block and you don't see how it all interrelates until later.

Dr. Mounce does leave out of his book some hints which he did cover in class; for instance, he says you should learn both the stem and the verb paradigm for the Present Active Indicative, or that you should memorize the various stems for the various verbs that have multiple stems (i.e., in the aorist or perfect or future). As well, Dr. Mounce leaves out a lot of worksheets and extra exercises (e.g., blank master verb charts, blank master noun charts) and exams that made learning Greek better. As well, I have found that making chapter summaries very helpful.

The text book which follows this is Daniel B. Wallaces "Greek Grammar Beyond The basics," which explains many grammatical details better (e.g., the middle being the "voice of self-interest").