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from THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO
by Jeffrey Hammond
I've just finished working my slow way through the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John in a 1916 issue of Westcott and Hort's Greek New Testament. It's a schoolbook edition, with "Hickie's Greek-English Lexicon" bound in the back Only four inches by six, with a sturdy black cover, this book was meant to be hauled around during a busy school day -- to stand up to the hard use of boys likely to flop it down with their coats for an impromptu game of baseball. On the flyleaf is inscribed, with Palmer Penmanship flourish, "St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, Md." On the rear endpapers, the same hand has recorded the bill of fare for a "Saturday Evening" banquet: blue point oysters on the half shell, consummé of tomato, roast Vermont turkey, mashed potatoes with cranberry sauce and something called "Fruit Salad à la Baltimore."
This was a meal to remember, and probably longer than whatever Greek the book's original owner managed to absorb. The evidence for that is pretty clear. The text is clean except for eight pages in the Gospel of Mark. There, the English equivalent of every word has been painstakingly entered in tiny script between the lines, a class-recitation pony so massively insecure that the boy might as well have smuggled in a Douay-Rheims to read from when asked to translate.
The study of Greek must have discouraged him, but at least he ate well. If Greek was hard for an active boy dutifully paying the family tithe to God's service, it's even harder for people working with middle-aged brain cells. I found that boy's Greek Testament in a used bookstore an hour's drive outside of Baltimore. New, it cost him $1.90. Eighty years later I paid $7.50 for it, and would gladly have paid twice as much. If you're learning a language, you can't beat having a dictionary right at hand, especially if your vocabulary is still small. It has taken me the better part of two weeks, reading in spare moments, to get this far in John.
Unlike my young predecessor, I'm not being forced to do this. When friends ask why I'm learning a dead language whose principal text is the most widely translated book in history, their concerned look tells me they fear the sort of midlife conversion that makes people quit their jobs to search for Noah's ark. I quickly reassure them I'm the same liberal humanist -- the typical English professor -- they've always known. It's just that I've become fascinated with the Bible.
. . . . . . .