New Testament Greek: A Beginning and Intermediate Grammar, Revised Edition with CD

Written by James Allen Hewett Reviewed By Jonathan T. Pennington

I won’t soon forget my first dining room table Greek lesson with my beloved and learned Uncle Gene. As the long-time curator of the Rare Book Room at the University of Illinois, he read many languages, and he agreed to teach me a little Greek. The grammar he put before me was a slim, red, nondescript volume called simply New Testament Greek: A Beginning and Intermediate Grammar by James Hewett. I don’t think I made it very far in the grammar before moving on to seemingly more important matters in my twenty-year-old life, but I’ve always had that book around my office. When offered the opportunity, now twenty years later as a Greek professor, to review a revised and expanded edition of this grammar, I jumped at the chance. Like many other teachers, whenever a new Greek grammar appears I eagerly search it, hoping in a Austen-ish way that it will be “the One,” only to be disappointed. The first two chapters of this grammar stirred my forlorn heart to hope again. Overall, the grammar does have much to commend, but alas, my search must continue.

As the title indicates, this book is indeed a significantly revised and expanded edition. While the original structure of the book is basically the same (and this will prove its greatest weakness), the chapters have been rewritten to simplify and clarify and with an ear to “more recent discussions in Greek grammar” (p. xiv). There are many additional tables and charts, and there is a greater sensitivity to page layout so that paradigms don’t break across pages as was typical in most grammars before the 1990’s. The new edition has a nice feel and stays open when laid on a desk, unlike the original. English to Greek exercises have also been added. In continuity with the first edition, vocabulary words in each chapter are helpfully grouped by part of speech (contra Mounce or Croy). Accents are still found throughout the book, but their rules have been moved to an appendix. Also, as is typical of grammars today, the book includes a CD that contains additional resources. In this case, there are PDF documents of the book’s appendices and a key to the exercises. There is also a group of pedagogical software programs (“Greek Tools”) for learning the alphabet, vocabulary, pronunciation, and parsing. These programs seem well enough made, but nothing revolutionary compared to many other such programs readily available elsewhere.

The biggest and most helpful additions are the two new introductory chapters and the way that paradigms are presented with a greater sensitivity to morphology. The first chapter provides a simple and linguistically aware introduction to basic English grammar. This will serve students well and replaces the need for a supplemental text for this purpose. Most welcome is the editors’ new chapter 2, “Meaning,” which deftly introduces readers to the issues of semantics in a very readable eight pages. This clears important ground for students as they begin their Greek study and is something I have not seen discussed in any other grammar. On the issue of morphology, when they introduce verbal paradigms, the editors strike a nice balance between the morphology of the “true” uncontracted endings (e.g., -, ς, -, μεν, τε, σι[ν]) and the traditional full, contracted paradigm (e.g., λύω(λύεις, etc.). They present both, giving the uncontracted forms as the endings, but then also providing the actual paradigm as it appears already contracted with the connecting vowels. I appreciate that both are given as this allows students to learn and teachers to teach as they would desire, while avoiding the rhetoric of some who would argue that only a purely morphological approach makes sense (I teach a hybrid, requiring memorization of the contracted paradigms while explaining morphological patterns all along). One oddity is that the authors do not follow the same pattern when presenting noun paradigms, instead providing only the contracted forms.

Despite the positives noted above, I think this grammar in its present form has some pedagogical defects. First, it is unclear what the authors think about verbal aspect. Their discussion shows signs of understanding something of the contours of the debate (though with no footnoted references, it is hard to tell), yet at the same time they basically present an Aktionsart view under the rubric of “verbal aspect.” This is not uncommon in elementary grammars today, but one always hopes for a more updated discussion.

The much bigger issue concerns the structure and ordering of the chapters. In addition to some oddities such as presenting -μι verbs (ch. 18) before the ever-important participles (chapters 19–21), the decisions about what to include in each chapter need to be reconsidered. Simply put, there are too few chapters, and they contain too much information; the book has 23 Greek-teaching chapters, compared to 30 in Mounce and 32 in Croy. In this the editors follow Hewett’s original pattern but to their detriment. For example, chapter 5 contains an explanation of the full nominal case system, the second declension noun paradigm, the introduction of adjectives, the various adjectival positions, and the verb εἰμί. Similarly, chapter 13 presents the “Verbal System: Primary Middle Endings, Indicative Mood; Deponent Verbs; Future of εἰμί; Nominal System: Reciprocal Pronouns.” This pattern continues throughout the book. For most students this is too much of a hodge-podge to take in during one class period and maybe even during one week. The response may be that the teacher is supposed to break up the chapter across more than one class period. However, then the teacher would be in the infelicitous position of having to teach a portion of the chapter per class period but then being unable to assign the exercises since they assume all the material in the chapter. Why not break up the material into smaller, more manageable chapters, each with their own exercises? It would be far better to have more and smaller chapters with more exercises for each. Indeed, for such long chapters with so many new concepts in each, a mere fifteen sentences are given for practice (plus some in English to Greek), and most if not all of these appear to come only from the NT. Thus, the students have many concepts to deal with at once but with little translation practice, the bread and butter of language learning. I fear the end result of this little translation work—especially coming only from familiar texts such as the NT—will be a shallow grasp of the language. The authors might defend the density of the chapters by referencing the book’s subtitle, “A Beginning and Intermediate Grammar.” While there is some information that goes beyond most elementary grammars, it is certainly far from an intermediate-level discussion. Additionally, in some of the chapter headings, the material is presented as “The Basics” versus “A Step Beyond,” but in the actual text of the chapters, this distinction is lost, not being marked as such. Moreover, this seems at times an overly arbitrary distinction. For example, 6.7 presents first class conditionals as basic information (is this really necessary at this early stage?), while 5.9 classifies as “A Step Beyond” the important knowledge that in translation there will often be the need to supply certain words.

In sum, then, while the content of this grammar is generally good and basically on par with other grammars available, the structuring of the content and the paucity of translation practice makes this volume, in my opinion, not one’s best choice available for Koine Greek instruction.


Jonathan T. Pennington

Jonathan T. Pennington
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky, USA

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