Any dopers know how many Greek words are used in the original New Testament? I want to learn Greek to read the NT in its original; how many words would be involved?
I have no special knowledge in this area, but I took this as a challenge to my Google-fu.
The Wikipedia article on Strong’s Concordance mentions “The 5624 Greek root words used in the New Testament,” so 5624 may be the answer to your question.
I also ran across this site which claims to offer a list of the 1067 words that are used 10 times or more in the Greek New Testament.
Thank you, Mr. Boink!
I clearly misunderstood the question, as my answer was going to be “pretty much all of it”, since the original NT was written in Greed.
Blessed are the Greek…
I don’t know how much you know about classical Greek, so forgive me if this is old hat, but there’s a lot more involved than just reading the words. The Greek of the New Testament is a declensional language, meaning that the role of a word in a sentence is indicated by its ending, not its position. You’ll have to spend a fair amount of time learning grammar before you really have a shot at reading it.
You’re going to need to learn more than just the roots. Words have cases, verbs have tenses and four voices (active, passive, subjunctive, and optative!), so it’s not going to be that easy a job.
I think it was Churchill who said that learning Greek was a treat to be given to those who did wel learning latin?
I’m sure there are some who would disagree with you.
And some who would agree.
the New Testament was not written in Classical Greek. It was written in post-classical Koine Greek, somewhat different.
And much, much easier. A disciplined student can be up and running reading Koine fairly comfortably within a few months.
Good catch. I think my fingers are dyslexic. “D” being the same distance to he left of “gh” as “k” is to the right.
“Greek is good.” Gordon Gekko
Isn’t Gorkon Geddo?