Greek Summer Study Programme 2022
Join Dr Steffen Jenkins, Lecturer in Greek and Biblical Studies at Union School of Theology, for a three month online and self-study programme to recover and keep your Biblical Greek.
How will it Work?
Join Steffen Jenkins, UST Greek Lecturer (and former Tutor in Biblical Languages at Tyndale House, Cambridge) for this unique and tailored Greek refresher.
Over 3 months, you’ll participate in a series of two-hour, online gatherings with Steffen and other participants, guiding a course of self-study. The curriculum is a draft of Steffen’s forthcoming book Reading Biblical Greek: A Graded Reader for Beginners (due in 2024 from Cambridge University Press), and you will be sent PDF versions of each chapter at intervals during the programme. You will also be grouped with two other participants for encouragement, peer-assistance and accountability.
While the monthly meetings will be an opportunity for you to learn from Steffen, clarify matters of Greek, and interact with other students, they will also help Steffen to edit and improve the book. All participants will have the added bonus of receiving credit in the foreword of the book for this contribution!
Steffen’s book is designed to work as a companion to the well-known Elements of New Testament Greek by Jeremy Duff, also a Cambridge University Press title. Duff’s Elements is the standard Greek textbook in Britain, containing grammar, vocabulary and exercises. Steffen’s new Reading volume supplements this by providing longer sections of Greek prose which can be read when you have only mastered the material up to that point in Elements: for example, Chapter 1 includes a list of characters’ names designed to practice the alphabet, while in Chapters 2–5 all verbs are present active and indicative, etc. The texts include study questions which point to the relevant sections of grammar in Elements as well as enhanced explanations of some points. Therefore, if your Greek is rusty, you may start with Steffen’s reader as a fun way to find out what you need to review in Elements.
Key Dates (all compulsory)
Online orientation: 20th May 2022, 15:00 (BST)
Online cohort meetings: 24th June, 29th July and 2nd September 2022, from 15:00-17:00 (BST)
New to Greek?
If you are learning Greek from scratch, you may join us as well, however, you should be ready to commit more time. You should plan to spend about 10 hours on each of the 20 chapters of the book. This includes reading the grammar in Duff’s Elements, memorising vocabulary and grammatical patterns, completing exercises, and finally enjoying working through the Greek texts in Steffen’s Reader.
If you’d like to study Greek but aren’t sure this is the right place to begin, ask us about our variety of Greek classes by emailing admissionenquiries@ust.ac.uk for more details.
Find out more about Steffen and our other Faculty: https://www.ust.ac.uk/faculty
Then What?
Perhaps you are eager to go even further in your Greek. Anyone in this cohort who does well over the summer could then do two more years of Greek (Greek Exegesis followed by Advanced Greek) with Union School of Theology. This consists of six one-week intensives (Greek Exegesis: Sept 2022, Jan 2023, Mar 2023; Advanced Greek: Sept 2023, Jan 2024, Mar 2024) and guided self-study that can be done wherever you are. You will finish that time having read 20% of the length of the New Testament, including a range of other texts from Plato and Demosthenes to Athanasius and Chrysostom, with the aim of making you a confident reader of the NT.
Find out more about the Greek classes on our MTh programme and as individual modules: https://www.ust.ac.uk/learning/course/mth
Cohort Maximum: 21 participants