Free Greek New Testament Workbook

The Learner’s Greek Bible is a workbook designed to help language students transition from parsing words to comprehending larger syntactic and discourse units. A student will know he has achieved this goal when he begins to see each text as a configuration of discourse “moves,” instead of a list of sentences—or as a list of words, for that matter. In order to facilitate this learning outcome, I have included several markup features to aid in recognition of both syntactic structures and discourse relations.

3:13 | πονηροὶ δὲ ἄνθρωποι καὶ γόητες προκόψουσιν {ἐπὶ [τὸ χεῖρον,] } πλανῶντες καὶ πλανώμενοι. |

• Bolded milestones signify chapter-and-verse transitions.

• | Pipes | surround every process (i.e. clause). A process is a phenomenon unfolding over time. Clauses may be embedded in other clauses. 

• [ Square brackets ] surround every thing (i.e. nominal group). If a thing comprises only one word, then it is not wrapped in square brackets.

• { Curly brackets } surround every prepositional phrase. Prepositional phrases are the traditional term for these units, but they simply reflect a logical relationship between nominals. 

• Conjunctions are displayed in a slightly lighter colour.

This book is intended to serve as a workbook, and so I have included additional spacing and generous margins. An interlinear is notoriously unhelpful for learning, unless you create it yourself. I have not included a glossary of terms, since anyone may look up a translation of a given verse for clarification, but, if there is sufficient interest, then I will do so at a later time.

While there are many excellent tools already in existence for students of Koine Greek, this one is free. I am generally in favour of assets being open-source and open-access, especially when some relevant service is married to the asset, such that the open-source creators have a viable business model despite not collecting royalties on their intellectual property. This arrangement aligns the interests of those creating the assets and those employing or otherwise consuming them.

To that end, I would encourage anyone to download these pages and print them out as they see fit. If you would like a convenient, spiral-bound copy printed for you, then I would encourage you to purchase one through ryderwishart.com. I have also created a video course to help students learn to read Koine Greek, and for further grammatical explanation of the markup in this volume, I would refer students there. For students of the course, I am also available to offer some instruction through each lesson’s comment section and over email. A final benefit of offering this workbook for free is the ease it affords for incremental updates as typos or layout problems become apparent.

Ryder A. Wishart

Christ is lord.