As the authors of the Koine Greek blog recently wrote, "Grammars are immensely useful resources, but they are not gospel. They are contextually bounded by the priorities and interests and awareness of their authors". In terms of learning to read the New Testment, there is a dynamic tension between theology and philology, with authors such as Basil Atkinson in his The Theology of Prepositions (1944) noting how theology should not drive philology. When a textbook-writer plans out the order of their topics, the kinds of examples they will include, the ways in which they explain materials, the paratextual choices, and what indeed they leave out, they make a series of politically-charged choices. Some of these are conscious, others are an inescapable consequence of one's intellectual heritage, be it native language, method of teaching, or the resources one has available. In this paper, I trace elements of this from Philip Melanchthon's Grammatica Graeca and its engagement with Reformation thought, through to the production of Greek textbooks in the twenty-first century. I examine the impact of the disciplinary split between Classics and Theology, and the ways in which this split has real world exegetical consequences. I also consider the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the ideology of education, specifically in terms of the ways in which remote and hybrid teaching has challenged our concept of what language learning looks like. These topics have been considered in terms of historical language learning, but are less often carried through as a trajectory demonstrating repeated patterns of engagement between pedagogy, religion, and politics in particular. How do we use our understanding of the pedagogy of the past to inform the learning of the future, and what does this mean for the linear textbook as a concept? How does ancient language teaching inform, or become informed by modern language teaching? This paper will be both analytical and creative in bringing together the different aspects of the topic, considering the role of grammar, grammar-translation, comprehensible input, and communicative approaches to ancient language teaching.
Alfons, Wouters, Luhtala Anneli, Quijada van den Berghe Carmen, Simon Coffey, Weber Corinne, Chapman Don, Kislova Ekaterina, et al. The History of Grammar in Foreign Language Teaching. Languages and Culture in History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.
Atkinson, Basil Ferris Campbell. The Theology of Prepositions. Tyndale New Testament Lecture. London: Tyndale Press, 1944.
Conybeare, Catherine, and Simon Goldhill. Classical Philology and Theology : Entanglement, Disavowal, and the Godlike Scholar. Cambridge Core. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Koine Greek: https://koine-greek.com/2022/05/21/you-dont-need-to-trust-your-grammar/ (last accessed 26th June 2022).
