[ButlerianJihad]

I've been reading Sacred Scripture in Greek these days, thanks to a free Bible study app with the approved translations. And it's extremely eye-opening to see the level of wordplay in the Gospels, that's sometimes hinted by modern homilists, but it goes to a depth you just wouldn't believe.

I thought I could "get by" in Greek just from my knowledge through medical and scientific terms, but there's a lot more to it!

One of the other exciting experiences was to attend a Greek Orthodox liturgy that was sung/chanted in Greek, too. I don't know exactly what variety of liturgical Greek is used, but speaking as someone who knows English and Spanish, and I can recognize many other languages, to hear the Greek chanted and pronounced so eloquently like that was transcendent, and sometimes surprisingly "foreign".

Whenever I see a film or TV of modern Greek signs, I try to sound out the words and decipher as much as possible. I feel like there is some "signal loss" since ancient times, with the musical tone, the rough breathing, etc. But it's definitely exciting to experience some comprehension across several millennia!

[globnomulous]

This is so nice to hear! I regret not spending more time with the New Testament when I had the opportunity (my time for Greek is essentially nil at this point). It's such a treat to run across people who savor the language the way you do, and it really is dumbfounding to hear those echoes across the milennia, isn't it?

The ways scripture intersects with more ancient literature is its own fascinating area of study, too. Take John 1:1: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. If you've read Hesiod's Theogony, the contrast could't be starker: ἦ τοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ᾽, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα Γαῖ᾽ εὐρύστερνος. In Hesiod, the birth of the cosmos and the gods is physical. The first things that comes into being, Χάος, is just the absence of anything else. In the New Testament, by contrast, the beginning is not physical, nor is there any absence. It's something like an idea or something like rational intelligibility (ὁ λόγος). This is so wildly different from so-called Pagan religion: the universe not only makes sense; it makes sense in ways that human beings can access. Divinity isn't power and violence. It's intelligence. This reminds me, now that I mention it, of Augustine's view that evil is absence -- specifically the absence of good.

There's so, so much of this. I didn't know about the wordplay though! Wordplay has such a wonderful history in ancient literature. I distinctly remember a lightbuld moment, when I was reading Plato's Republic, where the god Wealth is described as a "blind (tuphlos) leader." In Plato's time, that "ph" is pronounced "p-h", not "f." And the word wealth, of course, is Plutos. So tuphlos is an phonetic anagram of Plutos.