I Hate Greek Exegesis

Can you see all the red marks on this quiz? It has been I think four years since I took Greek exegesis I. Now I’m in exegesis II, which takes the first half of the semester. The second half, I take Exegesis III.

Admitedly, I studied the wrong word list, which is why I got all but two wrong. Don’t ask me why I thought hypakoe was a verb rather than a noun. Probably because I was so flustered.

But what I really hate about Greek exegesis is that it is so far removed from real life. Why do I have to know that a particular participle is an “instrumental participle of means” instead of an “attributive adjectival participle?” Okay, I get how the grammar is working. (Not the vocab perhaps, as demonstrated above, but I do generally get the grammar.) But why do I have to memorize a series of inane technical terms?

Do you know why? Because lots of people use these technical terms to overexegete the text and twist it to say something it’s not saying.

I am putting off studying right now. I am sitting down at the computer, frustrated, resisting getting into my exegesis homework. Why? Because I don’t want to have to pick apart every prepositional phrase and every clause in every verse in 1 Peter 1, and decide which dumb grammatical name to give it.

I was really excited because my professor put together a couple of PDFs that she called “The Least You Need to Know” (LYNK). Cool, I like that. I can learn the least I need to know. What is that? Like 3 pages of notes? A quick reference list? Something useful? Nope, none of the above. It is a 49-page grammatical manual. The least I need to know is 49 pages! What would I do if she had given me the Most I Should Know (MISK)? What, like 400 pages?

So what bothers me is that I should love exegesis. I should be eating this stuff up because it’s right up my alley. Okay, maybe not the vocab. Okay, maybe not the verb paradigms. But judging from my bookshelves, I’m supposed to love this stuff.

Why is it that I would rather shoot myself than do my exegesis homework?

Advertisement