[Tom O'Loughlin] Anyone who studies theology knows that many of
the sources of theology come
in languages that are no longer spoken.
I don't want to call them dead
languages because they're still alive,
except they're not ones you'll hear very often on the street.
A vast body of our texts are in Hebrew.
Those texts were translated into Greek and in
that Greek form they were used by the early Christians.
And then almost all of
the early Christian texts were written in Greek.
And that means that, like it or not,
we have to engage with Hebrew and Greek as theologians.
Sara, you teach the biblical languages here in the department.
It's been one of our proud boasts in Nottingham that
we have always kept the languages going.
We haven't gone down the route of pretending that,
you know, you can just avoid them. Why study them?
[Sara Parks] For a lot of reasons, Tom.
Maybe not the
same reasons as we used to, say, a 100 years ago.
There used to be an expectation that
in order to be a biblical scholar,
you had to become practically fluent in one or the other.
[Tom] You don't have to go back 100 years,
that was the way I was brought up! [Sara] That's true.
This was in the, in
the air when I was an undergraduate as well.
So there's an idea and it goes back a long way,
that you, ideally, to work with the biblical texts,
you must be fluent in Greek and Hebrew, ideally some Aramaic
so you can really compare Hebrew Bible texts,
Septuagint, New Testament, early Christian texts, et cetera.
And while that is still true,
it does help a lot that
(if you're just dealing with English translations.
I mean, well,
it's a different thing) but there are so many tools now.
And this is what students tell me:
'There are so many tools now,
I don't really need to learn Greek and Hebrew because I have
the software and I can just hover over the word
and see what it means and look in the lexicon, and that's that.
So why do I need to learn it?'
Well, in my opinion,
the lesson of learning -- not a dead language,
but an ancient language that's no longer spoken --
(I like how you put that)
the main lesson is humility,
not because it's difficult to memorize a whole bunch of tables,
but humility because it's the only way to really see
the distance between us and those texts.
Because when you learn a language,
you learn a worldview and you see
that the way of thinking is not your own.
And even though so many students have struggled through
Greek and Hebrew because they have to,
then they get their degree, they go on,
they don't use it and they forget it.
But what they cannot forget is the lesson that,
'wow, it's really different.
And I know we sometimes don't know what the text is
saying and maybe never will because it is so distant.'
[Tom} Well, there's that famous novel with the opening line,
'The past is a foreign country.
They do things differently there.'
And you could almost change that: 'The past is a foreign country.
They speak a different language there.'
Now, tell me.
You have been perfecting
specialist ways of teaching this language.
I know you have here in Nottingham. Tell me about them.
[Sara] Well, because I believe so passionately that
learning an ancient language is a key
to unlock all kinds of understanding,
not just being able to work closely with the text
(which might represent like five of our students)
but to be able to interact with the text,
knowing to be aware of the distance between us and the text...
because I, I believe in that passionately,
I want all kinds of students to take Greek and to take Hebrew,
not just the Biblical Studies track,
but all of them to get a taste of it.
So how do you do that when it's not mandatory?
It's not a seminary,
they're not going to not graduate if
they don't take a biblical language.
How do we attract 25 students
to take Greek when they don't have to,
and committing to a whole year of it?
I do that by offering
it to them in as many different ways as possible,
knowing that it has to be enjoyable. It has to be fun.
And so, Tom, there's a New Testament verse,
'be all things to all people'?
That's my language teaching mode.
So we play Greek Bingo,
I make Greek crosswords,
we do speed-teaching,
where the students draw a concept
out of a hat and then they have to immediately teach
it to the class in 60 seconds or all kinds of things like
that in order to just bring a relaxed atmosphere.
And memorization is not for everyone.
It's not a skill that we,
it's not a skill that's highly
valued in the age of the Internet.
And yet, in order to pass a Greek or Hebrew exam,
there's a measure of it and it takes work.
And so I try to reinforce the things that they
have to memorize all different ways. Orally,
we say them out loud,
I make songs about them, I get them to
we bring craft supplies and they make
their own charts to put up around their house to memorize.
So we just take a relaxed approach.
And in the end what happens is they have,
they have become able at the end of
the year to translate from the New Testament,
or in the case of Hebrew, the Hebrew Bible on their own,
but without the kind of pain and agony and drudgery of
past biblical language classes. [Tom] I learnt just memorizing,
going down the line 'ο, η, το'
Boom boom boom. Boom boom boom.
Thanks for being so good at teaching languages,
but also thanks for drawing out this central,
it's not just about biblical languages,
it's a central truth about theology:
The past is a foreign country.
They do things differently there.
They speak different languages.
And theologians are intertranslating all the time.