I graduated with my Doctor of Ministry degree in August of 2018. In the aftermath of that big day, I was bombarded with the question, “What are you going to do with all of your new found free time.” After much consideration, I moved on to a new goal: master New Testament Greek.
I quickly purchased a number of new books and dusted off the Greek helps from my seminary days.
To make a short story even shorter: I failed.
Badly.
I barely tried.
Yet, I’m going to try again.
My father-in-law recently gave me a Greek Scripture Journal that covers 1, 2, 3 John. I spent time yesterday translating the first four verses of 1 John. Please know that I translated the four verses with the aid of many tools. I constantly consulted dictionaries, parsing guides, and my handy Greek-English Interlinear New Testament. My work is slow, tedious, and dependent upon the work of others.
As a way to keep me honest in working on my Greek, I thought I’d regularly share with you some of my work on John’s Epistles. Here are my first four verses:
1 John
1:1 What was from the beginning, which we have heard, and which we have seen with our eyes, which we beheld, and touched with our hands – concerning the word of life.
1:2 The life was displayed and we have seen it and give testimony and we proclaim to you eternal life which was with the Father and was displayed to us.
1:3 What we have seen and what we have heard we proclaim to you, that you may have fellowship with us and our fellowship is with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ.
1:4 And we write these things that our joy may be full.
I’ll provide some devotional thoughts on this passage in an upcoming post.
Jeff Gravens 
Jeff, you are doing much better than me. I go to the Greek mainly when I need clarification, perhaps with a tense , case or word used. I have found that if you don’t use it, you lose it. I often recognize a word(s), but have forgotten what they mean. The thesaurus comes in handy. As for Hebrew, I have lost about all of it.
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