Excerpt from The Proselytizer It was a breezy spring afternoon in the coastal city of Chania, island of Crete, and the year was 1956. My teenage son Demetrios and I had just finished getting the church sanctuary ready for the Sunday morning service and it was now time to walk back home.       As we […]

According to an article on Greek verbal aspect by Ellis, et al. (henceforth, authors),[1] a question arises from the Greek text of Matthew 2:20, where the angel, upon appearing to Joseph in a dream, says to him regarding the infant Jesus: ἐγερθεὶς παράλαβε τὸ παιδίον καὶ τὴν μητέρα αὐτοῦ καἰ πορεύου εἰς γῆν Ἰσραήλ· τεθνήκασιν […]

Suppose my house is in a remote area with no one in sight to call my neighbor. Or that my neighborhood is spread over a wide metropolitan area. Would one living two miles away from my house be less my neighbor than my next-door neighbor? Jesus commanded us, You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:39, […]

In New Testament times a good number of Classical Greek words took on a new semantic dimension. One example is the word ἐκκλησία [eklisia] “church.” This article focuses on a revelation that begins to unfold with Jesus’ utterance of the word ἐκκλησία and which is later portrayed by Paul as “the Body of Christ.” Here some historical background of […]

The prisoners exchanged not a word as the camion jounced its way toward a German concentration camp. It was the island of Crete, Greece, in late May 1941, when fierce German air raids had begun to ravage our towns and villages. I looked at those despairing, exhausted faces and found it difficult to accept the […]

Two Greek words, σχῆμα and μορφή, generally understood as figure and form respectively, are thought to be synonyms. Some translations in fact use compound forms of these words (transfigure, transform) interchangeably. As will be shown below, however, an understanding of their underlying difference in meaning can shed a new light on a number of scripture verses.

At Christmas we celebrate Jesus’ birth. But do we know when Jesus was actually born? I do not mean the day, month, or even the year of Jesus’ birth, only the very moment His earthly life began. Simple, yet utterly profound, this question beckons an examination of three Greek verbs and some of their derivatives […]

Are you interested in studying New Testament Greek? And are you currently comparing online Biblical Greek programs? If so, know that in this age of booming distance education, searching for the right Biblical Greek program can lead the uninformed down the wrong path. To that end, you need to know what makes BibleMesh and its […]

The phrase “born-again Christian” has become almost cliché. Yet seen through a key Greek word in a dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus, this common phrase can be clothed anew in meaningful truth. The word at issue is ἄνωθεν anothen “from above.” The word is formed from ἄνω “above” + -θεν, a suffix denoting origin of motion from […]