The Grantham Bible Study Method
04/10/2007 17:14 Filed in: Faith & Reason
In the comments of a recent post, Chuck Grantham outlined his weekly routine of preparing for his Sunday morning Bible study. I asked Chuck if he would be willing to elaborate on his method a bit for This Lamp readers. Below is his standard procedure. Chuck and I have traded comments before about the lessons because he uses the same Explore the Bible curriculum from Lifeway that we use at our church. But I didn't realize until now that Chuck is not the teacher of his class--this is merely his preparation as an attendee! What I wouldn't give to have a few folks in my class who would put in half the time and effort that Chuck does. No doubt conversation with someone so prepared would take on a very different nature than what takes place in the average Sunday School class.
A Guest Post by Chuck Grantham
Rick has asked me to expand a bit on how I prepare for Sunday School for those who may not read the comments section.
The first thing I should say is that I do not teach a Sunday School class. I do this primarily for myself. On the other hand, I think any group of believers studying the Bible deserve good answers when they have questions, and the Learner Guide in the Lifeway Explore the Bible series, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Sunday School quarterly, cannot possibly address all the questions that can come up in your average class.
It is also a help to the actual teacher when someone can give a quick answer to those odd, even off-topic questions that come up, so the teacher can get back on topic. You culprits know who you are….
I should also add that this is a new routine for me, and is slowly evolving as I use it. It also varies a bit depending on the genre of the biblical book we are studying. For Old Testament history I do more historical study and less textual work because my Hebrew and my resources aren’t up to it. For the Gospels I do more synoptic comparison and non-canonicals research, because that‘s a scholarly trend right now and I am fascinated by the agrapha, even if Craig Evans dismisses it.
So as they say, this is where I am at right now, in regard to Sunday School preparation. Here are the steps as I can best outline them:
1. Read the lesson passage in the Learner book.
Of course, you’ve got to read the text first. This can involve different amounts of material. The lesson starts off with a title and then two sets of verses:
A) Background passage: the length of material assumed necessary to grasp the context of the lesson.
B) Lesson passages: those verses actually studied and commented upon in the Learner book.
Sometimes the background passage and the lesson passages are the same. Sometimes the background is several chapters and the lesson passages are the highlight verses within the background passage. My strong suspicion is most folk only read the lesson passages, and even that only in the translations provided in the Sunday School book.
Yes, I said translations. The Explore The Bible Learner Guide provides the lesson passages in side by side renderings from the Holman Christian Standard Bible and of course, the King James Version. This selection leads us to my next step.
2. Check HCSB and KJV for obvious differences.
I love parallel Bibles. But they can confuse someone who does not understand the background of translations. Not only do different Bibles read differently because of different translation philosophies (mirroring the original text versus mirroring contemporary speech of the translation‘s day, to grossly simplify) but also because translations are based upon different “original” texts. Speaking strictly of the New Testament, Older Roman Catholic Bibles were based upon the Latin Vulgate, which varied in places from the King James Bible, based upon Erasmus’ Greek New Testament. And both vary again from Bibles published in the last 130 years, when discoveries of massive numbers of Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac and many more language new testament manuscripts have led scholars to create several “standard” Greek New Testaments, which has further led to each new translation’s translator(s) being forced to decide in numerous places which Greek wording seems more original to them.
All of which is to say that the HCSB and the KJV do not always agree, and not only because centuries separate the vocabularies of the two. The venerable old KJV is based on Greek manuscripts from the Middle Ages, which tend to be more verbose in fear of leaving something good out. The HCSB is based on the current scholarly Greek New Testament, which tends to follow the earliest well-produced manuscripts, whose scribes had not yet added wordings to make things clearer or more reverent, and thus tends to be shorter.
So, after reading the HCSB and the KJV, I do a comparison of their wording, and I take a pen and circle the differences I see, either in vocabulary or in text. That gives me a series of verses which I can then use as a guide for the next step.
3. Check NET diglot for textual notes.
This is the first step where level of education rears its head. I personally have what might be described as “word study Greek.” I can read Greek letters and I know a lot of root words in the vocabulary. Thus I can use certain tools an English-only reader cannot. There are tools for the Greek-impaired to do these sort of things, too, though.
For those with Greek or without, the NET Bible First Edition is a great help, if you don’t let yourself be intimidated. With over 60,000 notes (compared to many study Bibles’ 20,000 notes) the NET is either a study Bible on steroids or an emaciated commentary. Besides the inevitable complaints about its translation philosophy, the NET’s chief strength is its greatest weakness: it has notes for every level of user. Simple definitions of terms sit alongside lengthy discussions of textual critical issues using manuscript numbers and Greek wording. Transliterations are provided as well as notes with “literal” translations of phrases, though.
My preferred edition of the NET when dealing with the New Testament (and we Christians usually are) is the NET Diglot. That is, a parallel Bible with the Nestle-Aland 27th (NA27) edition of the Greek New Testament combined with the NET English translation and notes. Why? Because I am a hopeless New Testament textual criticism geek. Reading the New Testament in Greek for most will simply confirm how careful most translations are to get things as right as they can. And because inevitably translators use
the same reference books and read each other’s translations, a good parallel English New Testament will reveal strong similarity in most Bible passages. But when they do differ, there is no better one stop resource than the NET diglot, which combines the mini-encyclopedia of the NET with the second mini-encyclopedia of the NA27, which endlessly footnotes even minor variations in the wording of NA27’s Greek text by citing which important manuscripts differ from the NA27, then which ones agree with NA27, then which important previous editions of the Greek New Testament agree or disagree with NA27. All of this together with an appendix citing the approximate age of the important manuscripts and what text of which New Testament books they contain.
All this can make for information overload, and the chief complaint against NA27 is that it requires one to learn practically another language in the form of NA27’s symbols and abbreviations to truly use it well. There are two solutions to this:
a) NET Diglot comes with a little foldout containing the witnesses, signs and abbreviations used in the NA27 that will be constantly in readers’ hand.
b) NET footnotes on the opposite page contain English sentences stating as simply as possible much the same information as abbreviated in the NA27 footnotes.
So, having found out what the NET Diglot says about the differences between HCSB and KJV, I will usually circle or underline the variation in the Learner book, draw a line out to the margin of the page, and write out a transliteration of the Greek, together with the earliest manuscript or two supporting each variation with rough date.
At this point I will also be mulling over other things I have learned from the footnotes on the NET side of the diglot, which I will have noticed mentions literal translations, other text critical issues, or even translation issues. But now it is time to go back to the Learner Guide for the next step.
4. Read the passage overview in lesson book, noting where the author keys on words, provides definitions or parallel verses.
In other words, grill the author on the assertions he makes. If he defines a word, I’ll circle it, find the Greek term in the diglot, see how NET translates it, and if I’m at all suspicious of the English term, walk over to my book case and pull out my copy of The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology: Abridged Edition
by Verlyn Verbrugge (NIDNTT) and look up the Greek. If I find the NIDNTT disagrees with the Learner book significantly, I will turn on the printer copier and run off the article. That will be the first of a sheaf of notes I will have before I’m through.
Key words and parallel verses require more work and more tools. I will cross check the English against the Greek so I get one term, then for the key words simply see how often they are repeated in the Greek text. I do this with E-sword, the excellent FREE (mostly) Bible software. By simply highlighting the Greek word and clicking, I can run a search on the word in the current book or the New Testament. With a copy, a switch to the LXX, and a paste, I can further search for the word in the Old Testament. Even with my poor Greek, I can flip through English versions in E-sword and get a sense of the range of meaning for the word, and very often discover parallels to my New Testament text.
If this doesn’t satisfy me (and by now you realize I’m not easily satisfied) I can hit the books again. Specifically Goodrick, Kohlenberger and Swanson’s The Exhaustive Concordance to the Greek New Testament
, and Hatch and Redpath’s Concordance to the Septuagint
. These will give me more uses of my Greek word in all its variations, as well as a case of eyestrain. Magnifying glasses are recommended with these resources, or electronic versions you can resize.
This is the point scratch paper comes in handy. Among these many verses I will make note of the parallels quoted in the Learner book and my search I find significant. That leads me to the next step.
5. Significant parallels I paste together and print out in Greek and English, particularly where outright quotes from LXX or a usage determining a discussed word meaning occurs.
Simply put, I’ll cross check my scratch list, pick the most important, then make a file of the New Testament and Old Testament parallels in Greek and English which I resize as small as readable, then print up double-sided to be folded up and stuffed in my now bulging Leaner Guide, along with that possible article from NIDNTT.
6. I print out Robertson's Word Pictures in the New Testament
concerning the relevant passage.
Because I need all the Greek help I can get, and because, to borrow from Rick Brannan, A.T. Robertson was a stud. Or to be more technical, because Robertson wrote a still highly regarded Greek grammar and he published Word Pictures after the papyri boom of the 1900s which changed forever our understanding of New Testament Greek.
7. I read Barclay's Daily Study Bible
on the passage, as well as The IVP Bible Background Commentary
and the abridged Expositor's Bible Commentary
.
Yes, it is only here I get to the commentaries proper. Unless I am cheating a bit. Which lately I am. I bought a copy of Thomas Schreiner’s 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude in the NAC series)
, and I will often read him as a further part of number 4, grilling and cross checking him as well. Usually he simply adds more material to steps 4 and 5.
Anyway, by this time I know enough about the lesson passage that I can run through the commentaries pretty quickly. Mostly I am looking for different material: cultural background, classical references, historical information. Besides the cultural, most of this will not likely come up in Sunday School. I make notes on my scratch paper, which is at least two sides of paper or two sheets by now.
8. I run off the appropriate page(s) from Bruce Metzger’s Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament
and/or Omanson’s Textual Guide to the Greek New Testament
.
Because I’m a textual criticism geek, but also because Metzger sometimes has odd little sidelines and Omanson discusses how segmentation can affect translation. And of course, Metzger is still THE Man.
9. I sit down with all these pages and put short notes in my Learner book.
Basically, I select what I find important, interesting, and/or easy to write briefly and write it up in the book where I will easily remember it. That usually includes Greek transliteration of key words or confusing terms in KJV along with definitions, notations of words not in the Greek supplied for English clarity, parallel verse notations, occasional flow charts of the author’s argument, and almost always questions about multiple interpretations of a phrase or verse. That’s a fair amount of black ink
scribbled in the book, along with that now sizeable sheaf of printouts in the center of the Learner Guide.
10. After a break of a day or two, I go back and review what I've compiled.
Like preparing for a test, I check to see what I remember and what I need to review. I will also likely scratch out some notes and add some new ones, because I see things more clearly after a break.
11. I go to Sunday School and never use ninety percent of what I've learned.
Because I’m not the teacher, and because I want to help my fellow members learn, not confuse them.
12. I come home from Church and after lunch start the process over again for the next week's Sunday School lesson.
Because I really enjoy all this study.
Thanks Chuck for sharing all this. I've heard it said (and I agree) that sincere study of the scriptures is just as valid of a style of worship as any other. I know many of This Lamp readers will relate to Chuck's enthusiasm for understanding the scriptures even if they have slightly different steps of their own. I can relate to Chuck because I've always said that I feel most alive when learning, and I feel most in God's will when I am teaching what I've learned.
Chuck Grantham can be reached at chuckgrantham@cableone.net, and I know he would appreciate your feedback in the comments.
A Guest Post by Chuck Grantham
Rick has asked me to expand a bit on how I prepare for Sunday School for those who may not read the comments section.
The first thing I should say is that I do not teach a Sunday School class. I do this primarily for myself. On the other hand, I think any group of believers studying the Bible deserve good answers when they have questions, and the Learner Guide in the Lifeway Explore the Bible series, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Sunday School quarterly, cannot possibly address all the questions that can come up in your average class.
It is also a help to the actual teacher when someone can give a quick answer to those odd, even off-topic questions that come up, so the teacher can get back on topic. You culprits know who you are….
I should also add that this is a new routine for me, and is slowly evolving as I use it. It also varies a bit depending on the genre of the biblical book we are studying. For Old Testament history I do more historical study and less textual work because my Hebrew and my resources aren’t up to it. For the Gospels I do more synoptic comparison and non-canonicals research, because that‘s a scholarly trend right now and I am fascinated by the agrapha, even if Craig Evans dismisses it.
So as they say, this is where I am at right now, in regard to Sunday School preparation. Here are the steps as I can best outline them:
1. Read the lesson passage in the Learner book.
Of course, you’ve got to read the text first. This can involve different amounts of material. The lesson starts off with a title and then two sets of verses:
A) Background passage: the length of material assumed necessary to grasp the context of the lesson.
B) Lesson passages: those verses actually studied and commented upon in the Learner book.
Sometimes the background passage and the lesson passages are the same. Sometimes the background is several chapters and the lesson passages are the highlight verses within the background passage. My strong suspicion is most folk only read the lesson passages, and even that only in the translations provided in the Sunday School book.
Yes, I said translations. The Explore The Bible Learner Guide provides the lesson passages in side by side renderings from the Holman Christian Standard Bible and of course, the King James Version. This selection leads us to my next step.
2. Check HCSB and KJV for obvious differences.
I love parallel Bibles. But they can confuse someone who does not understand the background of translations. Not only do different Bibles read differently because of different translation philosophies (mirroring the original text versus mirroring contemporary speech of the translation‘s day, to grossly simplify) but also because translations are based upon different “original” texts. Speaking strictly of the New Testament, Older Roman Catholic Bibles were based upon the Latin Vulgate, which varied in places from the King James Bible, based upon Erasmus’ Greek New Testament. And both vary again from Bibles published in the last 130 years, when discoveries of massive numbers of Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac and many more language new testament manuscripts have led scholars to create several “standard” Greek New Testaments, which has further led to each new translation’s translator(s) being forced to decide in numerous places which Greek wording seems more original to them.
All of which is to say that the HCSB and the KJV do not always agree, and not only because centuries separate the vocabularies of the two. The venerable old KJV is based on Greek manuscripts from the Middle Ages, which tend to be more verbose in fear of leaving something good out. The HCSB is based on the current scholarly Greek New Testament, which tends to follow the earliest well-produced manuscripts, whose scribes had not yet added wordings to make things clearer or more reverent, and thus tends to be shorter.
So, after reading the HCSB and the KJV, I do a comparison of their wording, and I take a pen and circle the differences I see, either in vocabulary or in text. That gives me a series of verses which I can then use as a guide for the next step.
3. Check NET diglot for textual notes.
This is the first step where level of education rears its head. I personally have what might be described as “word study Greek.” I can read Greek letters and I know a lot of root words in the vocabulary. Thus I can use certain tools an English-only reader cannot. There are tools for the Greek-impaired to do these sort of things, too, though.
For those with Greek or without, the NET Bible First Edition is a great help, if you don’t let yourself be intimidated. With over 60,000 notes (compared to many study Bibles’ 20,000 notes) the NET is either a study Bible on steroids or an emaciated commentary. Besides the inevitable complaints about its translation philosophy, the NET’s chief strength is its greatest weakness: it has notes for every level of user. Simple definitions of terms sit alongside lengthy discussions of textual critical issues using manuscript numbers and Greek wording. Transliterations are provided as well as notes with “literal” translations of phrases, though.
My preferred edition of the NET when dealing with the New Testament (and we Christians usually are) is the NET Diglot. That is, a parallel Bible with the Nestle-Aland 27th (NA27) edition of the Greek New Testament combined with the NET English translation and notes. Why? Because I am a hopeless New Testament textual criticism geek. Reading the New Testament in Greek for most will simply confirm how careful most translations are to get things as right as they can. And because inevitably translators use
the same reference books and read each other’s translations, a good parallel English New Testament will reveal strong similarity in most Bible passages. But when they do differ, there is no better one stop resource than the NET diglot, which combines the mini-encyclopedia of the NET with the second mini-encyclopedia of the NA27, which endlessly footnotes even minor variations in the wording of NA27’s Greek text by citing which important manuscripts differ from the NA27, then which ones agree with NA27, then which important previous editions of the Greek New Testament agree or disagree with NA27. All of this together with an appendix citing the approximate age of the important manuscripts and what text of which New Testament books they contain.
All this can make for information overload, and the chief complaint against NA27 is that it requires one to learn practically another language in the form of NA27’s symbols and abbreviations to truly use it well. There are two solutions to this:
a) NET Diglot comes with a little foldout containing the witnesses, signs and abbreviations used in the NA27 that will be constantly in readers’ hand.
b) NET footnotes on the opposite page contain English sentences stating as simply as possible much the same information as abbreviated in the NA27 footnotes.
So, having found out what the NET Diglot says about the differences between HCSB and KJV, I will usually circle or underline the variation in the Learner book, draw a line out to the margin of the page, and write out a transliteration of the Greek, together with the earliest manuscript or two supporting each variation with rough date.
At this point I will also be mulling over other things I have learned from the footnotes on the NET side of the diglot, which I will have noticed mentions literal translations, other text critical issues, or even translation issues. But now it is time to go back to the Learner Guide for the next step.
4. Read the passage overview in lesson book, noting where the author keys on words, provides definitions or parallel verses.
In other words, grill the author on the assertions he makes. If he defines a word, I’ll circle it, find the Greek term in the diglot, see how NET translates it, and if I’m at all suspicious of the English term, walk over to my book case and pull out my copy of The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology: Abridged Edition
by Verlyn Verbrugge (NIDNTT) and look up the Greek. If I find the NIDNTT disagrees with the Learner book significantly, I will turn on the printer copier and run off the article. That will be the first of a sheaf of notes I will have before I’m through.Key words and parallel verses require more work and more tools. I will cross check the English against the Greek so I get one term, then for the key words simply see how often they are repeated in the Greek text. I do this with E-sword, the excellent FREE (mostly) Bible software. By simply highlighting the Greek word and clicking, I can run a search on the word in the current book or the New Testament. With a copy, a switch to the LXX, and a paste, I can further search for the word in the Old Testament. Even with my poor Greek, I can flip through English versions in E-sword and get a sense of the range of meaning for the word, and very often discover parallels to my New Testament text.
If this doesn’t satisfy me (and by now you realize I’m not easily satisfied) I can hit the books again. Specifically Goodrick, Kohlenberger and Swanson’s The Exhaustive Concordance to the Greek New Testament
, and Hatch and Redpath’s Concordance to the Septuagint. These will give me more uses of my Greek word in all its variations, as well as a case of eyestrain. Magnifying glasses are recommended with these resources, or electronic versions you can resize.This is the point scratch paper comes in handy. Among these many verses I will make note of the parallels quoted in the Learner book and my search I find significant. That leads me to the next step.
5. Significant parallels I paste together and print out in Greek and English, particularly where outright quotes from LXX or a usage determining a discussed word meaning occurs.
Simply put, I’ll cross check my scratch list, pick the most important, then make a file of the New Testament and Old Testament parallels in Greek and English which I resize as small as readable, then print up double-sided to be folded up and stuffed in my now bulging Leaner Guide, along with that possible article from NIDNTT.
6. I print out Robertson's Word Pictures in the New Testament
concerning the relevant passage.Because I need all the Greek help I can get, and because, to borrow from Rick Brannan, A.T. Robertson was a stud. Or to be more technical, because Robertson wrote a still highly regarded Greek grammar and he published Word Pictures after the papyri boom of the 1900s which changed forever our understanding of New Testament Greek.
7. I read Barclay's Daily Study Bible
on the passage, as well as The IVP Bible Background Commentary and the abridged Expositor's Bible Commentary.Yes, it is only here I get to the commentaries proper. Unless I am cheating a bit. Which lately I am. I bought a copy of Thomas Schreiner’s 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude in the NAC series)
, and I will often read him as a further part of number 4, grilling and cross checking him as well. Usually he simply adds more material to steps 4 and 5.Anyway, by this time I know enough about the lesson passage that I can run through the commentaries pretty quickly. Mostly I am looking for different material: cultural background, classical references, historical information. Besides the cultural, most of this will not likely come up in Sunday School. I make notes on my scratch paper, which is at least two sides of paper or two sheets by now.
8. I run off the appropriate page(s) from Bruce Metzger’s Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament
and/or Omanson’s Textual Guide to the Greek New Testament.Because I’m a textual criticism geek, but also because Metzger sometimes has odd little sidelines and Omanson discusses how segmentation can affect translation. And of course, Metzger is still THE Man.
9. I sit down with all these pages and put short notes in my Learner book.
Basically, I select what I find important, interesting, and/or easy to write briefly and write it up in the book where I will easily remember it. That usually includes Greek transliteration of key words or confusing terms in KJV along with definitions, notations of words not in the Greek supplied for English clarity, parallel verse notations, occasional flow charts of the author’s argument, and almost always questions about multiple interpretations of a phrase or verse. That’s a fair amount of black ink
scribbled in the book, along with that now sizeable sheaf of printouts in the center of the Learner Guide.
10. After a break of a day or two, I go back and review what I've compiled.
Like preparing for a test, I check to see what I remember and what I need to review. I will also likely scratch out some notes and add some new ones, because I see things more clearly after a break.
11. I go to Sunday School and never use ninety percent of what I've learned.
Because I’m not the teacher, and because I want to help my fellow members learn, not confuse them.
12. I come home from Church and after lunch start the process over again for the next week's Sunday School lesson.
Because I really enjoy all this study.
Thanks Chuck for sharing all this. I've heard it said (and I agree) that sincere study of the scriptures is just as valid of a style of worship as any other. I know many of This Lamp readers will relate to Chuck's enthusiasm for understanding the scriptures even if they have slightly different steps of their own. I can relate to Chuck because I've always said that I feel most alive when learning, and I feel most in God's will when I am teaching what I've learned.
Chuck Grantham can be reached at chuckgrantham@cableone.net, and I know he would appreciate your feedback in the comments.