A Must Have Resource for NT Greek

For those who have studied Koine Greek in order to better understand the message of the New Testament, you know that after mastering the basic grammatical structures and learning the most common vocabulary, reading the NT in Greek (especially in its easier forms in 1-3 John) is not that difficult.

However, the biggest obstacle to obtaining true proficiency or being able to sight read longer, more difficult passages is the breadth of one's Greek vocabulary. There are simply too many words to keep track of. This has been a frustration of mine for years.

If you have studied Greek and felt the same way, I'd like to recommend an invaluable (and cheap!) resource to bring you aid: Sakae Kubo's A Reader's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament.

In this lexicon, Kubo does not use an alphabetical arrangement in the typical method of say Liddell & Scott or the BDAG. Rather, he arranges his text in the canonical fashion and proceeds to define the rare terms (any word occurring less than 50 times in the NT) from Matthew 1:1 to Revelation 22:20 (click here for a sample page). At the beginning of every NT book, he lists the "special vocabulary" that is particular to that book and its author. After every word that he defines, he provides two numbers: the first tells you how many times it occurs in that particular book and the second how many times it occurs in the entire NT. This is especially helpful as it allows the exegete to isolate important words to a given gospel or epistle. If a rare word is used only 6 times in the NT and all of those occasions come in Galatians, for example, then one would want to do further study into that term and its meaning in the epistle. Also included at the end of the book are some helpful appendices and grammatical tips for increasing your proficiency in Koine Greek.

I have found this lexicon to be more helpful than any other tool in sight reading the Greek NT. I do own the Reader's Greek New Testament recently published by Zondervan but find the copious footnotes and the weird Greek font to be distracting. I would rather use the Nestle-Aland 27 Greek text with this lexicon and only reference the words that I do not know.

If you are looking for tools to help you gain greater skill at sight reading, Kubo's Lexicon would be well worth the $20. It may not be the most thorough academic lexicon available, but for those wanting to read the NT in its original language, it is a must have resource.