Learning Biblical Greek has never been more accessible, and is needed more than ever!

When I studied at Bible College in the second half of the 1980s, we had to learn Biblical Greek, and I

loved it! It took a lot of work and dedication, but at the end of the 3 semesters of Greek that year I had an average of 96%. I found it fascinating!

But, like they say, "If you don't use, you lose it!" I got married in 1990, and started working at a massive state company through which I studied software development, and I've been in software development ever since. Through the years, because of disuse, I had forgotten much of what I learnt about New Testament Greek. I don't know how many times I tried to pick it up again. Don't get me wrong! I could no longer handle it smoothly, differentiating between different verb forms, nouns, etc. Yet, I was quite capable of helping myself when I came across something in the New Testament that I wanted to check against the Greek. I had the resources, and I knew how to use them, but I couldn't pick up a Greek New Testament and just translate as I read.

Allusions in the Book of Revelation to the Old Testament

Currently, I am studying the last book of the Bible, the "Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show to His bond-servants, the things which must soon take place; and He sent and communicated it by His angel to His bond-servant John."

After I worked through the text in my first round, I wanted to return and work through it while studying all its allusions and verbal parallels to the Old Testament. I started looking for a complete list of allusions, but I couldn't find a complete list. In the 404 verses of the Book of Revelation, it has several hundred allusions and verbal parallels to the Old Testament, more than any other New Testament book. I found a list here and here. I still wasn't convinced that these two lists were complete. Greg Beale makes frequent reference to these allusions to the Old Testament in his "Revelation: a shorter commentary." He also mentions in his John's Use of the Old Testament in Revelation, Sheffield Academic Press Ltd, Sheffield, England, 1998, p60, that the UBS3 Greek text has 394 references of allusions and verbal parallels to the Old Testament. I checked in my copy of the UBS5 Greek text; it has over 600 allusions and verbal parallels in the Book of Revelation to the Old Testament (Aland, Barbara & Aland, Kurt & Karavidopoulos, Johannes & Martini, Carlo M. & Metzger, Bruce, THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT, Fifth Revised Edition, Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, Germany, 2015, pp864-882).