intro

Please introduce yourself here, if you haven't already.
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Robert S. Daniel
Posts: 35
Joined: May 27th, 2020, 6:20 pm

intro

Post by Robert S. Daniel »

χαιρετε υμιν
Barry Hofstetter
Posts: 2159
Joined: May 6th, 2011, 1:48 pm

Re: intro

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

Χαῖρε! Feel free to tell us a bit about yourself...
N.E. Barry Hofstetter, M.A., Th.M.
Ph.D. Student U of FL
Instructor of Latin
Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy
καὶ σὺ τὸ σὸν ποιήσεις κἀγὼ τὸ ἐμόν. ἆρον τὸ σὸν καὶ ὕπαγε.
Robert S. Daniel
Posts: 35
Joined: May 27th, 2020, 6:20 pm

Re: intro

Post by Robert S. Daniel »

OK, here is some stuff about me. Somebody mentioned Randall Buth in response to one of my posts. I know Randall from his living language materials for Greek and Hebrew, and from one of his fluency workshops in Fresno a few years ago. Some of his henchmen were also doing online Bible study classes for a while, which were conducted in Greek and we did the discussions in Greek. I really miss doing that stuff. Buth and company don't seem to be doing that much these days. Maybe somebody here knows of something similar that is available?

I'm retired now after a career in software engineering for Bell Labs, Wang, Apollo, and Hewlett-Packard. It was in my early fifties that I started learning Koine Greek. I started by auditing a course online that was offered by the Episcopal seminary in Austin TX. It was grammar and translation. After that I tried to read the Gospel of John and found it to be a painstaking task. So I decided I had to do something to learn to read. I did that by finding a free online reading of the NT in Greek, and listened to Mark over and over while I was watering the lawn and going for walks, and driving my car. Eventually I happened upon the Buth materials, and started doing the same thing with those. These days when I listen to GNT it us mostly Spirios Zodhiates. I have had an aspirational goal of acquiring fluency in reading writing and speaking. I doubt that that is achievable by mere mortals but I moved pretty far in that direction from where I started.

My educational background is a BA from Kenyon College 1974 with high honors in philosophy. It was Anglo-American style philosophy mostly. I also picked up an MS in computer and information science from Ohio State, 1981. One of my main interests these days is trying to understand how Greek culture has colored the way we read the Bible, and I have become intrigued with what the notion that contemporary social science seems to have led to an understanding of human nature that is closer to the ancient Hebrew and NT understanding than anything in the mean time. Another way of putting that is that Greek difficulties with the notion of time and change influenced the way our culture has understood the mind, but we are at long last emerging from that phase. I'm thinking a catchy name for that phenomenon would be "Plato's curveball." I think we may be getting over Platonism at last. Although I don't think it was Plato's fault exactly. Maybe it would be better to blame it on Pythagoras. That is because the discovery of what we know today as Euclidean geometry raised the bar for scientific explanation. But Euclidean geometry applies only to space, or at any rate that is how it was understood at the time. It took until Descartes before we were able to incorporate time into mathematically-based scientific explanations. So the Western world for all that time didn't grok time. You can see how that affected theology if you read Augustine's confessions.

There's much more to say about all this, but this is probably more than anybody wanted to know in the first place.

By the way, I was a subscriber to the BGreek mailing list back before it went to this web site, but it took me all this time to make the switch myself. I'm really looking forward to having somebody to beg for hints when I get stuck in my attempts at research.
Barry Hofstetter
Posts: 2159
Joined: May 6th, 2011, 1:48 pm

Re: intro

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

Welcome (back) Robert!
N.E. Barry Hofstetter, M.A., Th.M.
Ph.D. Student U of FL
Instructor of Latin
Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy
καὶ σὺ τὸ σὸν ποιήσεις κἀγὼ τὸ ἐμόν. ἆρον τὸ σὸν καὶ ὕπαγε.
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