NT Exegesis step 4b

Okay, so after the Christmas break I want to get back to where I left off in the process of Exegesis.
So far we have looked at:
1) Spiritual preparation.
2) General introduction.
3) Literary context.
4) Provisional translation
a) Establish the text.

Today we're gonna look at
4b) Parse the key words and translate.

I find this part a lot of fun.
When I get home from work on a Tuesday I feel very tired, but the idea of translating the passage I will teach on on Sunday is exciting to me, so it helps me to sit down at my desk and start parsing.

At this stage I just do a very rough translation. I'm not doing any word studies, I'm mainly seeing what tense a word is in and translating it into English. To assist me in this I use Bibleworks 7 (software) and Zerwick's 'A Grammatical analysis of the Greek New Testament'. Cleon Roger's 'A new Linguistic and Exegetical Key to the Greek New Testament' is also very useful, although sometimes I think they go too far with some of their conclusions.

For anyone using Esword - you can download Greek New Testaments that come with parsing - obviously anything that gives you the parsing is going to hinder your Greek in the long run, but can still be useful. (although computer programs and programmers can make mistakes with their parsing too!).

B.T.W If you don't know any Greek, then instead of this step you can go through as many translations as possible looking for differences between these. The differences will often highlight exegetical difficulties, so they are worth noting. No one translation gets it right everytime, so don't just assume that your favourite translation will always get it right.

Interestingly some translations translate the perfect tense well, but not the imperfect so well.

So have fun translating, it's a great way to meditate on God's word.
Peace
D