A Patristic Greek Reader (review)

Whitacre’s Patristic Greek Reader is a very useful text, although likely to be of interest to a limited group of readers. The author has two main goals: to provide an introduction to the writings of the church fathers and to help those with a limited knowledge of Greek make sense of how the thinking of the fathers was expressed in the original language (xv).

Part I (Greek Texts and Notes) begins with the Didache, which the editor claims to be important for understanding the history of the early church, though exactly what it tells us—he says—will remain a subject of some debate (4). Following the Didache, Whitacre provides selections from fourteen other sources important for an understanding of the early church, ranging from First Clement to Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022). Each selection is prefaced by a brief introduction to the author or text under consideration, the edition used, and a note on the level of difficulty represented by the Greek, ranging from “Easy” (the Didache), through “Intermediate” (The Epistle to Diognetus 5–7), to “Advanced” (Justin Martyr, First Apology and Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History and Life of Constantine). Several selections blur the lines separating the levels of difficulty; text from the Miscellanies of Clement of Alexandria, for example, is judged to be “Upper Intermediate to Advanced.” Each text is accompanied by voluminous grammatical notes, identifying most of the verbs and other possibly problematical grammatical forms. The notes comprise one-half to two-thirds of a given page. I noticed no typographical errors nor obvious mistakes; proofreading was carried out with great care. No reader of Whitacre’s text is likely to find himself or herself in the unfortunate position of the Greek student in the Woody Allen joke, who “when asked to conjugate had to decline.” Part II offers literal but eminently readable translations of all the texts. Three appendices are included: a six-page vocabulary listing simple words whose meanings the reader is assumed already to know; the principal parts of common Greek verbs; and a handy one-page listing of the readings in terms of their increasing level of difficulty. The book closes with a brief bibliography of sources for further reading for each of the fifteen sections.

As Whitacre notes, there is little to choose from for help in reading other Hellenistic Greek texts and the church fathers (xix). Among the available resources for such texts, he cites Allen Wikgren’s Hellenistic Greek Texts and Conybeare and Stock’s Grammar of Septuagint Greek (xx), both of which can be usefully compared with this book. The Wikgren book contains a vocabulary in the back but offers no help in understanding and translating the Greek text. Indeed, Wikgren sometimes feels free to begin a selection in mid-sentence (for example, Isa 52.7), expecting the reader, I suppose, either to look up the rest or fill in the missing parts of a sentence from memory! His book expects too much on the part of the reader. Conybeare and Stock, on the other hand, provide an extensive grammar of NT Greek and a useful set of notes putting their readings in the proper historical and linguistic contexts. Their book is a model for a proper classroom text dealing with writings important for the study of ancient religion.

Whitacre makes his purpose clear from the very beginning: “I am offering these selections from faith and for faith” (xv). Readers with little Greek who approach the study of the church fathers from this perspective will find this book admirably suited to meet their need. The book, however, will not well serve the needs of those who approach the church fathers with more scholarly interests. Nevertheless, it must be recognized that the class of readers with only a little knowledge of Greek is increasing annually and textbooks that simplify their subjects are becoming more prevalent. Perhaps we face the problem today that plagued Erasmus when he published the first Greek New Testament. Unable to count on an audience capable of fully...