An Analytical Study of Words
Chapter Eight
Greek Tools
"...concerning zeal, persecuting the church; concerning the righteousness which is the law, blameless. But what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousnes s which is from God through faith; that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.
-Philippians 3:7-11
While not everyone has the time to study Hebrew and Greek, which require years of study before one can become proficient in either language, there are excellent study aids available to the English reader with which one can check to see how each Greek or Hebrew word has been translated in its every occurrence in the Scripture. Christian book stores, or book stores for the denominational groups, have such study aids as these: The Word Study N.T., in two volumes. Volume one shows the translation of each word used in the KJV in large print with a code number under each English word. That number is keyed to volume two and to several other Greek lexicons and concordances. Volume two is titled The Word Study Concordance. It is a copy of the old Englishman's Greek Concordance of the New Testament.
Also available are Strong's Exhaustive Concordance; Young's Analytical Concordance; The Englishman's Greek Concordance of the New Testament; The Englishman's Hebrew and Chaldee Concordance of the Old Testament and Smith's Greek-English Concordance. These works contain a complete listing of each New Testament Greek word, or each Old Testament Hebrew word, so that one may see at a glance how the words were translated in the KJV.
The Concordant Literal New Testament with Keyword Concordance lists each word of the Greek text and shows how it was translated in that version.
Word Study volumes, of which there are many are also very helpful. Vincent's Word Studies of the New Testament is one that I would highly recommend.
Careful study of some of the volumes previously mentioned will glean facts often overlooked or purposely avoided in traditional "Bible Study." For example, the Young's Analytical Concordance plainly reveals what I have been saying about the words we are looking at. A search under "eternal" will reveal that Dr. Young clearly saw that the King's translators did not handle the word aion correctly. A look in Smith's Greek-English Concordance under entry number 165b will reveal much which the average person who reads the King James Bible will never become aware of.
While interlinear Bibles are not the complete answer, they often help to at least look at the Greek and Hebrew underlying the translations. The Greek New Testament (UBS4 with NRSV & NIV) edited by John Kohlenberger III, The Greek-English Interlinear New Testament edited by J.D. Douglas which contains the United Bible Society's fourth edition of their Greek text along side the NRSV, and the Zondervan Parallel New Testament in Greek and English which contains the Nestle's Greek text, a literal translation, the KJV, and the NIV, are helpful with the New Testament. The Interlinear NIV Hebrew-English Old Testament is helpful in the Old Testament.
Throughout this book, I have quoted many dozens of scholars adept in the languages of the Bible. It would behoove the readers to acquaint themselves with some of these very valuable resources.