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I'm currently taking a first year Greek class, and we've finally gotten around to studying the use of participles in the Greek. While it can truly be said that Greek uses prepostions with a "mathematical exactness and a scientific precision"... much more so even, than the use of prepositions in English... the same thing cannot be said about the Greek use of participles. I dug out my old copy of "Fundamentals of Greek Research" by Walter J. Cummins. FoGR contains a few rudimentary items that are useful, such as how to use a concordance, the meanings of some of the most common prepositions, and a crude synopsis of Greek tenses, but for the most part FoGR uses examples of interpretation taken from PFAL, and reinforces those interpretations, even when the Greek does not necessarily do so. There was NO mention of participles. The closest is in a quote from page 21, "Other parts of speech and constructions are used just as precisely as the prepositions. The Greeks were a very mathematical people, and so was their language." That's just not true. The Greek thinking behind participles was so different from our way of thinking about participles, a direct translation of a participial phase into English usually doesn't make sense. Translating a participial phrase from Greek into English REQUIRES guesswork, informed by information from other parts of the sentence. Most of the big debates, about what particular passages from the New Testament mean, involve a participial phrase. The example our professor brought up spontaneously in class was Acts 19:2a, "He said unto them, Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?" The phrase "since ye believed" is the translation of a single Greek participle, and could just a accurately be translated "when ye believed" or "because ye believed." Wierwille taught us that interpretation of the Bible has a degree of certainty which in truth, it does not have. Of course Wierwille's goal was for us to accept HIS interpretation as the only one having mathematical exactness and scientific presion. It had neither. Love, Steve

In all of this let's not forget that language itself is imprecise when it really comes down to describing - say - emotions. We have a general idea of what someone else may feel, think, etc, but can we really ever know? All that word-study stuff was interesting, and I learned a lot doing it. But it presupposes that a word never changed or developed its meaning over all the hundreds of years, in fact millenia, that the books of the Bible were written. Just in the English language, it wouldn't be hard to find words that have changed their meaning, or acquired another meaning such that the original meaning is quaint and archaic (like "prevent" / "pre-vent". In the last 100 years this has really moved on a lot faster. Not to mention words that have acquired meanings much more recently (think: mouse - first thought? Not a critter but something to do with a computer). Those word-studies were in effect a blind, a diversion, a deviation, to get us to think about what we thought we knew, rather than really exploring what a particular passage was saying. Gave us head-knowledge without giving us heart-knowledge. We have a number of different words in the English language to indicate removal of property without consent: steal, rob, defraud, etc - and colloquially nick, pinch, wag, lift, "borrow" (add your own)) - they have different meanings (openly, stealthily, by force...) but you don't need a word study to understand that the basic thought is taking someone else's property without their consent. By whatever means it's done. (A dollar to a donut he got Jonny Jumpup or Snowball Pete to pinch the "math.exactness" phrase from somebody else, anyway)

I have a good relationship with my family now. I don't think it will ever be completely free of the shadows of my actions in marking and avoiding then for years, though. But it's ok. In some ways it showed me how strong families can rebuild and forgive each other. What bothered (and bothers) me the most is knowing that I am capable of that kind of cruelty. But NEVER AGAIN. I have a child now, and I will NEVER EVER cut her out of my life. I don't care what she does. It would be a non issue. Family is too important. I am trying my best to teach her that importance, too. My brother is doing much better now. He has a son now, is going to college for social work, and has a small business he is running. He recently got full custody of his son (the mother kept getting busted for meth) and I am so happy that my brother is able to give that sweet nephew of mine a stable loving home to grow up in. He has been clean for over two years now. I am so proud of him. He says his son has been his salvation. My nephew went from speaking only three words when he moved in to reciting story books from memory a couple months later. He says please and thank you. He has a good dad.

I can't say as far as Walter Cummins or Wayne Clap, since I never knew them, but I can say that the majority (and that even includes Mr. Schoenheit of STFI) have little clue about Koine Greek (Geer and Lynn's inabilities in the languages are too evident). Ed. Horney was teaching Greek at TWI for the in-rez Corps when I was with them, and he had no clue and made countless mistakes in every hour of his teaching(s). The Greek handouts they gave out to the Corps had inaccuracies as Steve pointed out. And they never really taught Greek anyways. Mostly how to look it up in a concordance, transliterate, parse words using a lexicon, do word studies, and understand a few basic grammar principles (albeit many were inaccurate). It'd be like asking the "trained" in TWI what the aorist tense is used for, much less ask them why it has the past tense modifier mixed with the future tense modifier. No, they would give you an English grammar equivalent that is inaccurate because it was given in their "Greek handout". And Hebrew... lol.. At least Mr. Schoenheit has some better understanding there... But the rest.. Don't ask, their blind. Edited: I guess I'm being a little unfair.. Even a first year Greek student will learn basics that are then later refined and even basic understandings changed the more years you learn the language. What you once were taught was similar to the English Present tense no longer is the case later on. But for a beginner, you have to start somewhere. And that usually includes drawing similarities between what you know and what you don't. But TWI did the disservice of making their "trained" feel like they actually knew something, when a lot of it was just pure rubbish.