The second Hendrickson book is another excellent Greek reader they put out. I’m even more excited about this one, as I’ve never read any of the patristic literature in Greek before.

Purchase from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com
Rodney A. Whitacre
Hendrickson
279 Pages

Here is the TOC:

1. Introduction
2. The Didache
3. 1 Clement
4. Ignatius’s To The Romans
5. The Epistle to Diognetus
6. Martyrdom of Polycarp
7. Justin’s Martyr’s First Apology
8. Melito of Sardis’ On Pascha
9. Clement of Alexandria’s Miscellanies
10. Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History and Life of Constantine
11. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation
12. Gregory of Nazianzus’ Orations
13. Desert Fathers and Mothers, Apophthegmata Patrum
14. Chrysostom’s Homiliae in Matthaeum
15. Hesychios the Priest’s on Watchfulness and Holiness
16. Symeon the New Theologian’s Hymns
17. PART 2 gives the translation of the above portions.

From the Back:
This is more than a book .It’s an opportunity to learn Greek from a superlative teacher and to learn Christianity from the greatest ancient masters. Dr. Whitacre’s anthology is unique, a model of both pedagogy and mystagogy. The Spirit has been leading the churches to “return to the sources” and A Patristic Greek Reader is a beautiful beginning for that journey. Very highly recommended. — Mike Aquilina

Many young theologians find themselves eager to read the Greek Fathers, but are hampered by their command of little more than elementary New Testament Greek . A Patristic Greek Reader is exactly what they need. It provides passages from the first millennium of varying difficulty, accompanied by commentary explaining point of grammar and syntax. On their own, or in classes, this book will enable such students to raise their sights to the sometimes rather difficult Greek of the Fathers. It is a thoroughly excellent initiative. — Andrew Louth

The book contains 3 appendixes: a vocab list, a principal parts chart, and a list of the selections arranged in order of difficulty.

This reader is presented a little differently than Hendrickson’s Philippians reader that I mentioned in my previous book blurb. The greek portions for reading do not give any translation — these are found in section 2. I like this presentation, as it forces the user to try a hand at translating themselves rather than relying on the given translation. The grammatical notes within the Greek sections are thorough, giving both parsing of difficult forms and lexical forms of difficult words as well.

This is another fine addition to Hendrickson’s expanding list of Greek readers. The one little nitpicky complaint I have is that the author recommends bible software in the introduction, and Whitacre is clearly a PC user as he neglects to mention Accordance. Readers may get the impression that you can only get Greek digital editions of the material on a PC, which is not the case. It is good for authors to hit both Mac and PC users when recommending software.

Another great book to add to my recommended list for the 2nd semester of my intro Greek class!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 7:36 pm by Danny Zacharias and is filed under Greek, Hendrickson, Book Blurbs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.