Do Pastors Need to Know Greek and Hebrew?

Do pastors need to know Greek and Hebrew? Fuller professors share their answers.

Studying Greek and Hebrew Equips Us as Lifelong, Discerning Readers of Scripture

You don’t need to study biblical languages, but your ministry will benefit from doing so. Studying Greek and Hebrew will enable you to draw continuous refreshment in your Christian thinking, in your teaching, and in your preaching. It’ll connect you with resources for the whole, lifelong arc of your ministry. You’ll be able to draw inspiration from Scripture in a way that you couldn’t without exposure to the biblical languages. It’ll also give you a check against all kinds of misinformation, noise, and chatter out there and online. Studying biblical languages anchors you and gives you tools to discern and discriminate between good and faulty information about Scripture. So I encourage you to study biblical languages.

Collin Cornell, Arthur F. Glasser Chair of Bible and Mission

Reading in the Original Languages Slows Us Down and Brings Complexities to Life

As a pastor, you don’t need to learn Greek and Hebrew. But you would greatly benefit from doing so and will be so glad that you invested the time and effort. When we read the Bible in our translations—which are often very reliable—it’s like reading the subtitles of a movie in a language that we don’t know. Imagine if you knew the language, and imagine that you could appreciate the humor, the nuance, the figures of speech, the idioms, the syntax, and all the complexities that you often miss when you don’t know the language. Learning Greek and Hebrew also disorients us in a way that is very humbling, requiring us to slow down and to ask questions of the text, making the familiar strange and the strange familiar.

Janette Ok, George Eldon Ladd Chair of New Testament

Knowing Biblical Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic Helps Us Bridge the Past and the Present

As readers of the Bible, it’s important to recognize the languages behind the English that you are reading. The Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts we have today are the closest things we have to the original text, which we’ve never had a chance to read. What we have are copies of copies of copies, but they represent the originals of the past. And reading in those original languages connects the cultures of the past with the culture of the present.

Johnny Ramírez-Johnson, professor of anthropology and profesor del Centro Latino

Studying Biblical Languages Matters Because Having Teachers With Expertise Matters

Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic make up the parts of the Bible that pastors teach and preach from, so pastors need to know the languages. If pastors are not the experts on the Bible in their own communities, then who is going to be? Where is the expertise and where is the authority? If someone said they planned to teach Spanish literature but they don’t speak Spanish, we might chuckle, because that person wouldn’t know the culture, the context, or the text well enough to teach it to someone else. In the same way, we’re dealing with texts in the Bible that were written in Hebrew and Greek, and they need to be interpreted in the light of the knowledge of those languages.

Christopher Hays, D. Wilson Moore Professor of Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies

Learning Biblical Languages Brings Us Closer to Scripture

Every pastor needs to have an ever-deepening engagement with the Bible. This is especially true for pastors who will, in the regular course of their ministry, open the Bible with and for other people. Pastors who do that are responsible for accurately interpreting Scripture. When we know the original languages, we can get close to the text without depending on extra resources to help us get there. Knowing the original languages also helps us to preserve the outside voice of Scripture. Because sometimes the Bible speaks to us in turns of phrase that are surprising; sometimes it puts emphasis on things that we wouldn’t know to put emphasis on. The original languages provide us with a way of getting close to Scripture so that we can hear it well and minister with it responsibly.

Chris Blumhofer, associate professor of New Testament

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