Ad fontes, ad fontes, ad fontes

In college when I began Greek I pretty much fell in love with it. From very early on I decided I wanted to read classical Greek texts in addition to the Biblical Greek text I knew I'd be studying. My first interaction with Greek outside of the NT was Herodotus. I learned very quickly while reading how much I relied on my previous knowledge of the English translation of the NT when I got stuck in Greek. It's real easy to fake it in Greek class when you're reading a passage and you can't remember the Greek, so you just "NIV it." [that would be an instance of making a verb from a noun] But when you get to a text with which you are not familiar, that is no longer an option. Sometimes you look at your translation and wonder how in the world anyone made sense of that sentence, only to look to an English translation and find out that your verb was really a dative noun, your genitive noun was really the subject of the verb and that all of those little words called "particles" can really change the meaning of a sentence.

Since then I've been involved with Classics in addition to my studies at Seminary in Theology. So a few years ago when I realized I could use classical Greek texts in BibleWorks, my mouth was watering. This was going to be exciting! Little did I know how much work it would actually take to figure out how to get the job done. But soon I learned about converting fonts from Unicode to CCAT format. I learned how to use macros in Word to make other conversions possible. I learned how to make sure I used only works in the public domain so that I could share the results of my labors with other BibleWorks users.

Fast forward a good chunk of time and you'll see how much work has been done. Basically all of Plato's Works are available within BW, so is Herodotus and Xenophon. Not only is Homer's Odyssey and Iliad available, they also are morphologically parsed! In other words, BibleWorks is not only a Biblical resource, it is turning into a great place for students interested in ALL Greek texts. BibleWorks comes already loaded with the Intermediate Liddell-Scott Lexicon and shortly they will be releasing a new module: the complete Liddell-Scott with all of the updates to it published within the correct entries. Oh these are good times indeed to be a classicist and Biblical scholar! No other program or website (to my knowledge) has as much Greek available for the cost of the program (the NT, LXX, Philo, Josephus, Apostolic Fathers are all included in the base program (this includes Greek text, parsing, and English translations)) and has bonus user resources available above and beyond the Biblical texts. In my mind this even blows away Perseus, a site which has a great wealth of material, but that material cannot be searched, analyzed and used in the way that BibleWorks can search, analyze and use those same texts. This is good news, not only to Bible scholars, but to aspiring classicists as well! :)