Teaching Old and New Testaments to Students of Greek and Latin Simultaneously

Because Old and New Testament texts in Greek and Latin are almost word for word replicas of each other inasmuch as they are both translations of preexisting texts, they can be taught simultaneously to students who know only one or both of the languages in the same classroom. Moreover, students with only one year of training can take such a class because of the syntactical simplicity of the texts and repetitive nature of the vocabulary. There are a number of outstanding learning outcomes to expect from teaching these works: critical thinking, introduction to textual criticism, canonicity, the Documentary Hypothesis, translation goals, cultural appropriation, comparative mythology, interdisciplinarity, and ancient biography.