Greek New Testament Exam
The examination in Greek is in two parts, written
and oral.
A. Written Exam
The exam is to be
proctored by a church officer convenient to the
candidate, and has a time limit of 5 hours.
Text: The exam will be one or more passage(s)
from the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament
27th edition. The scripture texts are
not pre-announced to the candidate.
Resources allowed: The candidate may use a
lexicon, Greek grammar, personal notes, and
commentaries. However any tool that parses
the words in the text is not allowed. This
prohibition includes electronic devices such as
computers, tablets, smartphones, etc. If the
candidate wishes to use a commentary it should
not include parsings of the text.
The candidate may be required to produce a
provisional translation of the text by:
Parsing all the verbs,
infinitives, and participles, and many of the
nouns and adjectives as required.
Writing out a provisional
translation which resolves questions of grammar
and syntax.
Developing a simple outline of
the passage.
Resolving any textual issues
which appear in the apparatus.
The candidate may be required to provide a
basic short word study, no more than a paragraph
in length, of a single word in the passage whose
meaning is crucial to understanding the whole.
Finally the candidate may be asked to make some
preliminary homiletical observations on the
passage as directed.
The completed exam is to be given to the
proctor, who will mail it to the examiner. The
examiner will forward the exam to the committee
with his recommendation on the scoring of the
exam.
B. Oral Exam
The purpose of the oral examination is to see
if the candidate is familiar with his Greek New
Testament. The candidate is expected to read a
short passage out loud, and then translate. The
exam is given in committee and normally the
examination may be expected to take about 45
minutes.
In the oral Greek Examination the candidate may
be asked to parse the verbs, infinitives,
participles, nouns and adjectives. Depending on
the text selected, the candidate may be asked to
make observations on the grammar and syntax of
dependent clauses and prepositional phrases, or
other features of the text. The candidate may be
asked to give the dictionary form of words and
discuss their accents and pronounciation.
If there are textual variants, the candidate
may be asked to explain the apparatus and
resolve textual issues as appropriate.
Attention may be drawn to exegetical issues
presented by the passage, and to homiletical
possibilities which may appear.
This is not an exhaustive list. The purpose of
the oral examination is to see if the candidate
is familiar with the Greek New Testament, and is
capable of sound exegesis.
 See also the Hebrew
Bible Exam
See also B. B.
Warfield on the Languages and Pastoral
Ministry
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