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About Us
Overview and Description of Projects
Realizing that Biblical Greek (Koine) is essential for Christian education we developed The Institute of Biblical Greek to assist those who want to learn Greek and those who have begun the life long project of improving their Greek language skills. Thus our goal is to be a resource that offers tools, helps and recommendations as well as a gateway to other fantastic resources on the web. We have received many requests and have many ideas for the development of original tools and learning aids and are excited about publishing them. Please take a look at our list of current projects and future projects on this page to get an idea of the type of work we are doing. We also have hope to become 501c3 non-profit organization to encourage more donations to help finance these projects. Ironically, we currently cannot afford the expense of all that would be involved of developing and maintaining this status. So until then we will cheerfully continue at whatever pace the Lord allows. All thanks to Him for blessing our work to offer our current resources.
1. Background, Purpose and Goals
2. Current Projects (to increase this general awareness)
3. Future Activities (Wtih your help)
4. Donations, 501c3 Status, and Current Needs
1. Background, Purpose and Goals
The Institute of Biblical Greek is established to advance the exegetical skills and biblical understanding of motivated Christians. With all of its divisions and fractures, the one thing that all Christendom holds in common is its Holy Scripture. If only five percent of those who believe the New Testament were able to read and study it in the original Greek, many divisions would be reconciled and much spiritual growth in unity would result. Currently, the percentage of Christians who know Greek is hardly measurable, so there is a lot of work to be done. Please read on to find out what the Institute of Biblical Greek is doing, and how you can help reach the goal of seeing five percent of the church literate in our original Word.
Inspiring more Christians to want to learn Greek is one of the chief goals of the Institute. It isn't enough to merely sharpen the skills of those who already know some Greek. To make any significant advancement more Christians must be motivated and empowered to work with the original language of the New Testament.
It is not an accident that the church suffers such a high level of original language illiteracy. There are many factors that contribute to the problem. Americans are blessed with conveniences of all kinds. This includes a plethora of Bible study aids and translations. A vast number of people believe that there is no reason to learn how to wield our living sword in the original language when we can handle it with all of our translations. However, they do not realize that the mere number of translations shows the truth of the old adage "something is always lost in translation." The Institute of Biblical Greek offers the solution to these problems by finding more and more ways to increase general awareness of the necessity and value for Christians to invest time with the Word in the original language.
2. Current Projects (to increase this general awareness)
- Developing a presence on the world wide web
- The Institute is currently ranked on the first page in the Google search for "Biblical Greek".
- One of the goals of the web site is to funnel those interested in bible study and exegesis to the benefits of original language study.
- The Institute is committed to offering many educational pages freely online. This not only includes educational lectures, graphic charts and audio files, but also recommending books and links to other helpful web sites.
- The Institute provides an online forum as an encouraging resource for those learning the language.
- Placing encouraging adds in Christian magazines
- Speaking and hosting booths at Christian educational and theological conferences
- Offering live online beginning and intermediate Greek classes to provide professional education to many people in diverse locations.
- Offering intensive week-long courses at various locations in the summer, which provide the general structure of language to those with limited time. These intensive courses have been occurring for five years.
- Promoting the National Biblical Greek Exam
- Developing discussion groups of people promoting various areas of biblical Greek. (e.g., we just started a mailing list for those teaching Greek at the elementary level).
- Through a grant from Logos Research Systems, the Institute is doing the research for the development of reverse interlinears of many English translations. These printed and electronic books function as intermediate steps to help people grow accustomed to the original language.
3. Future Activities (With your help):
- We hope to offer need based scholarships to those who have the desire and motivation to learn biblical Greek but are deterred by the cost of the classes.
- We hope to establish a publishing branch to encourage and assist those would like to publish biblical Greek educational materials for all ages.
- We are especially interested in developing innovative tools for parents to learn as they teach their children.
- We would also like to reprint many wonderful but hard to find Greek texts, which unfortunately have long since gone out of print, before losing all access to these classic resources.
- We hope to increase the quality and quantity of our current efforts (become more visible in Christian magazines and conferences).
- We hope to offer educational assistance to scholars who share the mission oriented vision of the Institute of Biblical Greek.
- We hope to offer assistance to educational and research projects which will advance biblical Greek literacy and learning.
4. Donations, 501c3 Status, and Current Needs
At the bottom of each page of the website, we include two methods for supporting the Institute of Biblical Greek financially. There is a direct donation button and then there search windows for affiliate shopping sites which will send us a small commission for purchases that originated from our site. Unfortunately, the donations are not tax deductible since we do not have non-profit 501c3 status. We do intend to become a non-profit tax exempt (501 (c)(3)) charitable trust but cannot afford the expenditures that are necessary to achieve and maintain that status. Once we have enough pledged annual support we will initiate the change in tax status. Until that time we will continue to move ahead on our current projects as the Lord blesses. Up to this point we have received relatively few donations and the site has been primarily financed by proceeds from the online classes, affiliate commissions, and volunteer work. Since a large part of our mission is to increase interest in Biblical Greek resources and education we can't expect natural market forces to support such a mission work at this time which is why we are looking in the direction of donations until we start making substantial progress in our overall goals.
To encourage donations and give possible donors an idea of our needs and current support we are now including the dynamic chart below. Please allow a couple days for your donation or pledge to show up in the chart below. Please let us know if you would like your name or name of company or religious institution to appear on a financial supporter web page.
Project
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Description |
Current Need |
Current Gifts |
Annual Pledges for 501(c)(3) Status Contact us with your pledge.
*All donations are posted through the National Biblical Greek Exam Paypal Account. |
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We believe that if we were a non-profit tax exempt 501(c)(3) charitable trust, we would receive significantly more financial support in the form of donations. But maintaining this non-profit status is not free. So we need annual commitments before we can make this move. If you want to help with this and can commit to a three year annual pledge (which would be tax deductible), please contact us.
The current gifts listed here are merely pledges. Once we reach our goal then we will ask everyone who pledged to contribute. |
$4200.00 |
$1500.00 |
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| Web Hosting Costs*All donations are posted through the National Biblical Greek Exam Paypal Account. |
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We have a significant amount of information on the web and hope to produce more interactive media types. All of this information uses server space, which isn't cheap. We also must pay for domain names and other online services to maintain our high rank in "Biblical Greek" web searches. This is our most important need area an amounts to keeping the site up and running.
This is a yearly cost for us and so we will reset the "current donations" to zero at the beginning of each year. |
$572.00 |
$120.00 |
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| 800 Number*All donations are posted through the National Biblical Greek Exam Paypal Account. |
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There are not many online resources where you can call an 800 number and talk directly to a real human. We are proud to offer this service and hope it helps keep our site current and accurate. Please donate to help us keep this courtesy.
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$480.00 |
$250.00 |
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| Greek Course Advertising*All donations are posted through the National Biblical Greek Exam Paypal Account. |
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In addition to helping many students who don’t have the luxury of a nearby Greek teaching, our online Greek courses provide substantial financial support for the BiblicalGreek.org site. To keep them full and to help spread Greek language instruction we have to let people know the courses are available. This means advertising in places other than the web like Christian magazines. We are currently saving for a World Magazine advertisement.
We will keep donations for this item accruing until we reach the goal. Then we will purchase the advertisement and set a new goal. |
$1,500.00 |
$300.00 |
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| Vocabulary Study Tool*All donations are posted through the National Biblical Greek Exam Paypal Account. |
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We have rights to Prof. John Schwandt's recordings of all vocabulary words in the Greek New Testament in both academic and ethnic pronunciation systems. These recordings are currently available in Logos Bible Software and Bibleworks. We would like to develop an online audio visual vocabulary quizzing program that would keep a history of users’ progress in memorizing Greek vocabulary.
The is a project that will begin as soon as we have funds to hire the programming. Below is our initial estimate for the cost of this project. Once we reach this goal we will begin the project. |
$3,200.00 |
$500.00 |
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