Ellis serves church family by teaching Greek class

By Greg Miller
STAR STAFF
gmiller@starhq.com

   Roby Ellis is serving his church family as the instructor of a weekly Greek class at the Elizabethton Church of Christ.
   Ellis teaches a Greek language class on Sundays at 5 p.m. He has been teaching the class for about 10 months.
   About five students attend the sessions on a regular basis. "Of those five, I think the oldest is 26 and the youngest is 14," Ellis said. "There's a great desire in our group of young people to both learn and work.
   "We get questions from time to time concerning a particular passage in the New Testament, in which a Greek word is used. When you know what the original language said, you get a better feel for the intent of the passage itself."
   Crawford Scott, who studied Greek for about 30 years, started the Greek class about five years ago. "That's when I developed an interest in the Greek language," Ellis said.
   When Ellis began studying the Greek language, "It confirmed what I had already learned. It made those beliefs a lot stronger."
   The Greek alphabet has 24 letters. "They're a little different from ours," Ellis said. "It's not a Roman alphabet. Most of the letters are pretty similar. The Hebrew language is a different matter."
   The class is using the textbook, "Essentials of New Testament Greek." "It begins with the vocabulary and the alphabet, and it builds on that just like any other language study," Ellis said. The class will probably take about another year to complete the textbook, according to Ellis.
   "Then we'll probably do studies from the Greek New Testament on each book of the New Testament," he said.
   An Elizabethton High School graduate, Ellis earned a B.A. degree in foreign languages from East Tennessee State University, where he studied both Spanish and French. "I studied Hebrew at Milligan College," he said. "I studied Greek for four or five years."
   Scott, Ellis noted, said the difference in reading the Bible in English and in Greek is comparable to watching TV in color or black and white. "That's a very true statement," Ellis observed.
   Studying Greek, Ellis said, affected his study habits. "I'll find myself going back to the original language, and I find myself getting lost in a word study," he remarked.
   Anyone can profit from studying Greek, according to Ellis, who works in the office of ETSU President Paul Stanton as a graduate assistant. "It's not that difficult a language as most people expect and anticipate, at least not on this level, and everybody can benefit from it," he said. "Just to have a piece of it can be a great asset."
   Ellis wants to spend additional time studying Hebrew, "So that I can read the Old Testament as well as the New Testament in the original languages in which they were written."
   Jeremy Epling, a student in the Greek class, teaches a class on World Religions at the church on Tuesdays at 7 p.m. Ellis attends the class, which has about 30 students.
   For more information about the Greek class, call 542-5131.