Benjamin Merkle's "Exegetical Gems" (A Discussion)-Part I

Merkle opens his book Exegetical Gems from Biblical Greek by addressing the issue of translation and what it means to render Greek into English with some degree of nuance. He counsels against an overly wooden translation, and I think this is good advice. For example, John 1:1 probably should not be rendered "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with the God . . . " 

Of course, this issue is more a matter of English than Greek, but it illustrates why overly wooden translations can be misleading. For the same reason, after one learns more about aorist participles, the need to translate them with "having X-ed" is no longer necessary (e.g., "having walked"). The more one's knowledge of Greek grows, the more nuanced his/her translations can become: see page 3 of Merkle for an example of how one might treat the positive adjective in Matthew 18:8. 

Merkle explains how features of the Greek language shifted whenever Koine came into existence. There is helpful information in this chapter, including data on various adjectival functions in Koine Greek (this particular dialect of Greek also increased the use of prepositions but decreased employment of the optative mood). The next subject he addresses is textual criticism of the GNT.