Academically Imposing Preacher of the Day Dept

My friend Rameen and I were talking about Biblical hermeneutics, and I mentioned the fact that over the last couple of decades I've heard quite a few Christian speakers pontificate about what the Bible says "in the original Greek" -- and almost always it has been instantly clear that they don't know what they're talking about. (You have to remember I'm a classics major from Princeton who reads his New Testament, and does his NT scripture memory work, in the koine Greek of the first century church; so if the preacher's pulling something out of his, um, hat, I generally know it.) "So basically," I concluded, "I pretty much warn people that whenever they hear a preacher say, 'Now in the original Greek...' they should generally just disregard whatever comes next because it's probably wrong."

Whereupon Rameen replied, "Oh, that reminds me..." And he proceeded to pass on to me the following more or less direct quote from a sermon he heard a few weeks back in a church he was visiting:

"Now if you look at this passage in the original Greek, it's clear that this is what we in academic circles refer to as an 'anachronism,' which is where you say one thing but you really mean something different."

[chuckling gleefully] Not only would I recommend that the reverend gentleman go find a textbook of rhetoric and figures of speech and look up "irony" -- but I think he should pay especially close attention to one particular variety thereof. For, while he may not be very good at Greek, he's plenty good at dramatic irony...