continued from last week
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1. Back in the day, Mike Harstad was a legend at Asbury College. (I don't know the details of his departure so I'll leave it at that.) He was known for teaching Greek the old school way -- by which I mean the way my mother learned it at Frankfort Bible College in the early 1940s. You learned Attic Greek first. Then you downshifted into Koine Greek, the "merchant Greek" of the New Testament.
Brian Small learned Greek from him that way and, as I recall, first introduced me to Smyth's classical Greek grammar. In my seminary years, Greek resources featured high on my list of birthday and Christmas requests. My parents obliged and I filled in some details. I believe Joseph Beth was helpful.
Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker, Liddle Scott, Moulton and Geden, Blass-Debrunner. My parents gave me Kittle's 10 volume Theological Dictionary one Christmas. Of course, it turned out to be riddled with language fallacies, not to mention the fact that it was put together by Nazi Bible scholars. Oh well.
In the 1992-1993 academic year, Harstad was on a sabbatical. The whole year. And, since I was now finishing up my MA in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Kentucky (UK), I seemed like a good pick to do some of the fill in while he was gone.
So I taught second year Latin at Asbury College that year, one class each semester. He used Robert Ball's Reading Classical Latin text, which used simple texts from Julius Caesar, Ovid, and the like. It was nice. If only I could have started out with those beginning texts instead of being thrown into poetry again at UK.
I can't say that I remember any students except for Jerald Walz, who has occasionally stayed in touch.
2. We used to joke that a great gulf separated Asbury College from the Seminary, as in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Seminary men were known to go over to hang out in hopes of finding girls who might date them. It was a little embarrassing, and I joined the ranks of the embarrassing for a short time.
Some of my college friends were RD's at Kresge. We would go over to visit them. My roomate at the time was Brian Matherlee, now well known Wesleyan pastor in North Carolina. He introduced me to the Braves and the Tarheels.
He was much more of an extrovert than me and quite cool for a seminary guy. A brief story will capture our respective personalities. Two of the most popular female seminary students came to our apartment to visit him. I was there -- or at least I thought I was. As he showed them around the apartment, he pointed to my room and mentioned that it was Ken's room. Mind you, I was standing right there behind them.
"Who?" they asked.
"Ken," he said. And then as the look of perplexity continued on their faces, he added, "He's standing right behind you."
Ah, such is life.
3. I was a Greek and Hebrew Teaching Fellow at Asbury Seminary from the fall of 1990 to the spring of 1992, going to UK part time. Then from 1992-1993, I went full time to UK and finished my degree.
This involved of course going headlong into Latin. I've mentioned that I took 2.5 years of it in high school. Then I spent the summer of 1991 going through Wheelock.
The first class I finally took was, by some freak act, another poetry class: Juvenal, Martial, and Statius. It wasn't too bad. Juvenal was a satirist. So we read the famous quote that all the people want are bread and circuses. Martial, as I recall, was ronchy. So for a brief moment I knew some Latin bad words and sex terms. I had Dr. Jane Phillips for that class. She was quite reasonable.
She was Roman Catholic, and I think may have been a nun at one time. Not entirely sure. I remember her being perplexed that I didn't know the term "fracture" for when the priest breaks the wafer when consecrating the elements. She was trying to prompt my memory for the fourth principal part of frango -- "fractus."
I had two semesters of Latin Composition with her my final year. I can't say that I learned as much as I would have liked, but that has always been my story.
4. I took Virgil's Aeneid with Lewis Swift. He was Dean of Undergraduate Studies and for some reason I was surprised that he actually would teach a class. He passed away a few years ago. I remember a brief exchange we had at a social for the master's students in classics. It was at Robert Rabel's house, as I remember. I dutifully abstained from the wine that was on offer. He had a very nice wine stock, as I recall.
Somehow, we had a brief chat about the imprecatory psalms. Dr. Swift said something like, "I was never quite able to figure out what to do with the imprecatory psalms. You know, praying down God's wrath on your enemies." He had actually studied for ministry as a Roman Catholic at one point, I believe.
I responded that I had always taken them somewhat metaphorically. Praying for God to end evil and various vices rather than people. He seemed amused.
He was a great teacher of the Aeneid and, although I continued my multi-hour pre-class Arby's ritual, I regularly found myself trying to guess when I would be asked to read to make sure I had something to say once we got there. A trick I tried with varying success was to volunteer early and then have pockets of text translated so I could volunteer throughout the class and just maybe give the appearance of having it all done.
Sometimes it worked. Sometimes I missed the Battleship.
5. There were classes I wanted to take but it just didn't work out. I missed Plato. That hurt. I went the first day but conceded I just didn't have the time. I did catch Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics with Robert Rabel (Books I and X, I believe). I missed Homer, which sucked. I mentioned that I had a year of Sanskrit with Greg Stump.
I had to pass a reading French competency. This was while I was still a teaching fellow. The problem is that the class I signed up for was at 8am. And at that time I certainly was not a morning person. That didn't happen until I was married. I couldn't get myself up. And it's not like there was an attendance requirement. Everything stood or fell on whether you passed the competency exam at the end.
I went the first day. I went a random day in the middle. I went to the class before the exam, I believe. And I studied reading French on my own.
I got an A in the class.
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