Rewind to Fall 2004: I just decided to register for my first Biblical Greek course in college, and while waiting in line to finalize my registration I ended up talking with a student who was actually taking it for the second time. Naturally, I started to get a little paranoid, wondering if this was a good choice. Not to mention, he also warned me that on the first day of class our prof would line us up outside the class and we’d have to light a match and recite the alphabet before it went out! As it turns out you can actually recite it a couple times in that amount of time without burning yourself. This is how my journey into Biblical Greek, along with a love-hate relationship with the grammar Basics of Biblical Greek written by William D. (Bill) Mounce, all started.

BBGG3-sm In 2008, I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Mounce in person at the Annual Meeting of the ETS, and found out he was working on the third edition to his grammar and needed someone to assist him with lexical/statistical research using Accordance. He wanted to eliminate any memorization of forms that didn’t actually occur in the Greek New Testament. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity, and spent the next couple months working through all the statistical counts and verb principal parts listed in the grammar’s vocabulary and dictionary, assisted with other research related items, and even wrote a short Exegetical Insight in chapter 34. Later that year at the 2009 Annual Meetings of the ETS and SBL, the third edition of BBG launched and was an immediate hit. The grammar was re-designed with a new color scheme, The Professor was added for illustrations, the chapter on –μι verbs was split into two, as well as updates to various content throughout.

Before the third edition launched in print, we discussed developing it for Accordance. But, we didn’t want to settle at creating a static version; we wanted to develop it in a way that integrated it with other Accordance resources and would help students in their study of the language. So, after extensive consultation with Dr. Mounce and many hours of hard work, we’re excited to release the Accordance edition of Basics of Biblical Greek.

Along with all the new updates to the third edition, the Accordance version offers extensive interconnectivity with our library of resources, such as the new Mounce Reverse-Interlinear New Testament and even includes short audio clips with Dr. Mounce pronouncing each vocabulary word.

So, after 7 years of working with this grammar in its different forms, you can bet that I’m really excited about this release. To get a more hands-on feel for the new features in our version, check out the following short screen cast.