J. Randal Matheny

In what are probably the earliest of his letters that have come down to us, the two Epistles to the Thessalonians, St. Paul finds it necessary to rebuke his converts for walking "in a disorderly manner" (2 Thess 3:11). The word (?τ?κτως), with its cognates, is confined to these Epistles in the New Testament, and what exactly is meant by it is by no means clear at first site. Is St. Paul referring to actual sin or moral disorder, or to something less heinous? The papyri have supplied the answer in a striking manner. Among them is a contract of A.D. 66 [P.Oxy.II 275] in which a father arranges to apprentice his son with a weaver for one year. All the conditions of the contract as regards food and clothing are carefully laid down. Then follows the passage which specially interests us. If there are any days during this period on which the boy "fails to attend" or "plays truant" (oσας δ??? ??ν ?ν το?τω ?τακτ?ση ?μ?ρας), the father has to produce him for an equivalent number of days after the period is over. And the verb which is used to denote playing truant is the same verb which St. Paul uses in connexion with the Thessalonians. This then was their fault. They were idling, playing truant. The Parousia of the Lord seemed to them to be so close at hand that it was unnecessary for them to interest themselves in anything else. Why go to their daily work in the morning, when before night Christ might come, they thought, forgetting that the best way to prepare for that coming was to show themselves active and diligent in the discharge of their daily work and duty.

From Moulton and Milligan's Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, showing how the papyri helps us understand better the Greek language. Another example is given on the Logos website.

This is a browsable, Web-based interface to the Greek New Testament (GNT). It has several distinguishing features.

• Unlike packages such as ``Logos'', you don't need to install it: if you are reading this page using any graphical web browser (e.g. Netscape or Internet Explorer), you can browse the GNT.

• You don't need any Greek fonts. The text is rendered as images (GIF files), normally one for each verse. This gives you good-quality text - much better than several widely-used installable fonts - with no effort on your part.

• Subject to the limitations imposed by limited bandwidth, the system is fast. Several levels of cacheing are employed, on both server and client. Consequently, in most circumstances only a few kilobytes of data need to be transferred for each request. The worst case is requesting a complete chapter for the first time (e.g. John 1 is sent as a 110 kbyte data stream), but even this causes only a short delay in most cases. Because of the cacheing, speed tends to increase as you use the system.

• The system does not use JavaScript, Java, client-side image maps, or any other recent enhancement to HTML or browser technology. I'm by no means averse to using new features - I'm not a ``technophobe'' - but there are severe and often unacknowledged problems of incompatibility and inefficiency which I wanted especially to avoid in this project. For example, client-side image maps would seem to be ideal for implementing selection; but this feature proved to be unacceptably slow, at any rate on the browser on which I tested it.

• There is a search facility. You can search for a given word; for a word occurring close to another given word; for a word with a given root (base or lemma); and you can limit the search by grammatical category. Examples:
  • Find all perfect imperatives. (There are 4 of them.)
  • Find all plural forms of a particular word.

  The search facility is fast, simple and self-explanatory.

• You specify Greek input by typing a Latin transliteration on the keyboard

This site is also hosted here, which may become the principal URL for it:

http://www.kimmitt.co.uk/gnt/gnt.html

This is the most updated Greek text I've found on the Internet. The NA text is in it's 27th edition, last I heard, which is the edition I have, so the online edition is very recent compared to most texts found on Bible study sites.