In the end, all of the hours that I poured into my pidgin Greek resulted in little more than an abiding admiration for those whose calling it is to translate sacred literature. It should have helped that I knew these texts well enough to summarize whole chapters and quote many verses from memory, but it didn’t. After memorizing a grammar book and what seemed like enough flash cards to account for all five thousand or so distinct words that appear in the New Testament, I began trying to get through the Gospel of John, supposedly the easiest of the books, and then the Apostle Paul’s more difficult letter to the Galatians. I remember all of this somewhat bitterly because I still struggled with Koine. I was heartened when a classicist friend, knowing how bad I was at learning languages, reassured me that the kind of Greek I needed to learn for this project was not the difficult kind-the Attic Greek that he and his colleagues read-but Koine Greek, which he described as “Dick and Jane” primer Greek, which would be much easier. This was so that I could read the New Testament in its original language, a desire I could not really explain, other than as a general sense that I was seeking more from Scripture. Some years ago, in a fit of religious enthusiasm, I decided that I wanted to learn Greek.