Post published by AntiqueRevolverGuy

Maybe because someone taught them to, they are defensive about our church, and/or they've never really learned anything about it. Fortunately there are also lots of fine people who don't freak out. Coptics, Greek Orthodox, and Jehova's Witnesses all have variants that are sometimes considerably different, and not just in how they translate things, but also including or excluding particular verses and even whole books. Even the catholic church has added and removed books over the centuries. When people profess to believe in the bible, my father, who can be a bit of a turd, will often ask "oh, which one?"

I took Greek in college and one semester we read the first chapter of John. Its very poetic and he uses words with very starkly different double meanings throughout it. My favorite is the phrase "and the darkness comprehendeth it not" which can also be translated as "the darkness cannot kill it," forshadowing the death and resurrection of Christ. It is literally impossible to translate both meanings simultaneously into English because we don't have words that have both those meanings. Sorry, you woke up my inner nerd!

Nerding on the bible is a good thing, because we acknowledge from whence it came.

how different is modern Greek from ancient Greek?

I'm not really qualified to answer than well. I'm told that they are more similar than modern English and old English. Maybe more analogous to Chaucer's writing (which is harder to read than Shakespeare, but you can figure out more or less what is being said with some effort)? "Ancient Greek" is kind of a catch all name. It has a bunch of dialects, and of course it changes over time as well. If I recall, Modern Greek has been grammatically standardized and simplified.