Any John Gresham fans?

No, I'm not talking about the popular author of  "The Client" or "The Pelican Brief."

I'm talking about John Gresham Machen, the author of one of the most popular Greek Grammars of the last century.

Here is a brief quote from his reflection on "The Minister and His Greek New Testament" (The highlighting in bold is from me.)

The bearing of this modern attitude toward the study of the Bible upon the study of the Greek Testament is sufficiently obvious. If the time allotted to strictly biblical studies must be diminished, obviously the most laborious part of those studies, the part least productive of immediate results, will be the first to go. And that part, for students insufficiently prepared, is the study of Greek and Hebrew. If, on the other band, the minister is a specialist—if the one thing that he owes his congregation above all others is a thorough acquaintance, scientific as well as experimental, with the Bible—then the importance of Greek requires no elaborate argument. In the first place, almost all the most important books about the New Testament presuppose a knowledge of Greek: the student who is

without at least a smattering of Greek is obliged to use for the most part works that are written, figuratively speaking, in words of one syllable. In the second place, such a student

cannot deal with all the problems at first hand, but in a thousand important questions is at the mercy of the judgment of others. In the third place, our student without Greek cannot

acquaint himself with the form as well as the content of the New Testament books. The New Testament, as well as all other literature, loses something in translation. But why

argue the, question? Every scientific student of the New Testament without exception knows that Greek is really necessary to his work: the real question is only as to whether

our ministry should be manned by scientific students.

I took this from http://www.davidcox.com.mx/library/M/Machen,%20J%20Gresham%20-%20The%20Minister%20&%20His%20Greek%20Testament.pdf

The whole article is a good read.