Brief History of the Project
Stephen Pribble

Dennis and Stephen began to study the Greek New Testament together about seventeen years ago, meeting weekly for two hours to read and discuss the grammar and meaning of the text.

Dennis, a computer programmer, had had an interest in languages for many years and had studied German, French and Spanish (among others) and had taught himself Latin and Greek. Etymology, grammar and syntax are particular interests of his, and for many years he has devoted much time to a syntactical analysis of the Greek New Testament.

Stephen, a pastor, enjoyed reading the Bible in French and took his first Greek courses at Bible college in the early 1970s. He pursued further studies in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic in seminary. For over fifteen years he has maintained the practice of reading aloud the entire Greek New Testament every year.

In the early 2000s Dennis and Stephen began tutoring sessions with Zana Litos, a native-born Greek speaker who had recently moved to the U.S. Becoming acquainted with modern Greek pronunciation enlivened their study of the Greek New Testament as they began to appreciate the euphony and beauty of the spoken text.

Along the way, Ian—at that time Stephen’s neighbor and co-owner of an IT company—joined their weekly study as his schedule permitted. He had taken Greek in college and kept up the practice of reading the Greek New Testament regularly. He, too, enjoyed learning modern Greek pronunciation. Over the years the trio has read together much of the Greek New Testament, as well as several books of the Septuagint.

As Dennis shared his passion of grammatical and syntactical analysis—as well as insights gained from his self-generated syntactical database (a one-of-a-kind, painstakingly programmed using the now-obsolete but still powerful Fox Pro)—Stephen and Ian began to share the vision of the benefits that could be gained by expanding the database to include not only the one-fourth of the sentences in the Greek New Testament that have been analyzed and coded to date, but the whole GNT. They have begun a non-profit corporation to bring that dream to reality.