This has 100% been my experience. I started with Koine at a Bible college, but then finished in a Classics program at a public school. It was night and day, the difference between them. Second semester of seminary everyone is in "NT Exegesis" as a kind of Greek II, but the whole thing is about interpretation. One might barely scratch 50 lines of Greek the whole semester. And no further courses offered above that. But in the Classics program you have a whole year of five classes a week with 2-3 hours of homework *every night.* Third semester plops you right into Plato and Lysias; fourth is Homer. You still need two more courses on top and by the end we were taking Byzantine poetry with Phd students. When we were reading Plato I remember asking my prof "what Plato meant" in a particular passage - by this I meant philosophically - and he said "I don't know" before returning to the real task at hand: Reading Greek. I'm not saying every single pastor needs to be a philologist, but I have a friend doing a Phd on Paul and she doesn't read the Greek except under duress. It's wild.
As for the older scholars being fluent in Greek, Latin, Hebrew etc. and certainly for valedictorian speeches, they would have been delivered orally of course but they would have been written down -- the fluency that older scholars had and some current living ones, is from doing many hours of composition -- in grad school, we might do two courses in composition but the older scholars who started Latin and Greek in grade school or the latest middle school, would have been immersed in composition exercises -- until recently, all the Oxford Classical Text (Greek and Latin) had the preface and introduction written in Latin -- in classical studies, being able to do so is expected -- or at least it used to be. Writing and reading are different skills but from my experience, the reading fluency you speak of in your videos is greatly supported by the active control and feel you get from being able to write in the target language fluently. All that said, I enjoy the work you are doing.
I would love to hear your understanding of the phrase. "μια των σαββατων". Especially in light of Acts 20:6 clearly referring to the feast of unleavened bread, with the biblical counting of sabbaths immediately following.
12:00 great point. The KJV translators at the time when they were still students, would speak Attic Greek one to another for conversation. And during the greek revolution for independence, many Englishmen went there and tried to speak attic greek with the people (obviously they didn't get too far since demotiki and ancient Greek are different languages). That would be a cool goal for myself to one day be completely conversational in ancient Greek.
