On a bit of a whim, I decided to record 1st Corinthians last night. As I am pushing to learn all the vocabulary of the NT, I’m going book by book, and once I have the vocab for a book, I like to listen to it several times. I couldn’t find 1 Corinthians complete anywhere in a Koine Era Pronunciation, so I decided to record it myself. I couldn’t spend a lot of time on editing right now, so I offer these recordings with some caveats.

With my Acts project, I typically spend about 2-3 hours per chapter on editing. I record multiple takes. Then I edit it so that I make sure that my pronunciation, accenting, word spacing and sentence flow are as good as I can make them (not shooting for perfection, but looking for high personal quality). Then I do noise reduction and go space by space to eliminate breathing sounds and mouth noises as much as possible. Finally I run some mastering plugins in Audacity to improve the audio further.

For this, I decided to do a single take through the entire book. What this means is that there are, occasionally, errors in how I accent, pronounce and space words, and sometimes the rhythm I give a sentence. At times I will repeat a word more correctly if I noticed the error. This also means that toward the end of the books I was both reading chapter’s I haven’t really read before in greek (at least for a long time since I had way less vocab) and I was getting physically exhausted by the process of reading.

Also, I promised myself that I would not make any cuts or do any manual breathing noise eliminations. I say I “promised myself”, because I have a tendency to want to do just one more thing to improve it until I’ve done 10 and wasted a bunch of time. It is on editing for corrections and the process of eliminating breathing and mouth noises that I spend the most time, so by eliminating those, I could just run the audio files through some automated noise reduction and mastering plugins and save a lot of time.

All that to set your expectations on what you are getting here. This is valuable for me even with the lower quality, and I suspect it may still be valuable for many of you as well. One day I may swing back and do another take or do some editing, but right now I need to favor quantity over quality.

You can find all my other recordings on my Greek category page.

Feel free to download and share the files, but please cite me if you share it online (a link to my site is sufficient). All chapters are from the SBLGNT.

1 Corinthians 1

1 Corinthians 2

1 Corinthians 3

1 Corinthians 4

1 Corinthians 5

1 Corinthians 6

1 Corinthians 7

1 Corinthians 8

1 Corinthians 9

1 Corinthians 10

1 Corinthians 11

1 Corinthians 12

1 Corinthians 13

1 Corinthians 14

1 Corinthians 15

1 Corinthians 16

References

Holmes, Michael W., ed. The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. https://sblgnt.com/license/.