CAMBRIDGE -- "Here's today's text," said Matthew Liu as he handed out a piece of paper.

It was all Greek.

It was June 18, and the second meeting of the Harvard Catholic Forum's Gospel of John Greek Reading Group was about to begin. The group is meeting weekly at St. Paul Parish in Cambridge from June 11 to July 30 to read the entire Gospel of John in the original Koine Greek.

"Participants should have completed and have some recollection of one year or more of either Classical or Koine Greek," reads the description on the Harvard Catholic Forum website, adding, "Snacks provided."

"My Greek is a little rusty," said group member Katherine Richman.

On June 18, the group read, translated, and discussed the first chapter of the Gospel of John, which Matthew Liu's older brother Haidun Liu, a Harvard Catholic Fellow and PhD student in political philosophy, called "the most important chapter in world history."

Haidun Liu said that the Koine Greek is "more accurate" than the English translation.

"The English has these very arbitrary interventions that sometimes doesn't make any sense," he said. "I mean, sometimes they're completely wrong."

He knows a PhD student at the Harvard Divinity School who is writing a paper about the mistakes in English translations of the Gospels, such as a common one in the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. In many translations, the workers are paid a denarius, which is described as a day's wage.

"It's not one day's wage," Haidun Liu said. "A denarius is many, many days' wage. It's bad historiography."

Harvard Law School Professor Charles Donahue studied Greek when he was in high school and college, but didn't use what he learned for almost 50 years after that.

"At the same time, I got interested in reading Scripture, commentary, getting into this more deeply," he said. "It was perfectly obvious that the Greek helps."

Adam Ziccardi, a Harvard Catholic Fellow and graduate student at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, said that, when he attends Mass on Sundays, he likes to read the day's readings in Latin and Greek.

"I want to know exactly how they chose certain words, see if a certain word has more connotations than I'm used to," he said. "And I'm a beginner in Greek, but that's something I enjoy doing. And I think it's fruitful in the conversations that we have here, exactly what I'm hoping to get."

Ashley Ann Bruno, a student at the Harvard Extension School and a youth minister at St. Paul's, always jumps at the chance to study the Bible with an academic lens. She studied ancient Greek mathematics at the Extension School and found that she enjoys the language. In her class, she once had to write about teleios (perfect) numbers, which are the sum of all their factors and were first studied by the Ancient Greeks.

"Any time I can write about Jesus in my class, I will," she said, "and I made the reference, and I saw that it's one of the most used words in the Bible, because Jesus is known as the perfected."

She said she has found nuances in the Greek Gospel of John that do not exist in the English version. For instance, when Jesus asks Peter if he loves him three times, in English it's always the same word "love." In Greek, however, there are multiple forms of the word "love" which Jesus uses: "Philia," which is brotherly love, and "agape," which is unconditional divine love.

"I love the relationship between Peter and Jesus," Bruno said, "and Peter's journey, obviously, leads to our own papacy."

She read that passage 15 times in recent weeks.

"It does have an impact on our faith," she said. "It really does."