Linguistic Analysis of the Greek New Testament: Studies in Tools, Methods, and Practice

by Stanley E. Porter

Publisher:

Baker Academic

, 2015

Overview

Leading scholar Stanley Porter brings readers up to date on the latest advances in New Testament Greek linguistics. Porter bundles a variety of studies of the New Testament’s original language under three rubrics: texts and tools for analysis, approaching analysis, and doing analysis. He deals with multiple of New Testament texts, including passages from the Synoptic Gospels, John’s writings, and Paul’s epistles. This volume distills a senior scholar’s expansive writings on various subjects, making it an essential book for scholars of New Testament Greek and a valuable supplemental textbook for New Testament Greek exegesis.

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Key Features

• Examines linguistic issues in select passages from the Johannine writings, the Pauline corpus, and the Synoptic Gospels
• Identifies and explains linguistic tools for conducting rigorous exegesis
• Shows how to use exegetical tools to optimize linguistic study

Contents

• Texts and Tools for Analysis
  • Who Owns the Greek Text of the New Testament? Issues That Promote and Hinder Further Study
  • Analyzing the Computer Needs of New Testament Greek Exegetes
  • “On the Shoulders of Giants”: The Expansion and Application of the Louw-Nida Lexicon
  • The Blessings and Curses of Producing a Lexicon
• Approaching Analysis
  • Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation
  • A Multidisciplinary Approach to Exegesis
  • Sociolinguistics and New Testament Study
  • Discourse Analysis: Introduction and Core Concepts
  • The Ideational Metafunction and Register
  • Time and Aspect in New Testament Greek: A Response to K. L. McKay
  • Three Arguments regarding Aspect and Temporality: A Response to Buist Fanning, with an Excursus on Aspectually Vague Verbs
  • The Perfect Tense-Form and Stative Aspect: The Meaning of the Greek Perfect Tense-Form in the Greek Verbal System
• Doing Analysis
  • A Register Analysis of Mark 13: Toward a Context of Situation
  • The Grammar of Obedience: Matthew 28:19–20
  • Verbal Aspect and Synoptic Relations
  • Study of John’s Gospel: New Directions or the Same Old Paths?
  • Method and Means of Analysis of the Opponents in the Pauline Letters
  • 1 Timothy 2:8: Holy Hands or Holy Raising?
  • Greek Word Order: Still an Unexplored Area in New Testament Studies?
  • Proper Nouns in the New Testament
  • Hyponymy and the Trinity

Top Highlights

“Cohesion entails that there are various features of texts that hold them together” (Page 139)

“The Louw-Nida lexicon is clearly a hybrid of both an ordinary and a semanticist dictionary.” (Page 49)

“Obvious elements include the use of conjunctions, the presence of participant chains, the repeated use of lexis from certain semantic domains, and the deployment of various morphologically based devices, such as tense-forms, voice-forms, and mood-forms. Every one of these features (and many more besides) plays a role in creating what is called a text.” (Pages 139–140)

“One of the assumptions to be noted in the lexicon is that Louw and Nida believe that there are ‘no synonyms.’ By this, they mean that two words, even if they denote the same thing, are different in their connotations or associative meanings (I will return to this notion below).” (Page 50)

“Here I will briefly mention some important concepts that Halliday develops. The first is the context of culture, which consists of those broad cultural features that have a bearing upon language use.” (Page 125)

Praise for the Print Edition

Porter has produced numerous excellent books on New Testament Greek and has shown himself to be a master of Greek grammar, syntax, idiom, and text. In this latest study he draws on his masterly learning and prodigious reading and research in this area to examine such subjects as discourse analysis, structural linguistics, sociolinguistics, verbal aspect, word order, and hyponymy.

—Anthony C. Thiselton, emeritus professor of Christian theology, University of Nottingham

No one in recent decades has matched Stanley Porter in the breadth of his interests in linguistic analysis of the Greek New Testament. Some have worked on, say, verbal aspect theory or on discourse analysis or on sociolinguistics, but Porter has worked on all three and on several other subdisciplines as well—and this both at the theoretical level and at the level of the exegesis of specific biblical texts.

—D.A. Carson, research professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Porter succeeds in taking the mystery out of linguistics! His book is brilliant in conception and rich with examples and exegetical insight. Students, pastors, and veteran interpreters will benefit from this book.

—Craig A. Evans, Payzant Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Acadia Divinity College

Porter makes a compelling case for New Testament students to familiarize themselves with principles of modern linguistics. For those who already have such an introduction, the book makes an excellent intermediate-level textbook for a class or seminar.

—Craig Blomberg, Craig Blomberg, distinguished professor of New Testament, Denver Seminary

Product Details

• Title: Linguistic Analysis of the Greek New Testament: Studies in Tools, Methods, and Practice
• Author: Stanley E. Porter
• Publisher: Baker
• Publication Date: 2015
• Pages: 448
• Christian Group: Evangelical
• Resource Type: Collected Essays
• Topic: New Testament

About Stanley E. Porter

Stanley E. Porter, PhD, University of Sheffield, has taught for more than 30 years in post-secondary institutions in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He is a Greek and New Testament expert, and, since 2001, has been the president, dean, and professor of New Testament at McMaster Divinity College. He's best known for his works on verbal aspects in New Testament Greek, is actively involved in OpenText.org and the Linguistics Institute of Ancient and Biblical Greek, and is a regular columnist for Christian Week.

Porter is the author or editor of numerous New Testament and Greek studies, including Idioms of the Greek New Testament, Discourse Analysis and the New Testament: Approaches and Results, and Dictionary of New Testament Background. He has edited over 80 volumes and authored 28 books on various New Testament and related topics, including How We Got the New Testament: Text, Transmission, Translation, and The Gospel of John in Modern Interpretation. Plus, he's published more than 450 journal articles, chapters in books, and dictionary entries and regularly speaks at major conferences and other venues around the world.

His interests include Greek language and linguistics, hermeneutics and various methods of interpretation, and a range of New Testament studies from the Gospels to John to Acts to Paul. He is also a papyrological and text-oriented research specialist and is interested in the wider Greco-Roman world. Outside of academia, Stanley has served in young adult ministry and has assisted in developing a lay training institute for the local church.

Sample Pages from Linguistic Analysis of the Greek New Testament: Studies in Tools, Methods, and Practice