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Heading into a Season of Reflection on Cancer and Life

I’ve never been one to get too excited about celebrating various anniversaries. But at least  anniversaries are usually celebrated for happy occasions: weddings, birthdays, etc.

And now I’m heading into a season of anniversaries of a different sort. It was a year ago this week that I went to the ER at the hospital in town for a blood clot in my leg. That was the start of a month and a half long process of un-knowingly heading toward death, which would, by God’s grace, be averted within days to a couple weeks of it happening. I’ve written a little about it here.

The first visit last November to the ER confirmed the blood clot was in a superficial vein rather than a deep vein and so I wasn’t in any danger of it dislodging and dying of a pulmonary embolism. My white blood cell count was a little high but that was easily explainable on the basis of having inflammation in my leg from the clot. The body reacts by creating more white cells to fight the inflammation. At that point I had no idea it would be cancer.

Needless to say, these aren’t the anniversaries to get excited about, but they present me with the opportunity to reflect. My reflection at this point is over God’s goodness throughout the last year. He was gracious every step of the way; everything I had was always better than I deserved. He gave me comfort, awesome family, awesome church family, and the preservation of my body and mind to be used to bring glory to him for some undisclosed time to come.

Now, a year later, I’ve gone through 4 rounds of chemo and am living a rather normal life. But I don’t want it to become too normal. I want to continue to live in light of the short time I have, whether that be a year or five or forty more. I pray that this reflection will not lead me to simply think on the past but look forward and give my all in the present.

The Dirty Truth about Lexicons

Do you study the New Testament in Greek? Are lexicons your best friends? Well, they sure are important.

What do you do when you come across, say, φλόξ, and you don’t know what it means and you can’t deduce its meaning simply from the context? You probably have some lexicon ready at hand, whether it be BDAG, LSJ, LN, or something else.

John Lee has written some important work on lexicography including a monograph on the history of New Testament lexicography, published in 2003, and an essay in a 2004 festschrift for Danker on the present state of lexicography.

In the essay he speaks about the importance of the lexicon and says:

Not only will lexicography be in demand, but it will continue to carry a weighty responsibility. This is because of the special character of lexicons. Lexicons are regarded as by their users as authoritative, and they put their trust in them. Lexicons are reference books presenting a compressed, seemingly final statement of fact, with an almost legal weight. The mere fact that something is printed in a book gives it authority, as far as most people are concerned. And understandably: if one does not know the meaning of a word, one is predisposed to trust the only means of rescue from ignorance.

But are lexicons infallible? His next words poignantly capture it:

Yet this trust is misplaced. The concise, seemingly authoritative statement of meaning can, and often does, conceal many sins – indecision, compromise, imperfect knowledge, guesswork, and, above all, dependence on predecessors. Lexicographers have to make a decision and put down a definite statement, and they are fallible like everyone else. But the ordinary user has no means of knowing where the mistakes have been made, where the ignorance has been covered up, what has been lifted from somewhere else without checking, and so on.

These are dirty truths that I fear schools who only provide a year of Greek study and maybe an exegetical methods course rarely disclose, if they are aware of it themselves. And I often wonder if some of the lexicons Greek students are raised on, along with a lack of linguistic understanding of how words work, lead them to think of glosses as the “literal translation” which leads to all sorts of messy stuff.

So, where does that leave the student who isn’t going to go far enough in their Greek studies to critically engage with the lexicons?

Well, among many things that might be said, I don’t think we can cite lexicons as the final word on any matter. Critical discussion should always be at hand. So, statements such as: “BDAG says…, therefore…” shouldn’t be found on our lips. Better would be: “BDAG says…. Does that make the most sense of the evidence…? Let’s look up every occurrence of the word in all extant Greek literature and decide for ourselves!” -> said no pastor ever. Or have you?

Porter et al.: Fundamentals of New Testament Greek

I may have an opportunity to teach Greek next year and so I’m thinking through pedagogy and textbooks. I started with classical Greek in my undergrad and used Athenaze. Once I had completed a year of classical I went through Mounce’s beginner’s grammar, Basics of Biblical Greek, on my own. I appreciate that the book is clear, easy to follow, and even mildly entertaining, but I don’t find his incorporation of semantic discussions of various morphological forms extremely helpful. That’s not to say I wouldn’t use this text with supplementary discussion, but I’m also interested in looking at other options. I did teach from Mounce once before.

Of course, a natural place for me to look (seeing as I’m an MDC student) is to the fairly recent Porter, Reed, and O’Donnell volume: Fundamentals of New Testament Greek, published by Eerdmans.

At this point I haven’t used the grammar so I’m not going to provide a full out review. Instead I thought I’d provide a number of links to reviews and helpful pages related to the book along with some of my initial impressions.

First, there is a website devoted to the book: portergreek.com. There you can view some chapters in both the text and the workbook, read D. A. Carson, A. C. Thiselton, and Craig A. Evans’s positive blurbs and gain access to accompanying study materials like paradigm charts.

Second, there is a blog post from the Eerdmans editor, Craig Noll. He highlights a number of exciting features of the book.

Third, there are some published reviews that contain both positive and negative elements:

RBL: Vance.
RBL: Coutsoumpos.
Themelios: Mugridge.

Fourth, blog reviews:

Paroikos analysis of 4 first year grammars.
There is another from Ricoblog but it’s making my computer freeze.

Finally, my impressions:

Just as others have picked up on, this is a serious first year grammar. In thinking about how to teach from it, I was a little scared at first but once I analyzed the ordering of the chapters and the layout of each chapter, I became more comfortable with it. I got a vision for how to set in front of the student the big picture at the start and produce a “map of the language” so that they don’t get lost moving through the chapters (helpful for any 1st year grammar perhaps).

And serious isn’t a bad thing. Porter et al. are consciously providing a rigorous first year grammar to challenge and bring students up to an excellent start in Greek. My only hesitation in this area is knowing the context of the students. I think that I would certainly use this textbook if teaching in a seminary/university environment. But I’m not yet sure about pastors and students who are currently in ministry and don’t have the same amount of time to devote to their Greek study. My hesitation is lessening as I become familiar with the text and think about how to approach that. I’m curious to get Porter’s thoughts on whether there are any groups of students he doesn’t think this book is for also.

Not surprisingly, I like the content. Aspect, as the primary semantic component of the tense-forms, is introduced with the introduction of verbs in chapter 4. The timeless model of the verbal tense-forms is explained. Great descriptions of the verbal moods and other parts of the verbs are given. My gripe with Athenaze and Mounce is that I felt the semantic component of verbs was not adequately dealt with off the bat. Or maybe I just don’t like the “list approach” to the verbs and cases: dative of time, dative of this and that; gnomic aorist, etc. For cases, I’ve found it much more helpful to begin with the core semantic component. For example, the genitive case signals restriction. I’d rather engage with that first than to be given a list of umpteen different uses with no real idea of how they hang together or to be told it means “of” in English, which it doesn’t.

And, I like the idea of starting with learning the aorist tense-form given it’s being the most frequent and its aspect (perfective) is the default one. I haven’t yet thought through how that affects the learning of the principal parts. It may be strange to me since I learned the present tense-form first.

More thoughts to come in the future as I look at it some more.

The Current State of Commentary Writing

I just evaluated four recent John commentaries and their handling of the Greek text in chapter 11 and in light of their own stated purposes. They didn’t have to agree with my stances on linguistics and verbal aspect but I looked for engagement with up to date scholarship in these areas and how they made arguments from the Greek text. Three of the four recent commentaries I canvassed had no reference to the aspect theory discussions that have been going on for more than 20 years now and two of the four commentaries had no reference to Greek grammatical work beyond 1963!! That puts these two commentaries at 50 years out of date!

It’s a strange phenomenon. Lars Rydbeck asked, back in 1975, “What happened to Greek Grammar after Albert Debrunner?” At Rydbeck’s time, a majority of scholars thought that everything had been done in Greek grammatical scholarship. The aspect discussions, among other things, of the last 20 years should put any of that nonsense to bed for anyone paying attention today. It seems to me that Rydbeck’s comments are just as true now as they were in 1975.

Thankfully there is work going on to rectify this but it’s been slow to catch on. And commentators seem to be among the slowest to catch on. Is it possible for scholars to master all the disciplines in light of the hyper specialization we’re witnessing in academia? Probably not. But isn’t the study of the Bible a study of text, and text written in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic? If our linguistic foundations are askew, what good is the superstructure?

I’m very interested to hear the papers at ETS in November evaluating the competency of various aspects of commentators. Unfortunately I won’t be there but I believe they’re being published.

Why do you think there is this lack of engagement with current Greek language and linguistics scholarship?

Preaching and the Languages

I’m always interested in how the handling of the original languages of the Bible intersect with preaching the Word. What is their value? Are they a necessary part of pastor’s toolbox? Rod Decker has an excellent paper here on that very topic.

Here’s an excerpt:

Some of you may protest, but we have good translations in English, why bother with the hard work of Hebrew and Greek when we can read what it says in English? The simplest answer was well put by a Jewish poet: “reading the Bible in translation is like kissing your bride through a veil”! I doubt any of you would be satisfied with that sort of kiss! We want the real thing. So it is with the Bible. If we want the real thing, we don’t want an English veil between us and our text. Not that the Bible in translation is bad, but not everything comes through when the original texts are transformed into another language. The limitations include the simple fact that no two languages say the same thing in exactly the same way. Every time we translate we must, of necessity, both omit and add information. That might be a foreign concept to some of you— but that makes the point: if we know only our own mother tongue, we have no way to know what has necessarily been added or deleted to put the Bible’s message into English dress (5-6).

And then he addresses (starting on p. 10) whether the use of the languages is the garnish or entrée and then mellon (think Lord of the Rings) or mantra. A good discussion ensues that I think helpfully locates the use of the languages for the pastor and will challenge some pastors’s approaches to them. Here’s a gem:

And if you are preaching to average people, what does the citation of Greek words and grammatical technicalities accomplish? The people do not understand them. The only purpose they serve is to impress people with your ability, but is that a proper goal for a minister of Jesus Christ? There may be one other purpose served by “preaching Greek.” You have perhaps heard the old preacher’s adage that is too often written in the margins of sermon manuscripts, “Point weak. Shout loud!” The way some preachers use Greek might suggest that they would write in their margins (if they were honest), “Point weak. Quote Greek!” (14).

And finally:

We must spend all the time it takes in the study grappling with the text in Hebrew or Greek, wrestling with it until the walls between us and the first century become as transparent as we can make them. But then we must leave the tools in the study and expound the text in the heart language of God’s people (15).