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 That puts these two commentaries at 50 years out of date!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?