Tagged: Verbal Aspect

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.

Verbal Aspect Resources

I’m glad to see people were interested in the keeping up your Greek post that included discussion of Greek verbal aspect. The question of resources arose, for which I’m thankful.

For a long time it has seemed that most of the work produced has been very technical and introductory grammars have been slow to incorporate current models of verbal aspect. This may be starting to change.

So, what resources are most helpful to introduce someone with a Greek background to the subject? I hadn’t looked at Andy Naselli’s article for a while, but upon review I would consider it the best brief introduction to the subject. He also gives his recommendation for resources in this article and orders them according to how he sees it would most benefit an uninitiated reader in the subject.

Naselli, Andrew David. “A Brief Introduction to Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek.” DBSJ 12 (2007): 17-28.

Next, you can check out Constantine Campbell’s blog series related to his introductory book on verbal aspect. I’m linking to Andy Naselli’s post since the five blog posts are neatly indexed there.

Con Campbell blogs on Verbal Aspect

Last for online resources for now is Rodney J. Decker’s condensation and summary of Stanley Porter’s monograph.

Rod Decker, “The Poor Man’s Porter”

You can also see how Stanley Porter (et.al.) incorporate verbal aspect in their recent introductory Greek grammar textbook, Fundamentals of New Testament Greek. Even if you have already studied Greek at the introductory level this is an excellent resource to have.

If you look through these and trace out the bibliographic material you should be well equipped to enter the discussion.

Keeping up to Date with Greek (Verbal Aspect)

Let me preface this post with my saying that I am not currently a pastor. What I say here should therefore be taken with a grain of salt, but I hope more than that that it would be weighed carefully. As a result, I will couch this in the form of a question with reflections.

Is it possible for pastors to keep up with current Greek scholarship on at least a marginal enough level that they are aware of the discussions and especially take into account developments in the last 2+ decades on verbal aspect?

I notice in sermons that pastors and speakers frequently say something about the Greek that lies behind the English version they are using and make an exegetical pronouncement about the text based on the verb that is questionable. The idea that either absolute time or ‘kind of action’ is the central feature of the verbal tense-form is an antiquated idea (with some debate as to whether time functions at all in it). I hesitate to provide examples lest I single pastors out. These pronouncements do not always affect the main point of the sermon but if I were preaching ideas that have shown to be false, I would want to have those things corrected out of integrity.

So, is it possible for a pastor to keep up with current Greek scholarship? I have two thoughts on this.

1) Scholars may be to blame in the first place. Commentary writers and popularizers of academic material have themselves failed to keep up and provide pastors with material that keeps up to date with the current understandings of the Greek language, especially the Greek verb.

I recently got my hands on a commentary that was released in 2010 (I won’t mention who) that fails to cite any Greek grammatical work beyond 1963, with the exception of two revised lexicons (1996 and 2000) which themselves are not in line with modern linguistics and Greek grammatical study. As such, the writer refers to tense-form usage in terms of its time-values and ‘kind of action’ that fails to recognize what all the major players of Greek grammar currently do and have for at least 2 decades: aspect, and not time, is the major contribution of the verbal tense-forms. Sadly this commentary is not alone in relying on dated grammars that were once magisterial (and no doubt they should be consulted) but have now been surpassed and even contradicted. How can pastors be expected to stay up to date if they are reading commentaries like this?

On the other hand, there are small glimmers of hope that the tide is changing as pastoral commentaries such as Kruse’s The Letters of John (PNTC) and Carson’s forthcoming Johannine Epistles (NIGTC) take verbal aspect seriously in their discussion of the Greek verb. Let’s hope for higher percentages.

2) Whatever the time commitments of the pastor, most (I hope) would agree that the preaching and teaching of the Word is central to the pastor’s job (cf. e.g., Acts 6:4; letters to Timothy). If that is so, the same pastors would agree that the faithful preaching and teaching of the Word is required. After all, to knowingly say something false would not be helpful. I don’t want to say that the pastor needs to be a scholar (there are varying gifts anyway) but should not some contact be maintained with the disciplines from when the pastor first encountered them in their seminary training (Greek as well as church history, theology, etc.)? After all, seminary does not teach everything the pastor needs to know so that they don’t have to read another book in their life, but it exposes the pastor to the beginning of a lifetime of study (I first heard this idea expounded by D.A. Carson in an interview).

Of course, all this is predicated on the idea that the languages are important for the pastor in the first place, a topic for discussion another time (but as I’ve heard many say and I myself believe: you don’t find pastors who have learned Greek well ever complain that it has not been fundamental in their study and teaching).

So, is it possible to maintain contact and stay abreast of the current discussion? I don’t have the final answer and won’t say more than I’ve just said for now except that if a pastor doesn’t think the languages are worth their time, should they quote Greek or refer to grammatical issues in a sermon in the first place?

Interested in your thoughts.