Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics: Open Questions in Current Research (Bloomsbury Academic Collections)

by Stanley E. Porter; D. A. Carson

Publisher:

Sheffield Academic Press

, 1993

Overview

Do verbal tenses, such as aorist and imperfect, actually communicate a temporal reference—time—or do they communicate something else entirely—aspect? Or can the tenses sometimes communicate both time and aspect? The verbal aspect debate is one of the hottest topics in Biblical Greek linguistics. Edited by Stanley E. Porter and D.A. Carson, Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics brings together into one volume essays from scholars in the field of Greek and linguistics to examine the Greek language from a linguistic and grammatical perspective.

The first half of the book is devoted to verbal aspect, and includes essays by Stanley E. Porter and Buist Fanning, two central figures in the debate over verbal aspect. The second part of the book contains a potpourri of articles on other applications of modern linguistics to the Greek Bible, and includes essays by Jeffrey T. Reed, Paul Danove, Michael W. Palmer, and Mark S. Krause.

Product Details

• Title: Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics: Open Questions in Current Research
• Editors: Stanley E. Porter and D. A. Carson
• Publisher: Sheffield Academic Press
• Publication Date: 1993
• Pages: 223

About the Editors

D. A. Carson is a research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. He has been at Trinity since 1978. Dr. Carson came to Trinity from the faculty of Northwest Baptist Theological Seminary in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he served for two years as Academic Dean. He also taught at Northwest Baptist Theological College, Richmond College, and Central Baptist Seminary in Toronto. He has served as assistant pastor and pastor and has done itinerant ministry in Canada and the United Kingdom. Dr. Carson's areas of expertise include biblical theology, the historical Jesus, postmodernism, pluralism, Greek grammar, Johannine theology, Pauline theology, and questions of suffering and evil. He is a member of the Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical Research, the Society of Biblical Literature, the Evangelical Theological Society, the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, and the Institute for Biblical Research.

Stanley Porter has taught for over twenty years in post-secondary institutions in Canada, the USA, and the UK. His publications include fourteen authored books and over 100 authored journal articles and chapters, along with various shorter pieces; he has also edited over 55 volumes. He remains a well-known and respected expert in Greek and the broader field of New Testament studies. He is currently the President and Dean, and Professor of New Testament, McMaster Divinity College, Canada.

Contents

Top Highlights

“It means, for instance, that insofar as verbal aspect has been grammaticalized in the morphology of the Greek verb, one cannot immediately leap to the kind of event to which reference is being made (Aktionsart), or to the time of event to which reference is being made (as in a time-based analysis of the verbal system), but to the writer’s or speaker’s decision to depict the event in a particular way. The bearing of this result on exegesis cannot easily be overestimated.” (Page 22)

“Porter adopts terminology common in Slavonic linguistics, and finds three fundamental aspects: perfective, grammaticalized in the aorist; imperfective, grammaticalized in the present and the imperfect, and the stative, grammaticalized in the perfect and pluperfect.” (Page 24)

“Various developments in comparative philology led many in the second half of the nineteenth century to link tense-forms not to time but to the kind of action that actually occurred—in short, to Aktionsart.” (Page 18)

“From the vantage point of Porter, then, Fanning so seriously confuses semantics and pragmatics that his work is fatally flawed. Without any consistent, undergirding theory of the semantic contributions made by the morphology of the Greek verbal system Fanning’s approach, in Porter’s view, is methodologically arbitrary and linguistically without rigor.” (Page 24)

“Both works realize the importance of the semantic category of verbal aspect for understanding the structure of the Greek verbal system, as well as its potential implications for exegesis.” (Page 31)

Product Details

• Title: Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics: Open Questions in Current Research
• Authors: Stanley E. Porter, D. A. Carson
• Series: Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series
• Publisher: Sheffield Academic Press
• Print Publication Date: 1993
• Logos Release Date: 2010
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subjects: Bible. N.T. › Language, style--Congresses; Greek language, Biblical › Congresses
• ISBNs: 9781850753902, 1850753903
• Resource ID: LLS:BIBGRKLANGLING
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-25T19:12:47Z