NT Greek Grammars

Steven Craig Miller scmiller at www.plantnet.com
Thu Oct 21 07:56:30 EDT 1999


To: Jay Adkins,

<< PS: As soon as I can afford it I would like to purchase Porter's 
&  Fanning's books on Verbal Aspect. I have Porter's Idioms of the Greek 
NT, Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, Blacks, It's Still Greek to 
Me &  Linguistics For Students of NT Greek, plus some older Grammars by 
Summers,  Robertson & Davis, and Dana & Mantey. I am waiting for the new 
BAGD to come out like everyone else. Any other suggestions for someone on a 
very limited budget would be appreciated. >>

The two major NT Greek Grammars are A.T. Robertson's "A Grammar of the 
Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research" and 
Blass-Debrunner-Funk's "A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other 
Early Christian Literature." Personally I prefer Robertson's over BDF.

There is also the Moulton-Howard-Turner grammar (published by T.&T. Clark), 
I don't tend to use it as much, with the exception of volume two which 
covers accidence and word-formation. Howard's section on suffixes is 
extremely valuable IMO. (It would be hard to justify buying all four 
volumes, just to have the section on suffixes. Of course, there is always 
the library!)

Frankly the Grammar I use the most, even for the NT, is Smyth-Messing's 
"Greek Grammar" (Harvard UP). IMO, students of NT Greek do themselves harm 
if they shut themselves off from the rest of ancient Greek literature. IMO 
every student of the NT should have Smyth-Messing's grammar and the 
intermediate Liddell-Scott lexicon (which comes in three sizes: abridged, 
intermediate, and full/large).

-Steven Craig Miller
Alton, Illinois (USA)
scmiller at www.plantnet.com

 From Luther's Large Catechism: "Why, do you think, is the world now so 
full of unfaithfulness, shame, misery, and murder? It is because everyone 
wishes to be his or her own master, be free from all authority, care 
nothing for anyone, and do whatever he or she pleases. So God punishes one 
knave by means of another" (BoC 386.154).



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