Teaching Top Down Analysis
clayton stirling bartholomew
c.s.bartholomew at worldnet.att.net
Sun Apr 30 15:48:14 EDT 2000
The way NT Greek was taught 25 years ago seems to have produced a lot of
perennial minutiaologists. Folks who spend the lions share of their
exegetical efforts on constituents at the clause (?sentence?) level and
below.
I read a statement recently by one of our list members that once we grasp
the significance of the higher levels of discourse structure the teaching of
biblical languages will never be the same again. (This is a loose
paraphrase).
Discourse analysis of biblical languages is over a quarter of a century old
and I cannot detect that the teaching of biblical languages has changed
much. Why not?
The current crop of seminary students still seem to be convinced that the
real "payoff" in exegesis is found in lexical analysis (word studies) and
clause level syntax analysis. Why is this still the case?
Has anyone integrated "top down" analysis into the core curriculum so that
students start right of from the beginning thinking of biblical texts as a
student of music theory would think of Igor Starvinsky's "Right of Spring?"
One would not attempt to understand "Right of Spring" by analyzing a few
bars of it somewhere in the middle. But we do this kind of thing in NT Greek
all the time. Why?
--
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062
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