BDAG vs LS

Steven Lo Vullo slovullo at mac.com
Sun Sep 15 23:39:04 EDT 2002



On Sunday, September 15, 2002, at 09:33 PM, Gordon Goltz wrote:

>   Are we not talking about personal preferences in this discussion? It 
> is like a phone book. You do have to open it up to make it useful. 
> Which phone book do you want to use--ATT or Sprint? If it works for 
> you, use it.

Well, if one's personal preference is for the scant and incomplete as 
opposed to the detailed and comprehensive, then it is indeed a matter 
of personal preference. Those who have used and compared LSJ and 
BAGD/BDAG over the years know what I mean. How many times is only a 
single NT usage or nuance tacked on at the end of an LSJ entry with 
nothing but a gloss? I think many would agree that, for all its 
usefulness as a Classical Greek lexicon, the NT is more or less an 
afterthought in LSJ. Compare by contrast, e.g., the abundance of 
detailed *definitions* (as opposed to mere glosses) in Louw-Nida and 
BDAG. For that matter, it could even be argued that a succinct NT 
dictionary (like Barclay Newman's) that offers mainly just glosses on 
words and phrases, is more useful for strictly NT study than LSJ. As 
for the phone book analogy, would one rather have a phone book with the 
full phone number for a given residence, or one that leaves out many of 
the digits?
============
Steven R. Lo Vullo
Madison, WI




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