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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