[B-Greek] Stanely Porter on Greek grammars

Kenneth Litwak javajedi2 at yahoo.com
Sun Jan 18 01:09:49 EST 2004


   From time to time, there are discussions here of
grammars.  I was interested to read an essay recently
by Stanley Porter (the book, from Baker Academic, 
it’s in is not yet published, so you can’t look it
up) that essentially, to use the vernacular,
“dis’d” all the NT Greek grammars I know of,
except for Moulton’s Prolegomena and Young’s
intermediate grammar.  Porter gives two basic reasons
for this.
1.  Just about all NT Greek grammars are based on
language theory from the 19th century, and pretty much
ignore anything linguists have learned about how
language works since then.  Here Porter dumps on BDF,
Robertson (though less so), Dana and Mantey, Wallace,
Winbery and others.  I’m not sure that all grammars
should fall under that condemnation, but Porter is
probably correct to a fair degree.
2.  He says that NT Greek grammars suffer from
analyzing NT Greek through comparison with Attic
Greek.  He says, provocatively, that Koine Greek,
spoken and written over a wide geographical area
should not be judged against or compared to for
understanding to a dialect of Greek spoken by the
elite of one city five centuries before the New
Testament period.  Like the first of these critiques,
this seems overstated to me.  I don’t think you can
confine classical Greek to 5th cent B.C. Athens.  At
he same time, I think he has a very good point that
you should not judge or seek to understand what is
happening in Ne Testament Greek in light of the
practice of Homer or Plato or others writing in a very
different cultural context at a very different time in
a much more limited area.  Exactly how widely known
Attic Greek was I will leave to Carl to speak on, but
I would doubt that before Alexander the Great, it was
anywhere nearly as widely used as Koine Greek after
Alexander’s time. 

   I’m not seeking here to tell you to go burn your
volume by Turner on style, which Porter finds
particularly poor methodologically.  I’m raising
these points because I’d like to know what others
think.  


Kenneth Litwak, Ph.D.
Affiliate Faculty
Southwestern College
Wichita, KS

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