[B-Greek] Wallace or Porter?

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at ioa.com
Sun Aug 28 16:39:56 EDT 2005


On Aug 28, 2005, at 2:18 PM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:

> On Aug 28, 2005, at 10:41 AM, Eric Weiss wrote:
>
>
>> Please eludidate. Do you mean the "Introduction" to
>> A.K.M. Adam's book A Grammar for New Testament Greek?
>> Or do you mean the book itself (i.e., the book is an
>> "introductory" Greek grammar)?
>
> The book as a whole.
>
>> And, why do you pick Adam's book, and what does he
>> have to say vis-a-vis the Wallace vs. Porter approach?
>
> Because Adam's framework, were not talking about linguistics now, is
> different from Wallace. I am wondering what impact this would have on
> his treatment of NT Greek. It might not have any. I saw the book when
> it was published and it appeared at first glance to be a standard
> treatment of the subject. I didn't read it with this question in mind.
>
> Dr. Conrad is correct that at some point hashing over the merits of
> particular authors becomes tedious. I am sure there are millions of
> people who wouldn't have any problem reading Wallace. That in fact
> motivates others to protest.

For what it's worth, I was disappointed in Adam's textbook; I had  
high hopes for it in teaching a one-month crash course in Koine in a  
St. Louis seminary (the kind of course that I really think ought to  
be legally banned!). AKMA was an impressive poster on B-Greek in the  
late 1990's and I was expecting better from this textbook, but in  
fact, this was a re-write of another textbook, and I'm not altogether  
sure how much of it was his responsibility. I thought the grammatical  
explanations were inadequate and the made-up Greek and English  
sentences seemed to me too often unidiomatic. Although most of the  
classes in Greek that I taught over the course of my teaching career  
were in Classical Attic, I did teach Koine once with Mounce, a couple  
times with Machen; I know that both these textbooks have their  
partisans but I would not recommend either one of them.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/




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