[B-Greek] Moulton, Turner, NT Greek Grammar

Chet Creider creider at uwo.ca
Tue Aug 30 08:35:51 EDT 2005


Mike Matsko wrote:

 > B-Greekers,

 >     Eisenbrauns has the 4 volumes of Moulton, Turner, et. al. "A
 >  Grammar of New Testament Greek" on sale for about $200, about 1/3 off
 >  regular price.  Given one has the standard (Mounce, Black, Dodson,
 >  Wallace, Smythe) books, is there any value added to having this set.
 >  Thanks.

 >  You can send responses to me and I'll summarize, if you want.  The
 >> sale
 >  ends September 7, and has a bunch of other stuff on sale.

The standard reference grammars of NT Greek are Blass-Debrunner-Funk and 
the Moulton series.  Smyth is a grammar of Attic Greek.  If you don't 
have BDF, you should purchase it.  As for the Moulton series, I believe 
that the conventional wisdom is that the first volume is marvellous, the 
second quite good (the part on derivation was written by Howard), and 
the volumes on syntax and style (3 & 4, by Turner) not as good because 
Turner wasn't a linguist.  I don't agree and find the syntax volume 
quite useful in large part because Turner quotes the work of others 
extensively.  I'm less familiar with the style volume (which I don't 
own) but believe it fulfills its purpose to a large extent (to give 
relatively superficial sketches of the "style" of the various of NT 
authors).  AFAIK, volume 2 remains the most detailed available reference 
treatment of the morphology (both inflectional and derivational) of NT 
Greek.

This said, the price tag seems pretty steep even with the discount and 
you might prefer to wait for a used set to come along.  I don't believe
that BDF is very expensive and would recommend that you purchase it 
immediately, particularly if you have some familiarity with Attic Greek.

Chet Creider



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