[B-Greek] word order
R Yochanan Bitan Buth
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Mon May 30 17:12:59 EDT 2005
>Finally, to my question:
Is Moulton a worthwhile volume(s), or has more recent scholarship made
his work 'obsolete'?>
The question was about statistics. Turner's contributions (v.3 and 4)
have been criticized, rightly so, for seeing in the NT a dialect of
'Jewish Greek'. On the otherhand, Turner presents many statistics and
data that are quite useful, regardless of Turner's conclusions.
For example, Turner can state a conclusion like (N. Turner, Grammar of
New Testament Greek, IV: Style, Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1976:47,)
"The construction with the infinitive occurs, very rarely in
non-Biblical authors, but the preponderance of the strictly Hebraic
construction in Luke-Acts indicates that even when Luke sometimes uses
the infinitive construction he is still writing Biblical Greek
influenced by the LXX (II Acts 19:1; We 16:6, 21:1,5; 27:44; 28: 8."
In the context Turner had listed both the 'Hebraic structures' and the
'non-Hebraic' structures throughout both Luke and Acts. Turner (along
with most Lucan scholarship on this point) missed the point. If Luke
was writing with a biblical Greek influence in Acts and "2 Acts", he,
nevertheless, only used the 'non-Hebraic'-EGENETO structure, never the
'Hebraic' one. Notice how Turner's "the preponderance of the strictly
Hebraic construction in Luke-Acts" neatly slides over the facts that
the Hebraic structure only occurs in the gospel of Luke. Turner
implied that Luke used the Hebraic structure in Acts, therefore he was
writing a biblicizing Greek. But the data, (also outlined by Howard in
volume two of Moulton) happen to speak for themselves. On many points
Turner will list statistical data that is not available in the other
reference grammars.
ERRWSQE
Randall Buth
Randall Buth, PhD
Director, Biblical Language Center
www.biblicalulpan.org
and Director, Biblical Studies in Israel
Hebrew University, Rothberg International School
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
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