[B-Greek] structuralism & Robert W. Funk 2nd Ed.

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Jun 10 06:30:35 EDT 2007


On Jun 10, 2007, at 1:44 AM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:

> There are a few other biblical/classical grammars written using the
> structuralist framework. One is Waldo S. Sweet, Latin a Structural
> Approach 1957, published the same year as Chomsky's Syntatic
> Structures, E.V.N. Goetchius Language of the NT, 1965. Funk's 2nd Ed.
> was published in 1973. Waltke-O'Connor Biblical Hebrew Syntax was
> still dabbling in structuralism in the 1990s.
>
>  From what I have read so far I can see that R.W. Funk is preferable
> to some of the other first year grammars but one can only wish that
> the framework was something more current than C.C. Fries The
> Structure of English 1952.

I realize that the point of this comment has a different focus from  
the comment I'm going to offer on it, but perhaps what I want to say  
will be worth saying anyway.

Elizabeth, it seems to me that you have long since reached the point  
that most Greek teachers who have taught for several years and used  
different textbook eventually reach: the realization that the only  
adequate textbook that meets one's own desiderata is one that one  
writes for oneself. I certainly often considered doing that myself,  
but I think it's evidently a good thing that I never did (the  
nearest  thing to it being a "Supplement" to the JACT "Reading Greek"  
textbook, which supplement I now see to be flawed in many ways. In  
fact, I think that FAR too many Greek teachers have succumbed to that  
impulse to "write their own" textbook. I had a high school geometry  
teacher who didn't say this but apparently felt that a translation of  
Euclid would suffice to teach plane geometry. He repeatedly said,  
"There are new books and there are good books; the new books are not  
good, and the good books are not new."

Obviously that dictum is more entertaining than useful. But it does  
seem remarkable to me that new textbooks of Biblical Greek don't  
really "hit the spot" with teachers and students generally. I've  
taught Biblical Greek out of Machen and out of Mounce. I despise  
Machen and I don't like Mounce; my experience with AKMA's textbook  
was not satisfactory. All this may be my fault; I'm inclined to think  
that learning Biblical Greek depends more upon the student than upon  
either the teacher or the textbook. But the fact is that Machen, as  
wretched a textbook as it is, survives into a new generation because  
people like its layout and method (it's like Crosby & Scheaffer, the  
old high-school text for Attic that teaches one to read Xenophon's  
Anabasis just as old-fashioned high-school Latin texts teach one to  
read Caesar's Gallic Wars). A.T. Robertson's big grammar has been  
faulted for many, many reasons, but it remains in publication and  
use, just as does BDF, for the simple reasons that enough students  
(and teachers) of Biblical Greek still find them useful -- and  
because something clearly superior to it has not been created. What  
has modern linguistic theory produced in the way of Biblical Greek  
textbooks? There's Ward Powers' textbook which has its commendable  
features, but it's not one that I would use. Of course there's  
Porter's "Idioms of the NT," an intermediate grammar; does it "hit  
the spot"? Not to my satisfaction. So where and when is the "great  
white light" going to dawn on Biblical Greek pedagogy? I honestly  
can't see anything on the horizon, and I think we're going to have to  
make do for some time to come with those tools that we have found  
most useful up to the present.

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





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