[B-Greek] Theological Lexicon of the New Testament

David McKay davidmckay52 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 8 23:27:01 EST 2011


Fascinating post, James. Thank you. 
David McKay 

Sent from my iPhone

On 09/03/2011, at 2:44 PM, James Ernest <j.d.ernest at bc.edu> wrote:

> OK, Spinti said I should comment, so I will. I always do what Spinti tells
> me!
> 
> I think the comments already posted are fair if bare.
> 
> I do know that Spicq's TLNT has fans who tell me they much prefer it to
> Colin Brown--am just back from an SBL regional meeting where once again
> someone was telling me that--but that's probably an individual thing. The
> following may tell you why.
> 
> TLNT has its origins in Spicq's long career of writing articles and
> commentaries. After a certain point, he decided, or was asked, to pull
> together his word studies into an alphabetical collection and did so,
> producing a two-volume opus. A bit later he surprised everyone with a third
> volume. The English version combines all the entries from those volumes plus
> one other that we dredged out of a Festschrift. David Townsley at
> Hendrickson Publishers asked me to translate the opus and bought me a
> computer (with a 286 processor!) and Nota Bene 3 with SLS to do it with. In
> addition to translating into English, we added the bells and whistles that
> users of English-language Bible reference works are used to--tables of
> abbreviations, indexes, cross-references, etc.--the original French was
> horribly deficient in those regards. Some of this extra material was my own
> work; some of it was done by Patrick Alexander or others. I suspect Patrick
> probably put far more time into improving and correcting my work on the
> translation than he ever told me.
> 
> Since TLNT is for the most part pulled together from commentaries, etc.,
> it's a bit potluck: some words you'd never expect to see treated in a
> selective theological dictionary are there, and some words you'd certainly
> expect to find in such a work are not. On the negative side also, at least
> potentially: Spicq was an excellent old-time philologist--he knew Greek, and
> he knew Greek texts, and he conducted massive mining operations throughout
> the classical and koine corpora, including especially the nonliterary
> papyri, but also literary texts--Plutarch, etc; but he was not a linguist,
> and I don't think he had read James Barr or would have worried much about
> what Barr said if he had. Furthermore, NT scholar though he was, he was at
> heart a priest, preacher, retreat leader, and theologian. So you get
> deliberately edifying conclusions to many of the articles--which Christian
> folk studying the Bible for theological and spiritual reasons tend to
> appreciate more than some biblical scholars who aren't looking for that sort
> of thing when they look in a lexicographic reference. He'll even
> occasionally--not often--throw in some juicy bits from Thomas Aquinas or
> elsewhere in the Catholic tradition just for good measure. So TLNT has more
> of a distinctive personality than some of the more rigorously disciplined
> scientific works out there.
> 
> So I'd say that no one trying to do serious or somewhat exhaustive lexical
> research on NT words can ignore Spicq. But as to how near to the top of the
> list it should rise for someone trying to allocate limited funds--I don't
> know. Depends on what you want and what you like. Maybe you should spend an
> hour in a library sometime reading here and there in TLNT. You might find
> that you love it; or you might not.
> 
> James Ernest
> 
> P.S. I translated Spicq on a work-for-hire basis for Hendrickson Publishers
> a number of years ago--before I did my doctoral work and went to work
> full-time for Hendrickson. I receive no royalties, and Spicq is not one of
> the academic titles recently sold by Hendrickson Publishers to my current
> employer, Baker Publishing Group. So I have no economic interest in sales of
> Spicq. I do have a definite fondness both for the opus--it represents many
> hours of dedicated toil! I think I still have lying around here somewhere
> the progress thermometer that I slowly filled in, day by day, as I slogged
> through the many hundreds of pages. I'm also rather fond of old Pere Spicq
> himself, whom I never met. Don McKim invited me to write an article on Spicq
> for the revised and expanded version of his IVP Dictionary of Major Biblical
> Interpreters, which was published several years ago. If anyone is interested
> in learning a bit about Spicq, that article could be a place to start. To
> learn more about TLNT itself, you could dredge out some of the many reviews
> that were published--reviews of the original French edition or of the
> English translation or perhaps of the Italian version. I think I have a
> paper file of these somewhere. I suppose you could find some of them using
> ATLA Religion Index or other such tools. My favorite review was written by
> Jerome Murphy-O'Connor and published in Revue biblique--my favorite because
> the great man not only reviewed the content but also spared some kind words
> for the lowly translator.
> 
> P.P.S. Now that I've written this post, I see that an earlier post is
> available here:
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/1998-October/002390.html
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