[b-greek] Eerdmans Critical Commentary

From: c stirling bartholomew (cc.constantine@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Thu May 31 2001 - 19:51:16 EDT


I took my bimonthly pilgrimage to the Seattle Pacific U library last night
and while I was there glanced through the first vol. of the Eerdmans
Critical Commentary. I am wondering if any of the biblical Greek
aficionados have taken a hard look at this title. I didn't have a lot of
time to look at it and didn't want to lug it home (big book).

I am not asking for a book review, just some comments about the usefulness
of this series for a student who wants to work in the Greek language.
Glancing at it briefly raised some doubts in this regard.

About two years ago I bought eight or nine of the NIGTC vols. (package deal)
including such titles as G. Beale on Revelation and my experience so far
with these books is that they are really targeted toward an English Bible
audience. Sure they contain quotes from the Greek text but the exegesis is
done from the English translations for the most part. This business of
translating first and then doing all of your exegetical discussion from the
translation rather than working directly in the Greek text seems like a bad
policy. Some of these NIGTC titles are better than others in this regard, G.
Beale is the one I have used most and he really spends the bulk of his time
talking about English and not Greek so I don't see why his book was included
in a series that was supposed to be a commentary on the Greek text.

***An aside***

This question also has some bearing on the way things are discussed on
b-greek. For some of us the question "how should this be translated into
English" is not a question about the Greek text at all. It is a question
about semantic mapping between two languages and it would be more
appropriate to discuss it on one of Wayne's translation lists. How you
transfer the semantic content into the target language tells you very little
about what is going on in the source language.

But we have argued about that before on this list. (Is there anything that
we have not argued about before on this list?).

***end of aside***

Anyway,

If anyone has worked extensively with the first title in the Eerdmans
Critical Commentary series I would be glad to hear some comments addressed
to this narrow question: To what extent does this book help you understand
the problems in the Greek Text? Again, I am not looking for a book review. I
have already seen one or two of those (can't remember where however).

This post is kind of long since I didn't have the time to write a short one.

Clay

--
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062



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