by Brian Knowles
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nce you have established the parameters of your study text, it becomes necessary to analyze the grammar. For those of us who are not adept in Greek or Hebrew, it becomes essential to rely upon the works of those who are. We cannot always depend upon translations to capture the essential meaning of a text. What is important here is that we understand the grammar where it is critical to the meaning of the passage being considered.
Greek grammar is particularly difficult – even for advanced scholars. For example, Greek uses both time and action in its various tenses. When studying Biblical Greek, we have to consider five tenses: present, imperfect, aorist, perfect, and future. The aorist is among the most difficult. It is generally defined to mean “simple action in past time” (A Beginner’s Reader Grammar for New Testament Greek by Ernest Cadman Colwell & Ernest W. Tune, Harper & Row, NY, 1965, p. 23). Many expositors of Scripture use it this way, both in writing and in speaking. In recent years however, New Testament scholars have been challenging that idea.
Until fairly recently, the idea that the aorist tense indicated action that was “once for all” or “completed” was taken for granted. The word itself means “without a place” or “unnamed.” As D.A. Carson writes, “It simply refers to the action itself without specifying whether the action is unique, repeated, ingressive, instantaneous, past, or accomplished. The best grammarians understood this well, and used the term punctiliar in much the same way a mathematician uses the term point in geometry – to refer to a location without magnitude” (Exegetical Fallacies by D.A. Carson, p. 68).
The serious
Bible student and exegete would be well devised to study the chapter in
Another supposition that often leads to grammatical
fallacies is the use of classical Greek lexicons to break open the meaning of
Biblical Greek. The Classical Greek period came to flower in the 5th
century BCE. The New Testament documents were written some 4 – 4.5 centuries
later.
“…it is important to remember that the principle of entropy operates in living languages as well as in physics. Languages ‘break down’ with time; the syntax becomes less structured, the number of exceptions increases, the morphology [patterns of word formation in Greek including inflection, derivation, and composition] is simplified, and so forth. The practical significance of this fact is that the relatively more structured grammar of the period of classical Greek cannot legitimately be applied holus-bolus to the Greek New Testament. The results of the great papyrological finds that alerted New Testament scholars to this truth were widely disseminated only at the end of the past century. That means technical commentaries on the New Testament Greek text written much before the end of the last century are unreliable on many grammatical points” (Carson, p. 66).
We can see in our own time that the rules of language are suffering from entropy. What was earlier in our lifetimes considered bad grammar is now common usage. For example, we often hear the word “impact” used in verbal form: “impacting” – as in “the drop in the stock market impacted the situation.” We now speak of “escalating” in ways that mean something other than riding an escalator. To a certain extent, Afro-American usage – sometimes called “Ebonics” – has had an impact on English usage: “How you be Joe?” “Oh, I be fine.” Of course the verb “to be” is one of the most controversial words in the English language. One linguist would like to do away with it entirely!
Suffice it to say that language usage changes over time. The Bible student needs to use lexicons that reflect the latest scholarship. For example, many New Testament scholars have considered Thayer’s to be obsolete since about 1957 (see Multipurpose Tools for Bible Study by Frederick W. Danker, pp. 111, 117).
Strong’s Concordance has virtually no scholarly value whatsoever when it comes to word meanings. Those who quote it in that regard reveal their ignorance.
It is also invalid to use a classical Greek lexicon like H.G. Liddell, R. Scott, H.S. Jones, Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ) – the standard classical lexicon, to establish the meaning of a New Testament word or its usage. For the NT, one should refer to Bauer’s lexicon. It is considered the standard work for New Testament words.
It is best to leave the grammar to the grammarians. You can
find texts on Greek and Hebrew grammar at your local seminary bookstore. In
References:
New Testament Exegesis by Gordon D. Fee,
Westminister/John Knox Press,
Exegetical Fallacies (Second edition) by D.A. Carson,
Baker Book House,
Multipurpose Tools for Bible Study by Frederick W. Danker, Fortress Press, 1993
Old Testament Exegesis by Douglas Stuart, The
A Beginner’s Reader-Grammar for New Testament Greek by Ernest Cadman Colwell & Ernest W. Tune, Harper & Row, NY, 1965