Koine Greek Language & Linguistics

Questions about areas of controversy or conflict between the Christian faith and the academic discipline can (and sometimes do) assume an easy dichotomy between the two. One's dual commitments to "the Faith" and the guild are often seen as competing allegiances, each vying for possession of the Christian soul. The guild may even be perceived as intolerant or antagonistic toward the Christian faith. Would-be Ph.D. students of evangelical backgrounds, for example, are often warned not to be naïve, but to be suspicious of secular institutions of higher learning. Such was my experience, as I left Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (M.Div.; Th.M.) for doctoral work in NT at Emory University. The problem with the aforementioned formulation, however, is the a priori "us versus them" mentality it fosters-a mentality that can foreclose genuine learning opportunities and undermine the very faith it seeks to defend. It also assumes a broad consensus among Christians on the identity and definition of those items of the faith in need of safeguarding vis-à-vis "the guild." Little did I know that upon returning to my alma mater, I would be the one suspected of having wavered from "the Faith."

Revisions to the Greek NT in NA28 are restricted to the Catholic Epistles—the product of the Münster Institute’s ongoing work on the Editio critica maior. The text of the rest of the NT remains unaltered. The updated manuscript data, however, spans the apparatus of the entire NT and signals a new day for its textual history. The revised correctors of the Apocalypse in Codex Sinaiticus make the point. The proposed revisions have direct and far-reaching implications for the book’s textual history. Corrections once placed in the fourth through sixth centuries now occupy the seventh. The changes appear slight, even inconsequential—“touch ups” in support of the task of reconstruction. The clarification and re-dating of the correctors, though, represent a material shift with instant repercussions. The inclusion of new and additional witnesses—alongside of and in juxtaposition to the corrections—further portend altered textual alignments and disclose forgotten chapters in the history of textual criticism. The clarity of the new data also facilitates an examination of their limitations and unclutters the landscape for renewed textual research. The stage is set for a reappraisal of the Apocalypse’s textual history.

Orthographic variation within the manuscripts of the Greek NT is seldom a cause célèbre beyond the ranks of diehard textual critics. Even among these most will concede that orthographic irregularities amount to little more than evidence of scribal incompetency or inconsistency in their spelling practices. To find the same word both spelled correctly and misspelled with a single manuscript b the same scribe is not uncommon. It approaches the  norm. The critical editions of our Greek NTs have therefore opted, on good grounds, to exclude textual variants displaying non-standardized spelling. To include them would make it impossible for anyone to use the critical apparatuses in a meaningful way. The deluge of senseless errors would drown out variants of demonstrable textual significance.

The publication of Josef Schmid's landmark work on the textual history of the Apocalypse seemingly established the Andreas Text Type as a fourth-century product. The primary evidence for Schmid's claim came from the fourth-century corrections of the Apocalypse in Codex Sinaiticus, corrections which bore a close resemblance to the Andreas text of the Apocalypse. Schmid's reconstruction, however, is flawed. The fourth-century corrections he identified are actually from the seventh-century. The data supporting a fourth-century Andreas text type does not exist. Schmid's widely influential error appears to have been based on a misreading of Milne and Skeat's "Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus."

The steady stream of provocative and popular text-critical works by Bart Ehrman has been stirring the apologetic's hornet's nest for a few years now. There has been no shortage of responses to his claims about proto-orthodox scribes tampering with the text of the NT. Wallace's Revisiting the Corruption of the NT is one of the latest apologetic works to attempt to set the record straight. The volume is successful in demonstrating that textual matters are more complex than is often portrayed and proffers viable, alternative explanations for textual variants in Ehrman's narrative of orthodox corruption. The collection of essays is nonetheless beset by a number of deficiencies, not least of which are its understandings of the text, scribal activity, and history. The book's naked apologetic intent is its greatest liability. Evidence appears to have been used selectively, and partial and misleading comparisons are made for the sake of apologetic gain.

A short article on the origin and development of the longer Trinitarian text of 1 John 5:7-8 as found in the Textus Receptus. The typos that are present in this draft will be corrected before the final version is submitted for publication. These include: Lachman > Lachmann; 1881 > 1831; Montifortianus > Montfortianus; [Ayuso] Ionneum > Ioanneum; [Bludau 1903-1] Bibeldruchen > Bibeldrucken; [Bludau 1919-1] den Glaubensbekenntnis > dem Glaubensbekenntnis; [Fischer] pseudo-autustinischen > pseudo-augustinischen; obiectarum. > obiectarum.’; [Rivière] es trois > des trois. Thanks to Jeff Cate, Peter Gurry, and especially Jan Krans for alerting me to these when it was originally posted on academia in 2015. The data of this DRAFT will also fully updated and footnoted in the 2020 peer-reviewed version in "Early Christianity."

A review of A Gospel Synopsis of the Greek Text of Matthew, Mark and Luke: A Comparison of Codex Bezae and Codex Vaticanus. Edited by Jenny Read-Heimerdinger and Josep Rius-Camp, in collaboration with Enric Muñarch. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Pp. xxi + 315. Cloth, $240.00.

Matthew C. Williams' "Two Gospels from One: A Comprehensive Text-Critical Analysis of the Synoptic Gospels" promises more than it can deliver, misleads readers with its subtitle, and stymies rather than advances the agendas of text-critical research and gospel criticism. Williams' study not only fails to shed new light on the synoptic problem, but also misappropriates (and misapplies) text-critical criteria to problems beyond their purview. The result is a work that amounts to little more than a cataloguing of well-known arguments for Marcan priority, encumbered by repeated attempts to tether a text-critical approach to the Synoptic Problem. Despite the appearance of copious detail, the work is selective in its treatment and founded upon a number of abstractions.

In this presentation, I walk through the basics of identifying a periphrastic construction and analyzing its meaning, but continue on to deal with an issue that grammars do not address: the reality of constituent order variation and what it means. I do this through an introductory description and use of an Information Structure analysis of periphrastic constructions. The basic concepts of Topic and Focus are useful for describing some of the key variations in word order and their possible exegetical implications.

This essay tracks the ways Wilhelm Bousset broke new ground in tracking the Apocalypse's textual history and in particular how he influenced Josef Schmid's landmark work, Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Apokalypse-Textes," which to this day remains the standard text-critical work on John's Apocalypse. The essay also notes the ways in which Bousset continues to exert an influence in the 21st century, despite considerable theoretical, methodological, and artifactual advances.

By combining an Ancient Greek semantic domains database with a corpus of annotated Ancient Greek treebanks, one may observe semantic preferences of individual words or word combinations. This information may then be applied to phrases which contain a word of ambiguous sense with the possibility of disambiguating that word. The method was applied to John 1:5, 1 Corinthians 11:15, and the phrase εν τοις επουρανιοις which occurs throughout Ephesians. Due to the small size of the annotated Ancient Greek corpus and the limited capability of the existing Ancient Greek semantic domains database, disambiguation was inconclusive for the first two passages. In Ephesians, however, this method combined with some manual inspection demonstrated that επουρανιοις may very well be referring to heavenly beings rather than a heavenly place. This is a valuable insight which had previously been unanimously rejected by published Ephesians works on the basis of flawed logic and with no consideration of linguistic evidence.

The 2008 SBL meeting in Boston included a panel review session on James R. Royse's book, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri (NTTSD 36; Leiden: Brill, 2007). A number of the reviews of this important work are presented here, along with Royse's response. The papers were produced as oral presentations and have been kept in their original shape, except for some straightforward corrections.

"The early papyri of Luke are remarkable for their diversity. Six pre-fourth century witnesses are extant. The content, date, provenance, textual relationships, and scribal habits of each vary from fragment to fragment. Their texts range from a few paltry lines to nearly an entire gospel. All were produced in the second, third, or fourth centuries. All are from Egypt--though their precise sites of discovery differ. The nature and frequency of their scribal variations also fluctuate. Nonsense readings, itacisms, and similar orthographic 'deviations' prevail in some; others exhibit little to none of these. The incidence of nomina sacra and numerical abbreviations varies from scribe to scribe, even line to line. Their significance is debated. The amount of surviving text is at once both an accident of history and a byproduct of particular scribal habits. The rates of additions, omissions, transpositions, and the like can be tracked to the individual copyist. Human hands have shaped the bequeathals of history and the absence of 'expected' readings continue to hold the imagination hostage. Questions swirl over textual alignments, while the very nomenclature of 'text types' is decried in some quarters. More than simple artifacts of early Christian piety, these papyri disclose the fault lines of Luke's textual history--well in advance of the great fourth-century codices."

Barr states that a particular word may mean a in one context, but b in another context, and so forth. The "meaning" of this word (I would prefer "use" over "meaning"), then, might be the totality of these meanings (or uses), but the error arises when the totality of these meanings are placed (or displaced) upon a single instance of that word in a particular context.

While ancient metalinguistic resources such as lexica and scholia are increasingly studied in the field of ancient scholarship (Montanari 2020), they are investigated less within the historical sociolinguistics of Ancient Greek. Analysing the Atticist lexica by Phrynichus, Moeris and Aelius Dionysius, this article illustrates the historically persistent connection between social perception of and diachronic change within Ancient Greek. Although the historical relevance of Atticist prescriptivism has been observed, the evidence that these social evaluations provide for Post-Classical Greek language change is rarely assessed systematically (except for objectionable ideological reasons). I demonstrate that the Atticist lexica display metalinguistic awareness of the major morphosyntactic changes characterizing Post-Classical Greek (pace Lee 2013:286): paradigmatic (e.g. analogical levelling in verbal system of endings, voice and augment), category changes, category renewal (e.g. dual, pronouns, periphrasis), syntactic change (category expansion of ἔμελλον and τυγχάνω) and case changes (e.g. from case to prepositions).

s collection of essays renders an indispensable service to the discipline of NT textual criticism. Spanning nearly a half century of scholarly output, the essays afford readers an opportunity to accompany Elliott on his lengthy and arduous text-critical journey and track the thinking of one of today's premier practitioners of "thoroughgoing eclecticism." More than a series of text-critical exercises, Elliott's essays articulate trends in the field and disclose the necessary mettle to undertake such endeavors. The volume is an exemplar of the indefatigable industry and patience required of textual critics, but particularly of Elliott himself, where he is often the sole advocate for an approach that privileges the NT author's observable language, style, and theology over every other criterion for reconstructing the text.

The distinction between foreground and background in narrative discourse is a pervasive phenomenon in the literatures of the world, and languages have a variety of devices to indicate   this distinction. These include, amongst others, the use of specific tense-forms of the verb, morphosyntactic features, the distinction between events and non-events, lexical verb types (achievement, accomplishment, activity, state, etc.), voice, and word order. The use of the tense-forms of the verb to indicate foreground and background has been studied in depth in a variety of languages. In the last three decades there have been a number of studies on the Greek of the New Testament, following the upsurge of interest in the aspect and time characteristics of Greek in the early nineties of the previous century. This study focused on the function of the Greek imperfect and pluperfect indicative tense-forms (henceforth, imperfect and pluperfect) to indicate foreground and background in the Gospel of Lu...

Le texte de Ph 2,6-8 pose de nombreux problèmes au traducteur. Comment trouver une solution qui rende justice à l'interprétation ancienne du passage sans esquiver les difficultés qu'il soulève? Cet article tente de rendre compte de la première difficulté soulevée par cette péricope, la traduction exacte du participe ὑπάρχων.

A talk for the St Paul's School Classics Society.

Some further comments:
On εἴπαντα (line 6),Gignac (1981: 337–338) cites only this instance of the masc.acc.sg., then the masc.nom.sg. from BGU 1673.8&10 (2nd c. AD) and PSI Omaggio 11.17&20 (3rd c. AD), and the gen.sg. from P.Giss. 11.8 (118 AD). Hellenistic attestations are discussed by Mayser (1938: 95 and 135): εἴπᾱς, (συν)είπαντος (P.Tebt. I 42.87 for συνεῖπε), {εἴπαντα,} and εἰπάντων (160, post 114, {118} and 257 BC).

To date (16 x 2017), the two papyri remain missing. Although I have now been able to inspect P.Oxy. III 530 at the British Library, in the absence of P.Oxy. XII 1481, I have not been able to investigate the likelihood of a relationship between the two letters beyond the personal names that they share.

For the correction to P.Oxy. XII 1481.7 (τοῦ{τοῦ} > τοῦ τοῦ), see S. Kapsomenos, E. E. Thess. 7 (1957), S. 356 [BL IV.62].

The distinction between foreground and background in narrative discourse is a pervasive phenomenon in the literatures of the world, and languages have a variety of devices to indicate this distinction. The use of the tense-forms of the verb for this purpose has been studied in a variety of languages, including the Greek of the New Testament. The aim of this study is to explore, describe, and classify the functions of the imperfect and pluperfect indicative in the Gospel of Luke's narrative discourse. The study is restricted to narrative proper (which includes embedded narratives, such as the parables of Jesus), but excludes direct and indirect discourse, and comments by the author of the Gospel. The findings are that the main function of the imperfect in the Gospel of Luke's narrative discourse is to provide background information. This is related to the imperfect's "imperfective" aspect and its characteristic linking to another verbal utterance, which also promotes cohesion in the text. The imperfect's main specific use is to provide background information in the form of setting the scene for events that follow in the main storyline. It is also used in the introduction of participants in a scene, to provide supplementary details, in epilogues, and in explanatory clauses. In a few instances, the imperfect expresses foreground information. The pluperfect is always used for background information. This is related to its characteristic of describing a continuing state in the past which is the result of an event in the past. The pluperfect's specific uses are to set the scene for mainline events that follow, together with the imperfect; to provide supplementary details about persons, events, etc. in the main storyline; and to explain the reason for events in the main storyline.