Linguistics and New Testament Greek

Key Issues in the Current Debate

Black, David Alan, Merkle, Benjamin L.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781493426928
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Reference

This work offers students the most current discussion of the major issues in Greek and linguistics by leading authorities in the field. Featuring an all-star lineup of New Testament Greek scholars--including Stanley Porter, Constantine Campbell, Stephen Levinsohn, Jonathan Pennington, and Robert Plummer--it examines the latest advancements in New Testament Greek linguistics, making it an ideal intermediate supplemental Greek textbook. Chapters cover key topics such as verbal aspect, the perfect tense, deponency and the middle voice, discourse analysis, word order, and pronunciation.

1

Linguistic Schools

STANLEY E. PORTER

This chapter is concerned with linguistic schools and their impact upon the study of the Greek language of the New Testament. As I shall explain, the study of New Testament Greek has not been clear in its methodologies. The result is a widely accepted positivist view of language in which the Greek language is seen as a “thing” predescriptive in nature—that is, there is an essentialist nature of the Greek language that we, as Greek grammarians and linguists, have progressively discovered over the years and now know. At this stage, we are no longer engaging in new descriptions of Greek but are fine-tuning our previous, agreed-upon understandings. The major problem with this viewpoint is that it is not only out of keeping with virtually every other field of study but also clearly wrong for Greek.

A case in point is the discussion of verbal aspect over the last thirty years. The Greek verbal system was previously described as temporal, even if this was not entirely satisfactory, and we must recognize that Greek, on at least some occasions, is concerned not just with when an action took place as signified by a verb but with how it took place. Many will be familiar with this discussion over the semantics of the Greek tense-forms and their relationship to Aktionsart, or “kind of action.” Thirty or more years ago, however, the notion of verbal aspect was introduced as a better description of the Greek verbal edifice. According to aspect theory, the Greek verbal system was aspect prominent, not tense prominent, so that the Greek tense-forms were used to represent the subjective conception of processes by the language user, not the time at which the event occurred. The result was a debate over the semantics of the Greek verbal system and whether aspect or tense was prominent, both of which had implications for understanding the entire Greek language. I have an opinion of which view is correct, but that is not important here. What is important is that the traditional view of Greek sounds much more like a description of German, a heavily tensed language, or perhaps even more importantly of English, a tensed language that also has categories for kinds of action. I suspect that the understandings of German and English were, for many of those in the discussion, far more important in their examinations of Greek than attempting to offer a description of Greek without drawing upon these well-established categories, especially as they represented the first language of the analyst.

The resistance to an aspectual view of Greek is probably not based upon actual examination of the language—something I attempted to do.1 By at least one accounting, there are as many tenseless as tensed languages among the world’s languages.2 Rather, such resistance is often based upon prior belief that the semantics of the Greek verbal system had already been resolved—if not by the ancient Greeks themselves, then by the Latin grammarians or surely by the nineteenth-century comparative philologians. This simply is not true. Much of what is labeled as linguistic description is projection of one’s prior understanding of language, often one’s first language, upon another language. That is why linguistic models are so important. Linguistic models—and the linguistic schools of thought that grow up around them—are attempts to find conceptual structures by which to examine language without accepting what we have been told or what we assumed without further reflection and without imposing our own language upon another. These attempts instead provide a linguistic framework that acknowledges its presuppositions and helps us to think about language in new ways, using the resources of the linguistic model.

In this chapter, I wish to examine the major linguistic schools that are currently productively functioning within New Testament Greek studies. In this regard, biblical studies is a problematic discipline since it often demands that a scholar be an expert in a variety of methods, such as linguistics. Most biblical scholars are at least competent in the historical-critical method, as well as knowledgeable about other post-historical-critical methods, such as social-scientific criticism, literary criticism, and the like. Linguistics, however, is not like that. The methodological boundaries are much more strongly and exclusively drawn, to the point that some may be aware of “linguistic wars” among those who have called into question others’ methods. In that sense, being a master of several different methods is not just unpracticed but is often frowned upon, because it implies an inappropriate crossing of boundaries. Therefore, I cannot claim to be an expert in all of the approaches or schools that I will be discussing, but I will attempt to do the best that I can in presenting each one, offering some representative examples of scholars within these schools of thought, and then making some evaluative comments.

■ What Are Linguistic Schools?

Before I divide the linguistic world into its various schools, I must ask what constitutes a linguistic school and how I decide what constitutes a linguistic school within New Testament Greek studies. In 1980, Geoffrey Sampson published his Schools of Linguistics, an excellent introduction up to the time of publication. He defines a linguistic school thus: “Often one individual or a small group of original minds has founded a tradition which has continued to mould approaches to language in the university or the nation in which that tradition began; between adherents of different traditions there has usually been relatively limited contact.”3 I will use this definition to define schools of linguistics, with the minimum publication requirement of at least two major monographs or the equivalent in the field of linguistics or linguistic theory and at least two major monographs in the field of New Testament Greek studies, and with some sign of continuing work using the approach. I realize that by imposing this requirement I run the risk of excluding approaches to linguistics that some might follow and find useful. However, the notion of a school, as Sampson indicates, implies a tradition that continues to shape scholarship, rather than simply an individual who develops a particular idea (although I will make a significant exception to this rule). I can offer only a rough outline of the schools of thought as reflected by those who follow a tradition, recognizing that individual scholars will have their own variations upon its major concepts. I am sure that I will overlook some schools of thought in other countries, as I concentrate upon English-language scholarship. I also concentrate upon what Sampson calls “core” linguistic fields, not what he terms “peripheral branches,” so I am not discussing sociolinguistics, multilingualism, and the like, although I will touch lightly upon that very broad and encompassing subject called discourse analysis. I also do not deal in detail with various areas of applied linguistics.

There are many different ways of describing linguistic schools. Sampson provides a generally diachronic view beginning in the nineteenth century to the present.4 Jeremy Thompson and Wendy Widder provide the only similar study for biblical studies, although their treatment problematically does not mention the most productive school in contemporary biblical studies (in my opinion), Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).5 Robert Van Valin Jr. and Randy LaPolla differentiate between what they call the “syntactocentric perspective” and the “communication-and-cognition perspective”—in other words, basically Noam Chomsky and everyone else.6 John Bateman has proposed a more nuanced categorization for the study of language focusing upon whether language is seen as in contexts, texts, heads, or groups. Chomskyans would locate language in texts, cognitivists would locate it in heads, and functionalists would locate it in contexts or groups.7 An arguably more straightforward means is suggested by David Banks, who distinguishes between formal, cognitive, and functional theories of language.8 I use this distinction in this chapter.

■ Traditional Grammar

Before I turn to the formalists, cognitivists, and functionalists, however, I include traditional grammar, as represented in the two major periods in language study before the rise of modern linguistics: the rationalist and comparative-historical schools. Many in New Testament Greek study still follow the principles of these schools of thought, even though these principles have been superseded by forms of modern linguistic study.

“Traditional grammar” refers to an approach to language that is prelinguistic. David Crystal defines its major features: the failure to recognize the difference between spoken and written language, emphasis upon restricted forms of written language, a failure to recognize various forms of language and how they are used, the tendency to describe language in terms of another language (often Latin), the appeal to logic as a means of describing and even assessing language, and the tendency to evaluate language as more or less logical or complex or primitive or beautiful or the like.9 These traditional criteria grew out of a long history of discussion of language that dates back to the ancients and continued until the advent of modern linguistics. They were found in the two major periods of language study before the rise of modern linguistics: the rationalist and the comparative-historical.10

Rationalist Language Study

Rationalism, growing out of the Enlightenment, was characterized by rational thought, a shift from dogmatic to empiricist epistemology, an emphasis upon naturalism (as opposed to supernaturalism), and dissolution of the divide between secular and sacred. This desacralization included the Bible. The movement is perhaps captured best in the work of Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), a rationalist who believed in deduction from common knowledge.

The rationalist period of language study went hand in hand with the Enlightenment. This period extended from roughly the middle of the seventeenth century to the turn of the nineteenth century (1650–1800), with the rise of Romanticism (more precisely in 1798, with publication of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge). Language study during the rationalist period was dominated by philosophers and linguists approaching language from a rationalist perspective, along with having historical concerns. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–80) believed that “abstract vocabulary and grammatical complexity developed from an earlier individual concrete vocabulary,” and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) believed in the “inseparability of language and thought.”11 William Jones (1746–94), the British judge in India, opined that Sanskrit was “more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either,”12 and James Harris (1758–1835) thought one could derive “grammar from ontology, since the verb, to him, denotes nothing less than existence itself.”13 The rationalist period was characterized by a philosophical orientation that logically deduced the nature of language from prior beliefs, usually grounded in one’s understandings of reality. Hence there was the notion of better- and worse-formed languages, thought and language were inseparable, tense-forms indicated reality grounded in time, and more complex forms were developed from simpler ones.

Georg Benedikt Winer’s (1789–1858) Grammatik des neutestamentlichen Sprachidioms (during his lifetime, editions were published from 1822 to 1855),14 though not the first Greek grammar, fully represented the rationalist period. Winer was on the forefront of a new phase of New Testament Greek language study, e...