My work through 1 Peter this week has been highly rewarding and am excited to complete it with chapters 4 and 5 on Monday and Tuesday. I have not been able to complete each section of the syntactical diagrams since we are moving at such a fast pace, but I will try to catch up this weekend and post the remaining diagrams.
I have been using a few commentaries but the most helpful has been Achtemeier’s Hermeneia volume. It has a great mixture of grammatical, cultural and theological comments, the best Hermeneia volume I have used yet. One aspect of Achtemeier’s treatment I have found most intriguing is his discussion of Peter’s use of participles. Most translations see a number of independent imperatival participles throughout 1 Peter, however Achtemeier does not see the participle as acting independently at all. While he some of participles normally translated independent have an imperatival force, such a force comes from context and is not a semantic category and the participles are necessarily still dependent on finite verbs. In my syntax courses we were taught the independent imperatival participle as a valid semantic category, but Achtemeier has caused me to rethink this a bit. I am not yet fully convinced, but I am intrigued.
June 19, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Listen to Achtemeier. He’s right. The grammars are wrong and make the claim based on faulty assumptions.
And there’s a 2005 Greek linguistics dissertation on UMI and makes the same claim with significant argument:
A discourse analysis of 1 Peter by Starwalt, Ervin Ray Ph.D., The University of Texas at Arlington, 2005, 226 pages; AAT 3192269
$36 for the PDF.
June 19, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Thanks Mike,
I was hoping you would weigh in. $36 is a bit too much foe a dissertation right now, so I’ll take your word on it. Why do you think grammars list at a category then?
June 19, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Most grammars, even recent ones, don’t go beyond the sentence/clause level in their description and since the participles of 1 Peter are often far away from their head clause/verb its difficult to accept them as anything but independent.
Steve Runge’s Discourse Grammar takes the same position – or I should say, will take the same position position, when its actually published:
http://www.logos.com/products/prepub/details/4598
But unfortunately, its more than $36.
The other issue has to do with translation. The evidence in Greek may speak against them being independent, but even still, there continues to be a question about how they would correspond to English since we don’t have any sort of parallel construction in our language. That means that its often legitimate to translate them with an English imperative. And since most grammars are also based on a translational methodology (hence of incredibly large number of categories in Wallace), the category appears in the grammar.
We just need to remember that how we translate a give clause is not necessarily equal to how a native Koine Greek speaker would have understood that clause.
That was long and perhaps convoluted. Does it make sense…?
June 19, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Mike that makes total sense and I totally agree.
I am considering getting Runge’s Discourse Grammar. What do you think about the Discourse NT? Does Logos sell the NT by itself or do you have to buy the $150 bundle?
I also noticed the whole JSNTS Greek series is on sale for $240, that is really tempting.
June 19, 2009 at 11:12 pm
Right now its only the NT – the bundle consists of the English version of the resource, the Greek version, and the glossary and introduction. Steve is hoping to do the OT (his dissertation was actually on Hebrew) too, but that still in the works and there’s no time frame for it.
If you’re a student, the academic discount is definitely worth looking into.
June 19, 2009 at 11:31 pm
I cannot find a page for the NT by itself only the bundle here http://www.logos.com/products/details/3887
What exactly is in the glossary and the introduction?
June 20, 2009 at 11:43 pm
good question.
you can get a good idea about it here:
http://www.ntdiscourse.org/glossary-of-discourse-devices/
June 22, 2009 at 10:47 am
Daniel,
Read through the blogs at ntdiscourse.org to see what the Discourse GNT will do for you. Most examples are screen shots from the resource. There is also a sample of the grammar posted on the publications page. And in the FWIW category, I begin analyzing the Torah July 6, which makes me a very happy camper! No guess as to a release, just know that there is a commitment to creating Hebrew Bible counterparts. The approach I use is cross-linguistic in nature, looking at how languages accomplish tasks rather than about the quirks of Greek vs. English.
June 23, 2009 at 8:39 am
Steve,
Thanks, I am planning to get the Discourse Grammar for Logos, but I was wondering if there was an option of just getting the Discourse Greek NT without the other things in the bundle to save some.
June 23, 2009 at 8:49 am
Daniel,
There is no separate bundling of the Greek only. The introduction and glossary are needed to understand the annotations. The HDNT was thrown in as a bonus at my request to add more value. Logos invested huge capital to get this project completed. The OT will be nearly 3x as much. If you have an academic affiliation as a student or prof, be sure to ask for the discount when you call.
June 23, 2009 at 9:30 am
Thanks for the info steve. Its at the top of my book list now.
June 19, 2009 at 8:54 pm
[...] a comment » Over at Text, Community and Mission, Daniel is thinking about participles in 1 Peter. Be sure to give it a read. And even feel free to contradict me in the comments. I’m ready [...]
June 20, 2009 at 7:42 am
I think what Mike says about most grammars not going beyond the sentence level is the key. I haven’t yet looked into this too seriously yet but I think we tend to forget the Greek text didn’t have punctuation originally. We put our own thoughts of sentences into the text. I am inclined to think that all the conjunctions function as punctuation in some way. But anyway I am rambling. I don’t think the participles are independent if we look at the text as a whole instead of just viewing sentence by sentence or even paragraph by paragraph.
June 20, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Thank you Mike, for your clear comments on the reason for the abundance of categories in the grammars.
Daniel: I concur with Mike’s assessment of the participles in 1 Peter. Greek clause structure is more complex than we are able to represent in English. Our translations often have to rely on different verb forms from Greek in order to correctly represent the discourse structure of the Greek text.
Unfortunately, the advanced Greek grammars available at this time are all based on linguistic methods from a century ago. Their “grammatical” categories are often not real syntactic or discourse categories, but suggestions for translation. They are based more on the needs of expression in English than on the discourse structure of Greek.
June 20, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Michael,
Thanks for the input. I had not seen your blog, but your sites are sweet.
June 21, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Thanks, Daniel. I enjoy tinkering with the site at greek-language.com . I have a lot of updating to do, though. I hope to get a lot done this Summer.
June 20, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Dr. Palmer, I’m excited you see your blog. I’ll be digging through your grammar over the next few days & weeks.
June 21, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Thanks, Mike. I would love to read any comments you might have about the grammar. It’s kind of old, since I wrote it in the early 1990s. If I were starting fresh today, I would not use the grammar-translation model that I did then. Still, I hope the grammar will be useful to beginning students.
June 20, 2009 at 10:01 pm
[...] in 1 Peter June 21, 2009 Check out the interchange between Daniel and Mike Aubrey on participles in 1 Peter over at “Text, Community & [...]
June 21, 2009 at 12:02 am
[...] in a great conversation about particples at Text, Community & Mission, I’ve found that Dr. Micheael Palmer began a blog back in March of this [...]