Linguistics and the New Testament: Critical Junctures (Library of New Testament Studies), eds. Stanley Porter and D. A. Carson (T&T Clark, 2015), 297 pages.
T&T Clark is reissuing several studies from the JSNTSS series in their Library of New Testament Studies series. Many of these are valuable sets of essay, including the present volume, which contains papers that apply modern linguistic methods to the analysis of the New Testament. As in most sets of essays, some are more useful than others, but the volume gives a good sampling of what modern linguistics has to offer biblical scholars.
Carson introduces the volume with an essay on the ever-increasing fragmentation of biblical studies. He provides four different ways to respond to such fragmentation, from blissful ignorance to sweeping acceptance of the most postmodern of methods.
Part 1 contains essays on literary analysis, discourse analysis, and rhetorical analysis. George Guthrie discusses some overlap between literary analysis and some forms of linguistic analysis, highlighting especially discourse analysis and the need for more attention to macro-analysis and sensitivity (but not sweeping acceptance) of new methodologies. Jeffrey Reed suggests discourse analysis, which he describes in some detail, has much to offer historical criticism, especially in literary analysis of letters in terms of their coherence and unity, but notes discourse analysis’s inability to answer historical questions. Stanley Porter then examines overviews several attempts to integrate linguistics and rhetoric, including linguistics grammars, tagmemics, communication theory, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis. He gives a negative appraisal of the merits of rhetorical analysis for the future of biblical studies (92).
Part 2 includes four essays on words. Casey Davis provides some characteristic oral features of texts in illiterate societies and analyzes many parts of Philippians he believes to exhibit these features. Andreas Köstenberger argues that the two verbs for sending in John’s Gospel (πέμπω, ἀποστέλλω) are synonymous (contra Rengstorf in TDNT), but the reason for their variation is not simply stylistic. Some choices to use one verb over the other are due to obsolesence in forms, but mostly he attributes the choices to stereotyped phrases and echoing of other phrases (142-43). Paul Danove provides an analysis of four groups of verbs (24 total) and their semantic, syntactic, and lexical functions. He provides a stimulating analysis of these components as a provisional beginning of a lexicon that includes the “notation of the argument structures assigned or required by particular words and of the semantic roles related to these argument structures” (144).
The last and most important essay comes from Matthew O’Donnell on whether arguments from style can ground claims to authorship. He demonstrates the linguistic naiveté of past studies on style, showing that many arguments such as lexical choice, sentence length, and word order are, from the perspective of modern linguistics, unable to prove authorship of documents. The argument is too detailed to summarize here, but if you are interested at all in pseudepigraphy and the discussions about biblical authorship, this long article is well worth trodding through.
The value of this volume is that it accomplishes its purpose to show the value of integrating the insights of modern linguistics into biblical studies. But each essay contributes more or less to this purpose. Köstenberger’s essay doesn’t exactly use much modern linguistics except for building upon Barr’s criticism of TDNT. Guthrie’s initial essay is a helpful foray into the question, but asks more questions than provides answers (as he says he intended to do).
I found the last two essays the most important, although in the case of the verbal lexicon essay by Danove I’m a bit biased since I annotated semantic roles of verbs as my job as a computational linguist. I wondered how I could integrate my semantic parsing into the analysis of the biblical texts, and I’m delighted to see Danove doing exactly that. Such a lexicon would tell us a great deal about the semantic, lexical, and syntactic structures that accompany each verb. This could go a long way toward assisting discourse analysts and exegetes. I already noted the importance of the last essay and I highly commend it for consideration for anyone working in the area of pseudepigraphy.
Lastly, I recommend to all biblical studies students and professors the study of modern linguistics. Since we work with discourses in everything we do, we must know how language works and how to analyze it. This volume makes a solid contribution toward helping us do that.
Find it here on Amazon.