It’s been a huge couple years for William Varner, one of our favorite contributors to the blog here (see all of his posts here). After teaching Scripture for decades, Varner has been collecting his wisdom and experience into numerous volumes. In 2020, he published Passionate about the Passion Week, followed by Anticipating the Advent. Now in 2021, in addition to other books, Varner has published a new linguistic guide to Philippians.
In this slender quick-access guide to each verse in Philippians, the student, pastor, and scholar can find quick answers to lexical, syntactic, and semantic questions about the Greek text. As James Leonard writes in the foreword,
Elsewhere, such answers are often buried in voluminous data in the larger commentaries, or maybe overlooked entirely. The layout in Varner’s commentary provides answers in quick fashion; the commentary is a tool that should be in reach while reading through the Greek text.
The introduction contains a brief explanation of typical issues such as author, provenance, literary unity, and purpose, but it also contains some discussion of linguistic issues, text-critical issues, several pages on discourse analysis and how he uses it throughout the volume, and the spiritual value of the letter (rare in a linguistic commentary!). The end of the volume contains a glossary of terms (helpful to those unfamiliar with advanced Greek grammar or linguistics) and a bibliography that will guide you to literature that covers more specific issues in-depth.
So how does it work? Consider Phil 2:6: ὃς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ. Varner comments as follows:
ὃς. The relative pronoun functions as the subject (hence in the nominative) of all the following indicative verbs and participles in 2:6–8.
ἐν μορφῇ. Locative. “Form’ is an inadequate rendering of μορφὴ, but our language affords no better word” (Vincent, 57; see Abbott-Smith, 296; BDAG, 659). This word only appears twice in the NT, here and in 2:7. GE (1364) suggests “nature” or “essence.”
θεοῦ. Possessive genitive.
ὑπάρχων. Pres act ptc masc nom sg ὑπάρχω (concessive). Some translations have the concessive “though” or “although” (NAB, NASB, CEB, ESV, NET) while others prefer a simple circumstantial participle, “being” (KJV, NJB, NIV, NLT) or “existing” (CSB). BDAG (1029.2) states that in Hellenistic Greek ὑπάρχω is simply a substitute for εἰμί and carries no special nuance (also Silva, 113). Abbott-Smith (457) thinks that here the verb retains its Attic meaning of “begin” and conveys the sense of “continuance of an antecedent state or condition,” thus suggesting the translation “being originally.” See also GE (2188.1).
οὐχ. Negative particle that negates ἡγήσατο.
ἁρπαγμὸν. Complement of τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ in an object-complement double accusative construction (Wallace, 186, 220). BDAG (133.1&2) defines this hapax legomenon with both an active (“a violent seizure of property, robbery”) and a passive (“someth[ing] to which one can claim or assert title by gripping or grasping, someth[ing] claimed”) meaning. Since the first meaning “is next to impossible in Phil 2:6,” the best functional equivalent translation is “a prize to be tenaciously grasped.” As an illustration of the difficulty of this issue, the CSB17 altered its HCSB translation from “something to be used for His own advantage” to “something to be exploited.”
ἡγήσατο. Aor mid ind 3rd sg ἡγέομαι.
τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ. Infinitival clause that functions as direct object of ἡγήσατο in an object-complement double accusative construction.
εἶναι. Pres act inf εἰμί (substantival).
ἴσα. BDAG (480) identifies ἴσος (“equal”) as an adjective that appears 8 times in the NT, but it is here used predicatively as an “adverbial neuter plural” (BDF §434; Abbott-Smith, 219). For the predicative use of ἴσα elsewhere, see LXX Job 11:12 and Thucydides, Hist. 3.14.
θεῷ. Dative complement of ἴσα. The closest linguistic and semantic parallel to ἴσα θεῷ is the charge against Jesus in John 5:18 that “you are making yourself equal to God” (ἴσον ἑαυτὸν ποιῶν τῷ θεῷ). Lightfoot (112) carefully observes: “Between the two expressions ἴσος εἶναι and ἴσα εἶναι no other distinction can be drawn, except that the former refers rather to the person, the latter to the attributes.”
Notice the use of BDF, Wallace, Lightfoot, BDAG, and of course primary sources. Throughout the volume, Varner also makes use of the new Legacy Standard Bible and the Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek.
If you’re looking for a full commentary that interacts with every other commentary published since John Calvin, this is not it. But if you’re a student, pastor, or scholar who wants quick access to a solid treatment of the Greek syntax, semantics, and lexical issues of Philippians, this is the book for you.
Find it at Fontes Press or on Amazon.
