Status Updates From Linguistics and New Testame...

There's an Italian proverb, "Traduttore traditore" which we translate into English (somewhat ironically and treasonously) as "Translator, traitor." In either language this proverb can be read and applied in sundry ways, one of which is to highlight something that all bilingual people know: different languages map reality in different ways.

(Pennington, 83)

An awareness of contextualized meaning then naturally leads to the study of larger chunks of texts (namely, discourse), which have improved our understanding of the nature of grammar and language above the sentence level.

In contrast, a discourse grammar approach focuses on the clause as a whole, recognizing that the manner in which verbs engage with noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses will constrain the interpretation from the start.

What Wallace calls an “exegetical syntax” is really a dive into semantic, exegetically derived usage. I am increasingly convinced that trying to attach (what appear to students as) ontological categories to describe polysemous, contextually derived meaning is not a helpful way forward.

unless we understand language typology and crosslinguistic frameworks, we are making our work unusable for an increasingly global church, whose members are maturing and which is developing into serious centers of study. From my perspective, there may be no more urgent area for linguistic analysis and integration than within the biblical studies guild. 243

In fact, the drifting of the biblical studies and Bible translation cousins is close to resulting in mutually unintelligible dialects. In this matter, we stand as children of a divorce, watching our parents live separate lives, and this is to be mourned as one of the most tragic results of this linguistic history.
—Linguistics and New Testament Greek. 239-40

The biggest and most compelling issue for Christian scholarship is to have the fluency in speech that enhances high-level textual processing and macro-comprehension in reading. That is what we demand for specialists in every other literature—Russian, German, English, and so on. That is the commitment that we owe to God as caretakers of the Bible. 193

Reading comprehension directly relates to what is termed “exegesis” in biblical studies. If we want to increase exegetical comprehension skills in Greek, we need to provide extensive oral Greek development.

We must not abolish the teaching of grammar. We must reform it. Language teaching must start afresh.