Customer Reviews

Acts: A Handbook on the Greek Text (Baylor Handbook on the Greek New Testament)

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I saw this title in an ad from Baylor and asked for an examination copy since I am a professor of Greek exegesis. To be honest, I had low expectations, thinking that it was going to be too basic for my own needs and those of my students in "The Greek Text of Acts." Was I pleasantly surprised when I received this marvelous book, compactly written and printed and yet still over 550 pages. It serves its purpose - to illuminate the grammar of Acts for exegesis - exceedingly well. I have already decided to adopt it for a course in the Fall. This is more than an "analytical lexicon." It is more than a "grammatical analysis." It combines the good points of those types of works with a great awareness and sensitivity to the most recent work in grammar and linguistic insights into the language.
It will serve pastors well, but also should not be viewed by professors as too much of a "crutch" for their students. It doesn't tell the reader everything about a verse. It doesn't eliminate the use of a good commentary or one's own exegetical analysis. As a matter of fact, the authors make excellent recommendations about other writings and have an excellent up-to-date bibliography on Acts. Parsons and Culy often cover matters that the commentaries omit. It is current, compactly written and very helpful for readers of the Greek text at all levels. We need to see more works like this from these two authors, if they are in the same vein as this work. Highly recommended!

Culy and Parsons are among the most scrutinizing and perceptive exegetes in evangelicalism today. Clear, concise, and painstakingly careful, you will not find a better work on the Greek text of Acts anywhere.

The book is directed toward people who have at least an intermediate knowledge of Greek. Among other things, it helps readers to understand what are the various interpretive options that the text of Acts allows, and often makes arguments for which ones are preferable. It is not for the faint of heart, though; this is anything but light reading. I often spend fifteen minutes examining one specific verse, analyzing what the different exegetical options are, and considering how my interpetation of the text could be affected by each one.

The book is formatted in the style typical to scholarly commentaries today. The text of Acts is broken up into various sections, at the beginning of each one is the authors' own translation. Then they provide a phrase by phrase (often word by word) analysis of each individual verse.

It is worth noting that the book is quite handy for those who find Luke's style of Greek to be somewhat intimidating. It can help to clarify those difficult passages where his writing leans heavily toward the classical style, and is even useful for those who are studying his gospel, since it gives readers a feel for his use of the language.

It should be emphasized that there is not very much in this book as far as "commentary" is concerned. Rather than examining the broad picture that Luke has given us, it focuses on the tiny pixels that make up that picture. But, it does such a great job in doing so, that I highly recommend keeping it nearby when you are reading any commentary on Acts.

The ground rules: I am not a professional theologian or greek scholar. I am a layman who has done 1st year greek for fun. I am past Mounce's "Basics" and am at the early Wallace ("Greek Grammar Beyond...") stage.

I would describe this book as a grammatical commentary. Culy and Parsons divide Acts into passages and translate each. Then they go through phrase by phrase and comment on the grammatical structure. They provide a lot of parsing information which is useful to the beginner/intermediate reader. They also identify the common and the more advanced grammatical structures -- for example in Acts 1:2 we have an example of an "internally headed relative clause". You always wondered about Acts 1:2 didn't you? :-). They thankfully provide definitions for such structures!

If you want theology, word studies, literary criticism etc. you will not find it here. If you want a more in-depth analysis of the grammar of Acts, or if you want a helping-hand with your parsing as you read, this book is a treasure trove and is highly recommended. It provides much more grammatical information than e.g. Zerwick/Grosvenor (A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament)and suchlike volumes but will not (in general) translate individual words.

There is one more book in this series by Martin Culy on John's Epistles which follows the same format and is equally valuable.

I think that with this type of book, Baylor have addressed a real need here, and I hope they follow up with further volumes on more books of the GNT.

This book contains more grammar than most readers will probably need or want to know. However, for seminary or university students who have to produce a detailed analysis of the Greek text of Acts at word, phrase, clause and sentence level, this volume has done the work for them - at least as regards verb forms. Other words seem to be somewhat randomly parsed or ignored.

After a short introduction (9 pages), Parsons & Culy's book works through the book of Acts, divided into passages of suitable length, with the following sections:

Their translation of the Greek passage

The passage is then printed, a verse at a time, in the original Greek text (NA27/UBS4)

After each verse, all verb forms are fully parsed, as are some other words (although no translations are given at this point).

There are occasional lengthy paragraphs on points of grammar that the authors consider require greater explanation, and other manuscript evidence is referred to, sometimes in considerable detail.

However, it should be pointed out that this is not a Commentary on the book of Acts, in the traditionally-accepted understanding of the term, and occasional excursions into commentary are not always convincing and in at least one case inaccurate - the commentary on Acts 25:23, where Bernice is described as Agrippa's wife (she was his sister).

I found the Greek font used difficult to read. It is particularly difficult (near impossible without a magnifying glass) to distinguish between rough breathings, smooth breathings, acute accents and grave accents, and when a breathing is combined with an accent, the effect is not much better than a smudge of black ink above the vowel. This is a pity, as much more legible fonts are readily available.

Parsons & Culy's analysis is not always easy to understand. Terms such as "headless relative clause" and "internally-headed relative clause" are used without explanation (e.g., on pp 291-292), when in the opinion of the present reviewer such terms need as a minimum to be illustrated with diagrams.

The book concludes with a bibliography.

As an alternative to this text, one could consider consulting "A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament" by Maximilian Zerwick, SJ and Mary Grosvenor. Zerwick & Grosvenor's book does, after all, cover the whole of the New Testament.

However, Parsons & Culy go into much greater detail on those words that they do parse and/or comment on. For example, the word diaswthentes in Acts 28.1 is defined by Zerwick & Grosvenor (correctly) as "aor. ptc pass" (and they then give the Greek verb from which it is formed, and translate that into English). For the same word, Parsons & Culy write "Aor pass ptc masc nom pl diaswzw (temporal)". (As well as these abbreviations, Parsons & Culy use many others, but unfortunately the book contains no explanation of signs and abbreviations - an omission which should be corrected in a future edition of the book, in the opinion of this reviewer.)

Parsons & Culy also point out a number of genitive absolute phrases that are missed by Zerwick & Grosvenor.

An alternative source of full parsing information would be the program Bible Works 8 (or presumably the newer version 9, which I have not seen). Naturally, this is a lot more expensive than the book by Parsons & Culy, but it does of course cover the whole of the Bible, including the original Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew texts, with every word (at least, of those that I have so far checked!) fully parsed, with full dictionary definitions in a parallel pane, as well as with a wide range of translations into English and a range of other languages. With Bible Works 8 it is also possible to do searches for words in the translations that are included and in the original texts. In other words, BW8 includes a full multi-lingual concordance.

However, having a book in which one can write notes suits my way of working, and when I was doing a detailed study of the Greek text of Acts I was pleased to have Parsons & Culy, alongside Zerwick & Grosvenor and the commentaries by J Fitzmyer and F F Bruce.