Customer Reviews

A Concise Dictionary of New Testament Greek

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Warren Trenchard has performed a great service for readers of the Greek New Testament with this slim but comprehensive volume. Trenchard includes every word that occurs in the Greek NT and provides multiple definitions for many words, lists cognate words, identifies the part of speech, and lists the principal parts of each verb; in addition, he also provides common idioms that are encountered in the GNT among the word definitions. You can't ask much more from a 177-page paperback. No, this will by no means replace BDAG and it doesn't aspire to do so; BDAG is much more comprehensive and cites many more examples. However, Trenchard's slender volume is much more convenient to take along wherever you go and the information it gives you will suffice until you can consult BDAG or TDNT for the full scope of a word.

New Testament Greek dictionaries come in two very different flavors. On the one hand, there are the huge, multi-volume theological dictionaries, generally translated from German, the language of the very largest community of New Testament scholars. On the other, there is the thin, almost pocket-sized dictionary of only those Greek words which appeared in the New Testament, with only the scantest lexicological information. I have used two of these. First, the lovely leather-bound dictionary by Barclay M. Newman, Jr. and published by the United Bible Societies. The second, slightly larger volume published by the Cambridge University Press, is prepared by Warren C. Trenchard.
Both books are dedicated exclusively to Greek to English, giving all Greek words in the original Greek script we encountered when we studied college math. As someone with aging eyes, I can say that both are easy to read without extra magnification. If I were to give the edge to either, I suspect the slimmer Newman dictionary may be infinitesimally clearer.
Both books have virtually identical coverage of words, with Trenchard having more words on a page and fewer pages, while Newman's pages are thinner, with a correspondingly higher risk of skipping over or tearing pages. The lexical information provided on all words is very similar; however Trenchard gives better information on the parts of speech and tenses of verb forms.
Neither book offers any assistance with Greek grammar. I am quite surprised also that neither book even has a copy of the Greek alphabet in the book. Both books also offer occasional references to passages in the NT to help understand a word's context, but this is only with about 20% of the words in Newman and about 35% of the words in Trenchard.
The one great difference between the two dictionaries lies in Trenchard's providing a count of the number of times each word appears in the NT. This is a small but valuable asset, as when I tried to find a word in one of the mammoth theological dictionaries, and discovered that it occurs but twice in the NT, giving me some reassurance that in the greater scheme of things, this word is relatively unimportant. So, if I were going on a trip, I would pack the attractive and thin Newman, but use the more informative Trenchard for day to day work.

This is absolutely an excellent little dictionary. It is convenient because of its size, and the type-set is easy to read. Trenchard gives brief definitions of every word in the New Testament, as well as idiomatic expressions. He also lists odd word forms for verbs, and generally lists the aorist and perfect tense forms after the present tense before he provides a definition. I highly recommend this book for beginning students over the bigger and more unwieldy BADG. This book should also be useful for intermediate and advanced students as a quick reference dictionary.

This Greek lexicon is not good for beginners. Greek words have many different forms (tense, mood, etc.), & the spelling can be different for different forms (sometimes even the beginning of a word changes). You must know the root spelling to look up a word in this lexicon. Few beginners know root spellings, so this is not the lexicon for students just beginning to learn Gree.