Customer Reviews

Intermediate New Testament Greek: A Linguistic and Exegetical Approach

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Richard Young has a superb job of giving the student of the Greek New Testament a grammar that is a worthy successor to Dana and Mantey. Although it is not as massive as Daniel Wallace's Greek Grammar: Beyond the Basics, Young's treatment is an ideal choice for one who is seeking to use his Greek to interpret the New Testament. Using a linguistical model, Young goes beyond the traditional approaches of sentence-based studies of the surface structure of the Greek language. He presents a broader picture of communication that examines both the language of the Greek New Testament and how its meaning is influence by its literary and situational contexts. A must-have for anyone wishing to do exegesis.

As a former undergraduate student of Dr. Young's in my early years, I found this volume a good representation of his cognitive style. He is foremost a remarkable scholar. He is also a remarkable pragmatist. His text illustrates a caveat in Western thinking between traditional grammarians and those who spoke vulgar Greek in daily life. After Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and two ancient north Egyptian dialects, (Sahidic and Coptic), I have come to many of the principle conclusion of his book, (albeit 20 years later). To divorce the force of "meaning" from it's internal idiomatic and external forms of expression is to miss the force of a language altogether. Why do ALL modern Greek grammars do this? Simply put, it is a fear of crossing traditional lines. Dr. Young was always far more concerned about accuracy than tradition. Whether Dr. Young cites the G. Sharp rule on anarthrous nominatives on the Johannan paradox misses the point of linguistic-historical harmony of meaning. It also utterly misses the point of this grammar.

This volume should be on every shelf in every Greek professors library in the world. Failing this, a great volume of meaning shall be lost by even the most astute Greek students/scholars of Alexandrian Greek.

This is not the grammar one should first reach for in most areas. Daniel Wallace's grammars hold pride of place out of those that are most current. When one compares this grammar to those, there are reasons why this should not be preferred over Wallace.

1) Young has an interesting, and odd, tendency to list only the English translation of passages that aremeant as a Greek grammatical example. thus one has to find the passage to see if his usage is accurate.

2) He changes terminology from that which is commonly used by other scholars. thus one has to get used to his own (idiosyncratic) usages and then compare them against the "normal" usages.

3) He often included exegetically debated texts as his prooftexts for particular usages, and then does not say that they are debatable.

All of these devalue the usage of this grammar. Also he follows speech act theory very closely. which means he not only sees the aorist as not having a time aspect, but rarely sees time aspect mattering in tense at all. However, one should consider the fact that an author in any language can use a verb in an alternate tense to make it more vivid or to bring about a point. This does not invalidate a rule, because one has to know the normal usage to expect the abnormal one.

Where this grammar is most useful is in preposition and conjunction usages. His compiled lists of common usages for conjunctions and prepositions save frequent trips to the lexicon. They also represent the one area of clear superiority over even Wallace's "Beyond the Basics."

I have no regrets in purchasing this book. It is a keeper for the serious Greek student. Dr. Young work has been even integrated in Daniel B. Wallace popular work, "Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics."

Yes, he has employed some nontraditional terms, but isn't that what scholarship is all about?

As someone who has done graduate work in NT Greek, I find this work to be a great addition to the study of NT Greek.

As a teacher of Intermediate New Testament Greek, I found this a highly successful and easy-to-use book.

Other reviewers have noted some terminological differences between Young and Wallace. These are most significant in participles, where a term like "adverbial participle of reason" is equivalent to Wallace's and others' "causal participle." If you're using the book as a working textbook, some quick notes in the margins will enable you to communicate in a broader scholarly context. In some ways, Young's term helps the translator remember in which of the two MAIN categories of participles (adverbial or adjectival) the sub-category fits. This is helpful for students new to technical exegesis. This is just one example, I'm sure, of its easy "translation" to traditional terms.

Also, one should note that not all of the categories Young presents are equally plausible for a given translation. I find that they are in descending likelihood. (For instance, in narrative, a participle is most likely adverbial, temporal/time-related. In epistolary Greek, a participle is more likely to be causal/reason-related. Wallace is a good resource when you've got a stinker of a phrase that doesn't fit any normal category, but when you want something clear and in order of likelihood, Young is the most easy to use.

I've praised Young enough. This text is always popular with my students. The only problem I have is his occasionally highly conservative theological/interpretive viewpoint that shows through. It is rare and I cannot recall exactly where it shows up, but be forewarned that it is in there. However, if you're learning THEOLOGY from a Greek Grammar Textbook, there are more disturbing issues about that scenario than whatever Young might say!

Richard A. Young has produced a useful work that certainly provides assistance to students of intermediate NT Greek. Being an intermediate Greek textbook, it predictably deals with syntax and not morphology or phonology. One particularly distinctive feature of Young's work is that he mixes modern linguistic findings and insights based on classical rhetoric with his discussions of syntax. For instance, he supplies brief discussions on metaphors, "kernels," figurative language in general, and speech acts. Moreover, Young has included a helpful chapter on discourse analysis and he also references the prominent theories of aspect formulated by Stanley Porter and Buist Fanning. In may ways, he is also fair in his presentation of syntactical possibilities as illustrated by his approach to 1 Cor 15:29. However, it seems that more than a few of his explanations regarding word order are driven by certain theological preapprehensions. For example, on page 66, he criticizes the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures' rendering of Jn 1:1c as "a god" rather than the traditional "God." His criticisms are based, in part, on his notion of what constitutes a "monadic noun." Young utterly misunderstands the thrust behind the NWT rendering and implies that the "a god" translation is polytheistic--which it is not, when rightly understood. Even worse, he depends on the inadequate rule of Colwell to buttress his opposition to the NWT reading. Regardless of whether the NWT is justified in treating the Johannine text as it does, it is clear that Young sometimes allows theology to govern his syntactical judgments and he unfortunately overlooks the possibility that "a god" just might be a very plausible way to translate Jn 1:1c. There is really no need to impute a polytheistic stance to those who choose to render the passage this way. Despite some issues that I have with Young's intermediate text, however, I recommend it and say, caveat emptor!