New Greek textbook by Stanley Porter
For many years Mounce’s Greek textbook has virtually dominated NT Greek instruction in most seminaries (or perhaps in most evangelical seminaries).
Despite its popularity, there have been many who have wondered ift does not represent the insights of recent linguistic scholarship. Who better to write a new textbook? Stanley Porter, of course. And he did.
I mentioned this in a previous post (on Eerdmans forthcoming books): the book is called Fundamentals of New Testament Greek – due out in late July/early August. Porter will offer a highly competent guide to the Greek language and put the learner in a position to interpret the NT (in Greek) without making common exegetical mistakes.
Eerdmans has not released much information about this book, which is unfortunate and makes it very risky for profs to adopt the book for this fall. I am in such a position, as I am highly tempted to give it a go for teaching Greek this next year. As far as I know, this is the breakdown of chapters for the first part of the book:
ch1: Alphabet, accents, pronunciationm noun jobs, parts of speech
ch2: 2nd decl. nouns, 1st and 2nd decl. adjectives
ch3: the article, verbless clauses
ch4: Intro to verbs, first aor. indic and infinitive
ch5: 1st decl. nouns; relative pronouns
ch6: second aorist and imperfect
ch7: 3rd declen nouns and adjectives; “to be”
ch8: Present and future active indicative and infinitive, contract verbs in -epsilon omega
ch9: Pronouns
ch10: Aorist, pres., fut active participles
ch11: middle voice: aor. and fut. indicative and infinitive
ch12: prepositions with one case. Demonstratives
ch13: Passive voice
ch14: Subjunctive
Ch15: More prepositions: more on pronouns
Ch16: Contract verbs, conjunctions, adverbs
[there are certainly more chapters, but I do not have information on them].
In the end, if the book is released soon, I will use it as I admire Porter (et al.) and his linguistic work. In particular, I have used Mounce and Duff and I find their discussion of verbal aspect to be very weak and outdated (esp. Duff). Porter will certainly offer a more nuanced discussion.
Please – if anyone has any more information about this textbook, please share your notes/thoughts in the comments. Thanks!
July 1, 2009 at 12:41 pm
It may be worth noting that Dr. Rodney Decker has a brief supplement available for chapter 15 of Mounce over at ntresources.com. I believe the date is 2003. As you know, Decker’s dissertation supported Porter’s view on the Aspect ‘debate’.
July 1, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Would Eerdmans be able to send you a copy in advance if you requested it?
July 1, 2009 at 1:42 pm
I contacted Eerdmans. They do not have the book at a stage where they could do that. My guess (and it is only a guess) is that it is probably not going to make it out in time for fall adoption at most institutions. Don’t quote me on this.
July 1, 2009 at 1:51 pm
It will be interesting to see the grammar when it comes out. I have a version of Porter, Reed and Palmer from 1992 from when I TAed for Porter. It is traditional in the sense of the depth of understanding that is required, compared to Mounce, e.g. being able to apply accents compared to recognizing them. In that sense, it is more like Machen. IMO, Mounce exhibits linguistic innovation is in the area of morphology, and breaking the paradigms down into their lowest possible form for easier recognition of the form. At introductory levels, there is only so much that cutting edge insights from linguistics can accomplish. The focus is of necessity on learning the forms and vocabulary, pretty crude stuff.
I look forward to reviewing the grammar, but I expect Mounce +Decker+supplementing lectures will be hard to beat for most situations. Porter et al. will appeal to those who like Machen and want to understand the compositional side of the language, as opposed to Mounce’s focus on reading and recognition.
July 16, 2009 at 10:57 am
Hi Nijay – I’m also very interested in this, as I’ll be teaching Greek at Nottingham this coming year. I wonder when it will be available to preview??
July 16, 2009 at 12:13 pm
I contacted Eerdmans and they have pushed back to launch date to the very end of October. They won’t have any kind of preview for quite some time.
July 17, 2009 at 8:49 am
dang… I also contacted them for an exam copy, but alas seems like it’s too late for this coming year. I guess it’s back to duff…