Brian LePort recently posted a positive short review of Steve Runge’s Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament (Hendrickson 2010). My linguistic journey began when I was introduced to using linguistics as tool for exegesis when I took a Biblical Hebrew Syntax course at Southeastern Seminary. Then while at Edinburgh I purchased Runge’s DGGNT and ultimately utilised the concepts from the chapter on Information Structure (Word Order Analysis) for my MTh dissertation on fronting in Amos 3-6.

Three things confirmed for me on the reasonableness of the concepts advocated in DGGNT: First, it was a cross-linguistic approach. The principles found in the grammar have been utilised by linguists and fieldworkers working in numerous types of languages. Thus, the principles are reasonable because they derive from how language works and is processed.  Second, while at Edinburgh I worked with a lecturer in the linguistics faculty and she found the framework linguistically responsible. Here was a linguistics scholar, not a Greek scholar, validating the linguistic framework. The last reason is the explanatory power I found while writing my dissertation. I found that I could explain particular phenomena in Amos that either scholars just make intuitively, but with no exegetical basis, or simply could not answer because they felt the evidence was ambiguous.

A great quote from Brian’s original post that sums my own feelings:

I confess that prior to reading this book I overlooked most (or read without being very conscious) of the devices used by authors to do things as simple as emphasizing the main theme over against an athematic point, or when the author seems to be commenting/explaining the text within the text, or when the author wants to introduce a change in time or place. In fact, many of these chapters introduced ideas that were completely new to me. If not completely new, then paradigm shifting and mind expanding. I found that my reading of the text seemed to go from 2-D to 3-D in the process.

Read the entire review here.