In seminary I had the opportunity to read a bunch of books. Some were helpful, others not so much. I came across the work of  folks like Adele Berlin, John Sailhamer, Robert Longacre, and Randall Buth. They were doing some incredible things with the study of original languages that would really benefit pastors, but we were not really being trained to do the same kind of analysis they did. In fact, there really was little in the way of introductory methodologies to be followed. I felt like I was on the outside of a wonderful building. I could look in the windows and see wonderful things, but all of the doors were locked.

After graduating with my masters degree, I started reading in the early mornings, and built houses during the day as a sole proprietor of Academic Construction. I read for years, focusing on the bibliographies of everything that I found interesting. I wanted to learn the kinds of things that enabled Buth to do what he did. Finally in 2000, I came across an article by Stephen Levinsohn. It was a text-linguistic study of referring expressions in Genesis 22. I contacted him, and he began to guide my research by suggesting readings. When I would hit a wall, he would help me figure our which part of my theoretical framework needed attention. It was about this time that I began interacting with Christo Van der Merwe, who later became my doctoral advisor. He guided my reading in the area of Hebrew grammar and cognitive linguistics. All of this reading culminated in flying to the UK for a six-week workshop on Analyzing Discourse taught by Levinsohn.

As I learned new things, I applied them to my teaching at church and on short-term mission trips, and pulpit supply. The guys at the construction site (we did not have a ‘Joe the plumber’, his name was Mick) were my sounding board. I discovered that the concepts were not overly difficult, people just needed to see the practical pay-off. I remember my high school English teacher trying to get me interested in themes and character development in Melville’s Moby Dick, but with little success. Now I wish I had payed more attention.

The same kinds of literary devices that my English teacher and the OT literary analysts like Berlin focused on, I realized, were actually grounded in the language itself and in the way that God has wired us to process language. The further I read into discourse, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, the more readily I understood why certain idioms accomplish the effects they do, why jokes are funny only if told correctly, and so on.

While the concepts were pretty straight forward, I found that you really needed to have all of the plates spinning at once to be able to do proper analysis. But that took teaching people how to spin a plate, and then to add six or seven more. Few had either the aptitude or the commitment to pull it off. This lead to another epiphany.

What if ALL of the most useful discourse devices in the NT were identified and labeled right in the text? This way you would not be distracted from the biblical text by reading a separate commentary. I found that even untrained people could do quality work once they had an analyzed text and even a rudimentary understanding of the discourse devices. If there was an analyzed text, time in class could be devoted to analyzing the larger discourse context instead of teaching ‘plate-spinning’. There is great value in doing the work yourself, but only if people can actually do the work. The idea of an analyzed discourse Greek NT seemed like the best way to give folks (both pastors and translators) access to exegetical information that they would otherwise never see.

The result of my research has been published as Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament, part of a new series of original language resources that I am working on. There is also an English version of the same data called the High Definition New Testament. Both catalog and graphically identify all occurrences of a specific set of devices that the biblical writers used, but which are usually overlooked, even by those with a knowledge of Greek.

This blog is devoted to exegesis of NT passages, highlighting the exegetical contribution of various discourse devices to the composition of the passage. A particular focus will be the exegetical significance of different readings in the Synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.