I just received a note this morning from Stephen Levinsohn regarding the posting of his resources on the web. Some of you may be familiar with his self-taught discourse materials. What may be new are his extensive exegetical notes on various books of the Bible. Some of it may well be over your head, but they are definitely worth taking a look at if you are doing a close study of the book. Conceptually speaking, the framework I am using is intended to serve as an introduction to his approach. If you can track what I am doing here, you should do fine. Here is his description:
The website includes not only the self-instruction courses, but also my files of discourse observations on 1 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 1 Corinthians 1-4 and parts of Luke – materials produced in past ‘Discourse for Translation’ workshops. It also has a link to three files in Spanish. As I am often asked for these files, I was wondering whether there is some means of publicising the existence of this site.
One note of caution. Stephen is a very precise scholar. Generally speaking, if he cannot account for 95-100% of the data of a given feature, then he does not feel that he has properly described it. I am aiming for the 80-90% range, since there seems to be a fairly high fatality rate in covering the last 10%. In other words, it becomes so technical in the final leg that many give up the ghost rather than pushing ahead. It’s not really a death march, it just feels like it. My introductions are intended to acclimatize folks before they move off to attempt the summit. When I was doing my doctoral studies there was no concise introduction to the field, most works assumed a horrific amount of background. Hopefully I am bridging that gap.
I commend Levinsohn’s work to you, particularly the self-teaching materials. By all means read and see how languages tend to operate, what principles they follow. It will greatly enhance your ability to think productively about English, Greek, or most any other thing.
