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Greek Style

Posted: November 5th, 2012, 8:02 pm
by Jeremy Spencer
I've been wondering for awhile now whether there have been recent discussions of Greek style in the GNT. I think Nigel Turner wrote on style in the GNT some time ago. Has the idea of "style" been replaced by other approaches these days? Any thoughts on this topic would be appreciated.

Re: Greek Style

Posted: November 6th, 2012, 5:07 am
by Stephen Carlson
Style is something that is both obvious and hard to define. My sense is that there have been several different ways of dealing with it.

One is to compare how the texts of the NT and compare them with contemporary standards of rhetorical style. I'm thinking of the work Hans Dieter Betz has done for Galatians.

Another is to go computer and have computers do the style analysis, generally for authorship discrimination. David Mealand has been doing work on this recently.

Yet another is to give pragmatic or discourse explanations to features that used to be called stylistic.

Personally, I think that all three approaches have their merits.

Re: Greek Style

Posted: November 6th, 2012, 11:53 am
by Jeremy Spencer
Thanks for your comments and suggestions of different resources. A cursory search of Amazon turned up only one book by Eugene A. Nida touching, in part, on the subject of Greek Style in the NT, but perhaps there are other works as well. At advanced levels, it seems like rigorously defining what is meant by "style" would be a real challenge.