ἄρχομαι + infintive in Grimm-Thayer : Danker

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Re: ἄρχομαι + infintive in Grimm-Thayer : Danker

Post by cwconrad »

Stirling Bartholomew wrote:I read the intro to BDAG and BAGD again. I was surprised to discover that the project for BAG 1957 was sponsored by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
Fred Danker (sowie auch Ed Krentz und andere) was on the faculty of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis at that time. In 1969 there was a revolution of sorts in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod; the seminary's new president John Tietjen, was compelled to resign and was followed by several other faculty who soon established a "Concordia Seminary in Exile" -- commonly known as "Seminex" with the extraordinary assistance of St. Louis University, a Jesuit institution. "Seminex" members later moved on, many to Chicago -- among them Fred Danker, who arranged for the long-awaited BDAG to be published by University of Chicago Press. I was in St. Louis at the institution next door to Concordia Seminary, Washington University, at the time of the upheaval at Concordia; it was quite a stir, to put it mildly. Those who are interested may learn more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seminex.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
ed krentz
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Re: ἄρχομαι + infintive in Grimm-Thayer : Danker

Post by ed krentz »

cwconrad wrote:
Stirling Bartholomew wrote:I read the intro to BDAG and BAGD again. I was surprised to discover that the project for BAG 1957 was sponsored by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
Fred Danker (sowie auch Ed Krentz und andere) was on the faculty of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis at that time. In 1969 there was a revolution of sorts in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod; the seminary's new president John Tietjen, was compelled to resign and was followed by several other faculty who soon established a "Concordia Seminary in Exile" -- commonly known as "Seminex" with the extraordinary assistance of St. Louis University, a Jesuit institution. "Seminex" members later moved on, many to Chicago -- among them Fred Danker, who arranged for the long-awaited BDAG to be published by University of Chicago Press. I was in St. Louis at the institution next door to Concordia Seminary, Washington University, at the time of the upheaval at Concordia; it was quite a stir, to put it mildly. Those who are interested may learn more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seminex.
Let mew give a bit more information about BAG,BAGD, and BDAG. William F. Arndt was also a professor of NT at Concordia Seminary. He earned a Ph. D. in classics at Washington University; his advisor for his dissertation "The Participle in Polybius and St. Paul" was Thomas Shearer Duncan. The LCMS had an association of scholars that persuaded the church to fund the translation of Baur's lGerman lexicon, then being printed in Germany. The University of Chicago Press agreed to publish the dictionary and added F. W. Gingrich to the translation team. Cambridge University Press published the British version. Arndt was in England when it was published; he die riding on a rain from London to Cambridge.

Fred Danker and I were colleagues from 1954 to his retirement about 1990, first at Concordia Seminary and then at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. We were the only two students in some classics seminars at Washington University; I recall the one on Cicero's De natura deorum with Prof. Philip DeLacy. Fred did his Ph. D. at the Universiity of Chicago under Gertrude Smith with a dissertation on expressions of grief in Greek tragedy.

Fred and I, along with 40+ other colleagues were judged heretic by an LCMS convention in 1973 for teaching things "not to be tolerated in the church of God." Ironically e ery seminary student4 in the LCMS uses this heretic's lexicon as a guide to understanding he NT and other early Christian literature.

Fred did the minor revisions of the second edition (BAGD) and then spent years doing the major rewrite of t4he third edition (BDAG). He stressed a couple of things about this edition in personal conversations with me in his St. Louis apartment. 1. He provided basic definitions of Greek words, not just one word "equivalents". He stressed this point! 2. He added significant references to the non-biblical citations at the beginning of entries, especially from Greek epigraphic texts. These references were to indicate the linguistic fields in which terms occurred to fill out one's understanding of meaning possibilities. 3. He kept many of Baur's references to older exegetical literature, often disregarded by younger scholars (in Fred's opinion an arrogant attitude). He felt they often replicated what4 older scholars knew as if they were new discoveries.

Fred was a legend to his students, nicknamed "Red Fred" from his hair before it became quite scat. He was a phrase-maker, an original in English rhetoric. One example: After preaching in chapel he offered this prayer at the altar: Lord, teach us not to pat ourselves on the back; we might break our arms, and we need them to praise you." I miss him a great deal, and I hope these notes will increase your appreciation of him. Ed Krentz
Edgar Krentz
Prof. Emeritus of NT
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago
cwconrad
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Re: ἄρχομαι + infintive in Grimm-Thayer : Danker

Post by cwconrad »

ed krentz wrote:
cwconrad wrote:
Stirling Bartholomew wrote:I read the intro to BDAG and BAGD again. I was surprised to discover that the project for BAG 1957 was sponsored by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
Fred Danker (sowie auch Ed Krentz und andere) was on the faculty of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis at that time. In 1969 there was a revolution of sorts in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod; the seminary's new president John Tietjen, was compelled to resign and was followed by several other faculty who soon established a "Concordia Seminary in Exile" -- commonly known as "Seminex" with the extraordinary assistance of St. Louis University, a Jesuit institution. "Seminex" members later moved on, many to Chicago -- among them Fred Danker, who arranged for the long-awaited BDAG to be published by University of Chicago Press. I was in St. Louis at the institution next door to Concordia Seminary, Washington University, at the time of the upheaval at Concordia; it was quite a stir, to put it mildly. Those who are interested may learn more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seminex.
Let me give a bit more information about BAG,BAGD, and BDAG. William F. Arndt was also a professor of NT at Concordia Seminary. He earned a Ph. D. in classics at Washington University; his advisor for his dissertation "The Participle in Polybius and St. Paul" was Thomas Shearer Duncan. The LCMS had an association of scholars that persuaded the church to fund the translation of Baur's lGerman lexicon, then being printed in Germany. The University of Chicago Press agreed to publish the dictionary and added F. W. Gingrich to the translation team. Cambridge University Press published the British version. Arndt was in England when it was published; he died riding on a train from London to Cambridge.

Fred Danker and I were colleagues from 1954 to his retirement about 1990, first at Concordia Seminary and then at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. We were the only two students in some classics seminars at Washington University; I recall the one on Cicero's De natura deorum with Prof. Philip DeLacy. Fred did his Ph. D. at the Universiity of Chicago under Gertrude Smith with a dissertation on expressions of grief in Greek tragedy.

Fred and I, along with 40+ other colleagues were judged heretic by an LCMS convention in 1973 for teaching things "not to be tolerated in the church of God." Ironically e ery seminary student4 in the LCMS uses this heretic's lexicon as a guide to understanding he NT and other early Christian literature.

Fred did the minor revisions of the second edition (BAGD) and then spent years doing the major rewrite of t4he third edition (BDAG). He stressed a couple of things about this edition in personal conversations with me in his St. Louis apartment. 1. He provided basic definitions of Greek words, not just one word "equivalents". He stressed this point! 2. He added significant references to the non-biblical citations at the beginning of entries, especially from Greek epigraphic texts. These references were to indicate the linguistic fields in which terms occurred to fill out one's understanding of meaning possibilities. 3. He kept many of Baur's references to older exegetical literature, often disregarded by younger scholars (in Fred's opinion an arrogant attitude). He felt they often replicated what4 older scholars knew as if they were new discoveries.

Fred was a legend to his students, nicknamed "Red Fred" from his hair before it became quite scat. He was a phrase-maker, an original in English rhetoric. One example: After preaching in chapel he offered this prayer at the altar: Lord, teach us not to pat ourselves on the back; we might break our arms, and we need them to praise you." I miss him a great deal, and I hope these notes will increase your appreciation of him. Ed Krentz
Thank you very much for filling in several of the blanks about Fred Danker, BDAG and also about yourself. You and I have never met in the flesh, although we’ve exchanged messages over the course of a couple decades; but the Classics Department at Washington University is one common matrix that you and I share. When I arrived in St. Louis and joined the department in Sepember of 1961 I found a remnant faculty from which Tom Duncan had already retired and from which Phil DeLacy and Saul Levin had just “flown the coop.” On the shelf in my new office was a bound volume of the typed doctoral dissertation of Ed Krentz from 1960. Many moons were to pass before our department was strong enough to grant another Ph.D. We continued to have divinity students from Concordia Seminary doing work in our department, both before and subsequent to the big upheaval there, and I later steered two or three of them through a doctorate myself.

I met Fred Danker only once; it was during my own years as Chair of our department; we met at the university library where together we arranged for procurement of a volume of inscriptions from Pergamum that I felt we needed and he would be able to use for his lexical research. But I heard lots of stories about him from many sources, including members of the church that he attended down across the road from the other end of our campus across from Francis Field, the stadium where the Olympic Games of 1904 were held more than a century ago.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
MAubrey
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Re: ἄρχομαι + infintive in Grimm-Thayer : Danker

Post by MAubrey »

Wow. Thank you, Ed, for this excellent history. These sorts of details are invaluable!
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
SIL International
Koine-Greek.com
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