YABNTDA -Yet Another Book on New Testament Discourse Analysis

From: clayton stirling bartholomew (c.s.bartholomew@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Sun Feb 13 2000 - 16:45:55 EST


Yet Another Book on New Testament Discourse Analysis

Porter, Stanley E. & Jeffrey T. Reed ̉Discourse Analysis and the New
Testament, Sheffield Academic Press, 1999

Just got this title through ILL two days ago. Looks good. Currently
looking at Gustavo Martin-Aseniso's analysis of Steven's speech in Acts.
The article is very lucid which is not typical of articles written by
linguists.

Will not get into any detailed discussion of Gustavo's thesis at this
point, but will note that G.K. Barrett (Acts - ICC) comes in for some
pretty heavy criticism in this article for not having read and
incorporated everything published by Stan Porter and his gang into
volume One of his commentary on Acts.

 Is this fair?

Vol. One of Acts by Barrett was published in 1994. This means that it
was probably substantially completed a year or two before that, say
1992. Stanley Porter had just appeared about two years before that. His
first published work was not really readable by native users of the
English language. So it wasn't until "Idioms" came out that his ideas
appeared in a readable format for wide distribution. I appreciate what
Stanley Porter and Jeffery Reed and others are doing but I don't expect
that their ideas and methods are going to become "mainstream" for some
time yet.

I think it is a slightly preposterous to suggest that a NT scholar who
has been publishing for decades and decades (C.K. Barrett) is going to
be able to assimilate information written by people who are working in a
entirely different and highly specialized field (linguistics) within a
matter of months and pull it into the final draft of a major work he has
been preparing for years.

Anyway, get your hands on a copy of "Discourse Analysis and the New
Testament" so you can quote it in your next book. Otherwise you will
incur the wrath of the next wave of Rohampton Inst. Phd's.

Do read Gustavo's article, it is well written. I intend to go back over
the Greek text of Steven's Speech and study it in light of this article.
It looks to me as if Gustavo in his analysis of "Participant Reference"
has brought to our attention a very productive approach to discourse
analysis.

--
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062

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