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February 07, 2008

Making of the Lexham High Definition New Testament

[Today's guest post is from Dr. Steve Runge, a scholar-in-residence at Logos Bible Software, whose work
focuses on the discourse grammar of Hebrew and Greek.]

This is a follow-up to a blog entry that I posted last Thursday entitled Who
Cares About Participles? I Do! It described how the New Testament writers
used Greek participles to push less-important action into the background in
order to keep attention focused on the main action of a verse. At the end, I
gave the warning that this principle about backgrounding action did not apply
to every participle. This prompted a great comment from a user. He said:

I wasn'
t the best student at English grammar either so to figure out that
what you have shown us in this blog would have been impossible for
me as I don'
t understand all the different parts of English speech and
writing. So, my question is this: with my ineptitude with both Greek and
English, how can I use this tool well and know even what to look for?
Perhaps that is an impossible question to ask.

This is a great question. The reality is there is no possible way for him to have
known or done what I did without knowing the grammatical principles I used. Even knowing the principle, he
would still need enough grammatical background to do the analysis. In other words, he wants access to this
information, but his grammatical skills are too rusty for him to do the analysis himself. On top of this, he was
probably never taught this principle in his studies. If you read the participles blog post and are a few years out of
school, you will probably empathize with his frustration. Maybe you never even had the chance to attend Bible
school. Here are some questions.

1. Were you able to understand the idea of '

backgrounding'the action in a sentence using participles?
2. Did you understand the meaning that could be gleaned from the choice to use a participle, and not a finite
verb?

If so, then the problem is not with your understanding of grammar, the problem is with your access to the
analyzed data. Right now, there is no access without years of study, and in this users case, keeping his Greek
skills fresh, right? My personal mission in life is to address the ACCESS issue.

I have spent the last 12 years studying the problem, proposing and testing solutions, and coming up with a plan.
What if ALL of the backgrounded actions in the NT were identified? What if there were a visual-filter type label on
them so that as you were reading the text you could distinguish main actions from backgrounded ones? Would
that be helpful? What if I did the same with 15 other of the most useful devices I found in my research? What if
you could see all of these devices identified right in the text? This way you would not be distracted from the
biblical text by reading a separate commentary. What if the text was organized into a block outline, breaking
down the complexity of the text to help you better understand how it flows and how it is organized hierarchically?

If these questions pique your interest, then you will be interested in a resource that is set to go on Pre-Publication
in the next few weeks. It is called the Lexham High Definition New Testament, part of a new series of original
language resources that we are working on. It catalogs and graphically identifies all occurrences of a specific set
of devices, like backgrounding, that the biblical writers used, but which are largely invisible without knowledge of
Greek.

Many of these devices are based on the work of Bible translators, and are not even taught in seminary classes.

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The only way to learn them at this point is to slog through the linguistics literature like I have done for the last
decade. This required developing an extensive knowledge of cognitive linguistics, pragmatics and syntax. Having
done that, and having annotated where all of the devices occur in the text, the problem of access to the data is
only partly solved.

The next step is to explain the concepts based on our idiomatic usage in English. Every language has to
accomplish the same basic set of tasks. Since the annotated devices accomplish a specific task, I can explain the
Greek device by analogy to how the same task is accomplished in English, regardless of how it might be
translated. In other words, it would not matter if a Greek participle is translated as a main verb in English as long
as you understood that it is backgrounded, right? This is a new way of thinking about these issues, a great
complement to working with your preferred translation.

There is another problem. My analysis of these devices is based on the Greek text, not an English version. This
means that somehow the data needs to be exported and mapped to an English version so that non-Greek or
'
rusty-Greek'folks can access it. Until two years ago, this would have been impossible. Logos has invested the
time and money into creating reverse interlinears, where the original language words are aligned to the
corresponding words of the English translations. This allows the data that I have annotated to the Greek to be
exported and displayed in English translations. Ill let you in on a little secret: Greek is not English! Not every
Greek device maps well into English, so we combined and culled down from about 40 concepts in Greek to 17 in
English.

What is displayed in English is actually Greek data. If you find concepts like backgrounding valuable, and the
want to get access to things that you would likely not even have learned if you had done advanced Greek study, it
will soon be accessible to you mapped onto an English translation.

Not every concept is easy enough to understand with a thumbnail sketch for an introduction. However, a good
many of them ARE that simple, but access to the data has been the ongoing problem. We have taken the very
best of these devices and mapped them into English in the Lexham High Definition New Testament. There will be
another, more detailed and more technical version of the data that is mapped onto the Greek text that will also be
released, called the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament.

I appreciate the frustration people have felt about helpful information being restricted to the few that had the
aptitude and discipline to reach the advanced levels of original language study. There is a tremendous amount of
information that will remain restricted to this domain, based on the nature of it. However, there is a lot of practical
stuff that can be exported and applied by folks if only they had the access to it. This frustration has been my
motivation for getting up at 4:30am several days a week since 1993 to do research. I worked construction for the
last 15 years to provide for my family and fund my study. Logos hired me in October 2006 because they believed
that the insight into Scripture that users would gain from this project was worth the investment to produce it.

There is not another resource like the Lexham High Definition New Testament, where a collection of the most
useful discourse devices are pulled together and practically applied. I will be blogging about a different device
from the Discourse NT series each week for the next few months. I do not want information that would be
beneficial to people like you, people who are smart and motivated to study God'
s Word, to remain restricted to the
few. I have had several scholars rebuke me for taking on such a project, saying people might misuse it. People
are already misusing English versions, so why not give them something that might curb some of the abuse and
misunderstanding?

Update: Both products are now available for pre-order:

Lexham High Definition New Testament

Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament

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Posted by Rick Brannan at February 7, 2008 06:00 AM

Comments

Please convey my thanks to your family for supporting you through your years working brick and mortar
construction in order to construct something many of us are waiting for with great eagerness. And thank YOU for
responding to our Lord'
s call to work through all that relevant literature on behalf of us who are strung out along
the way between none, little, and quite a bit of language study who truly need access to what you have been
discovering way up the trail.
Steve Maling

Posted by: Steve Maling at February 7, 2008 07:33 AM

Thank you for the valuable work you do for people like me who are not greek scholars. please make it accessible.

"I have had several scholars rebuke me for taking on such a project, saying people might misuse it"

I beg you in christ name please ignore the rebuke from these scholars.

Thanks again a thousand times thanks

Posted by: Ted Hans at February 7, 2008 01:50 PM

Wow! This sounds great. I was just fooling around with the "backgrounding" stuff and it is terrific. Sounds like a
really great resource. Publish it! Fast!

Posted by: John Murphy at February 8, 2008 03:19 PM

Steve as I looked at your last article it was an eye opener and really helped me as an English only Bible student.
I have another question though.

I purchased 12 Essential Skills for Great Preaching by Wayne McDill and he starts with a structural diagram (that
is a phrase by phrase chart of the text in the exact word order of the translation that is used, showing rhetorical
functions, connectives, verbs, theological significance).

I want to be able to identify all these different information using libronix.

Steve can this be done?

Posted by: Gareth Segree at February 9, 2008 02:56 PM

The Lexham Discourse NT will have a basic block outline of the text, based on the Greek text. This means you
will be able to have an outline of the English version (currently the ESV) that is grounded in Greek grammar.
Depending on which library you have, there is a resource called "Lexham Clausal Outlines of the Greek New
Testament" by Deppe that is included in the Original Language and Scholars Libraries. It provides a basic outline
of the Greek text, and includes an interlinear, but it does not label any of the devices.

The book you mentioned by McDill teaches you how to do the analysis, but does not do it for you. Skimming
through what he describes, the Lexham Discourse New Testament will likely be the closest analysis that you will
find to what he is describing, providing a complete propositional outline of the New Testament, and identifying a

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number of rhetorical and linguistic devices right in the text when they occur.

Posted by: Steve Runge at February 12, 2008 04:13 PM

Just a quick question: What Greek text is this resource based on? If it is UBS4/NA27 then this is an excellent
resource. If not, then it is not as useful as it could be.

Thanks in advance for your response!

Posted by: David Cote at March 14, 2008 05:29 PM

David, the Greek text used is identical to the UBS4/NA27.

Posted by: Phil Gons at March 15, 2008 01:03 AM

I love this stuff! I would be interested in your research that led you to the "15" you refer to in the blog. Is there a
dissertation or thesis or article or two I could access?

Also, I wonder if you use any qualitative analysis software in your text study. I'
ve been using Atlas.ti for work in
my PhD in Literacy, looking at written texts of participants (some 60 documents) and classroom video field notes
(some 30 hours transcribed).

What kind of a process did you use to determine which data were most valuable? Did you start with classic Greek
grammars and translation commentaries like the UBS handbooks in Libronix?

Fascinating! Thanks for your work and sacrifice.

You have a gift for putting the scholarly language into terms that everyday people can understand as well. A most
important ingredient.

Blessings,
JHD

Posted by: John H Doty at March 15, 2008 08:53 AM

Thanks for the info.

I have ordered the Lexham Discourse Greek NT. Will it be beneficial to buy the High Definition NT also?

Jerry Finneman

Posted by: Jerry Finneman at June 9, 2008 05:25 PM

Hi, Jerry,

The Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament is bundled together with the High Definition NT, so if you buy it,
you will also get the HDNT thrown in for free. The LDGNT is definitely the better deal and the best choice for
most people.

Posted by: Phil Gons at June 13, 2008 09:11 PM

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