Libronix - Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament

Kenneth_Murphy · #1 (**permalink**) 05-22-2008, 07:04 PM

With all the discussion on Logos software recently I went back and looked through the list of current pre-publications. There I saw the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament.

Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament

Quoted from the logos product listing ....

Quote:

The Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament identifies discourse markers and performs complex discourse analysis of the entire New Testament quickly, easily, and accurately, which makes it one of the most advanced tools for studying the Greek text of the New Testament.

The Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament includes the entire Greek text of the New Testament marked up with more than twenty discourse devices, making discourse analysis easier than ever! The Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament comes with a general introduction to discourse grammar, where you’ll find an overview of each discourse device and numerous examples from the Greek text of how various New Testament authors used these devices to communicate. The Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament also includes a built-in, easy-to-use glossary. By simply hovering over a discourse device, the glossary appears, allowing you to quickly access information about the device and about the text you’re looking at. With the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament, it’s also possible to search for all instances of a particular device, such as all cataphoric references in 1 John or all temporal frames in the Gospels. The search tool aids in discourse analysis of entire books—textual analysis that once took hours can now be done with a click of a mouse! The Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament makes this all possible.

I'm not familiar with this type of analysis so am wondering if this is something I should strongly consider getting or if it is mostly "hype" and not really very useful?

Archlute · #2 (**permalink**) 05-22-2008, 10:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kenneth_Murphy

With all the discussion on Logos software recently I went back and looked through the list of current pre-publications. There I saw the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament.

Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament

Quoted from the logos product listing ....

Quote:

The Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament identifies discourse markers and performs complex discourse analysis of the entire New Testament quickly, easily, and accurately, which makes it one of the most advanced tools for studying the Greek text of the New Testament.

The Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament includes the entire Greek text of the New Testament marked up with more than twenty discourse devices, making discourse analysis easier than ever! The Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament comes with a general introduction to discourse grammar, where you’ll find an overview of each discourse device and numerous examples from the Greek text of how various New Testament authors used these devices to communicate. The Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament also includes a built-in, easy-to-use glossary. By simply hovering over a discourse device, the glossary appears, allowing you to quickly access information about the device and about the text you’re looking at. With the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament, it’s also possible to search for all instances of a particular device, such as all cataphoric references in 1 John or all temporal frames in the Gospels. The search tool aids in discourse analysis of entire books—textual analysis that once took hours can now be done with a click of a mouse! The Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament makes this all possible.

I'm not familiar with this type of analysis so am wondering if this is something I should strongly consider getting or if it is mostly "hype" and not really very useful?

Discourse analysis is just a fancy term for the attempt to locate various structural markers within the text (such as certain Greek words that are seen to be forming an inclusio within an epistle, or beginning an exordium, and other high-speed/low-drag Latin terms for simple, even intuitive, linguistic concepts - once you know what you are looking for).

DA is not something that is set in stone, but is an academic exercise to be debated amongst language scholars in commentaries. As such, while it can be a helpful tool for getting the exegete thinking about structural markers and their significance for a passage's placement within the broader context of a Gospel or an epistle, it is not necessarily the most important endeavor into which one would want to put loads of their preparation time. If you can sightread Greek or Hebrew already, you can often pick up on these markers through reading larger portions of your text, and making a mental note of some of these terms and of certain repetitions. Even if you are not that fluent in your reading skills, most advanced language-based commentaries will include some form of DA in their discussion from which you can still profit.

I probably wouldn't spend my money on it. Remember, this is one man's/committee's opinion and analysis. You could do that work on your own if you really wanted too, and probably learn more from the passage in the process.