Kittle's

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Notthemama1984

Notthemama1984

Puritan Board Post-Graduate
What are your views on Kittle's TDNT?

I heard someone dismiss the work on the basis that Kittle was a Nazi and believed that Jesus was not a Jew. This goofy belief was enough for this person to throw the whole work out.

I plead ignorance.
 
Boliver, Kittle's dictionary still has a very honored place among reference works. Kittle himself wrote very little of the dictionary. He was simply the editor. The main criticism that James Barr has levelled against it is that it often uses the "root meaning" fallacy, as if all the different shades of meaning that a word has can be boiled down to one over-arching meaning. This is not the case. However, Barr made his critique of TDNT after only the first four volumes had been published. As a result, the last six volumes are much freer of this criticism. I have found it most useful as a commentary. Volume ten has an index that is superb, since every passage that is cited in the dictionary is listed in the index. However, only those passages that are actually discussed in some detail are listed in bold in the index. So, I use it as a commentary, and I have found many helpful things in it. Linguistically, it does need to be supplemented by BDAG, for instance, and NIDNTTE.
 
I have appreciated TDNT for years. When used with discernment it can be very helpful with the etymology of an important or even a little used word. Caveat: many of the contributions will contain a sprinkling of neo-orthodox commentary. Keep this in mind an you should be able to separate the good stuff from the fluff.
 
In brief, Neo-Orthodoxy was the child of Karl Barth. In the very early 1900's Barth attacked Liberalism and we might have more admiration for him had he not gone to war with an emasculated bible in hand. For Barth the bible is not the Word of God. It can become the Word of God for you, and then only if upon a believing response in an existential-like moment you find that YOU at least at that MOMENT are reading THE WORD OF GOD. This is just the tip of the Neo-Orthodox iceberg.
 
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