Charles Irons

Most books are meant to be read. Other books, like this one, help you to read. A Syntax Guide for Readers of the Greek New Testament is designed to "assist readers of the Greek new Testament by providing brief explanations of advanced and intermediate syntactical features of the Greek text" (7). Charles Lee Irons, the current director of research administration at Charles Drew University and an ordained Presbyterian pastor, compiled this resource "to encourage students, pastors and others to devote themselves to reading large portions of Greek New Testament, and ideally, all of it" (8).

Picking up where parsing tools, readers editions, readers lexica, and Bible software leaves off, Irons aims to iron out difficult syntax and text critical issues. A Syntax Guide follows closely critical editions of the 27th and 28th Editions of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.

The guide is comprehensive with more than six-hundred pages of textual notes, plus indexes. Though it is not exhaustive, because Irons focuses solely on advanced issues. Some verses are skipped past without any comment and with other verses, Irons comments on a single word or phrase. Still there is enough here to give an intermediate student of Greek an at-a-glance aid to translating and understanding the passage before her. A mid level grammar (i.e. Daniel Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics), a critical apparatus and a good lexicon will unearth all the essential lexical issues with greater detail than this; however, what Irons has done is provide a quick resource for students and readers of the Greek New Testament, with references to the lexicons (most often BDAG), grammars and other resources for those who want to dig deeper.

Most importantly, this is a small book–about the same size of your Greek New Testament. You can take this and your Nestle-Aland to Starbucks and make serious headway on the text, instead of bringing a whole library of heavy text books with you. Anyone who has wrestled out a translation of Greek as sermon prep, for a paper or devotionally will benefit from this resource. I give it four stars.

Note: I received this book from Kregel Academic in exchange for my honest review.… (meer)

A Syntax Guide For Readers of the New Testament by Charles Lee Irons is a nice addition to one's NT Greek tools library. It is not a stand-alone tool, but meant to be used with other lexical aids. Irons notes that, "This Syntax Guide does not duplicate the help provided by such tools. Rather, it picks up where these other tools leave off" and "presupposes their use…" The introduction explains that in this guide, "select cases, glosses and parsing are not the focus". Rather, in some places it gives specific explanations of "syntactical, clause-level features".

There is a chapter for each book of the New Testament, and each book is divided into chapters and each chapter has a list of select verse references from that chapter and next to the reference there may be a section of the Greek wording of the verse and some comments . Some of the verses only have a brief suggested translation without any grammatical comments, I give an example below:

(Note: I've attempted - probably not very well - to transliterate the Greek words which are actually presented in Greek font in this book)

1 Cor. 1:22, "Epeideh kai = 'for indeed'"

And other verses are dealt with more in depth:

"4:23 [erketai hora kai nun estin = 'an hour is coming and is now here,' erketai is ingressive-futuristic present (W 537) ] kai gar = 'for indeed' ] ha patair toioutous zatei tous proskunountas auton = 'the father is seeking such people to worship him' (ESV), 'the Father wants people of this kind as his worshipers' (ZG)"

At first I was a bit disappointed that it is not more detailed, and still am. But again, as the intro explains, this guide is not meant to be a stand-alone resource, but rather used along with a parsing guide or other similar tools. Irons wants to encourage people to read the Greek NT as a whole instead of merely tiny portions of it, and created this tool with that idea in mind. In this book Irons tries to eliminate the "need to stop and look up intermediate, advanced or unusual grammatical features of the Greek text". Irons believes that a very good way to truly learn NT Greek is to familiarize oneself with the text by reading through large portions of it or preferably the whole NT.

I think that that is a good idea and it makes sense, that simply reading through the Greek New Testament will build up one's skill in a more natural way than just memorizing individual Greek words and tenses, verb forms..etc. Even having to look things up in a parsing guide and a syntax guide almost every step of the way will build one's knowledge over time.

At the end of the book is an index of subjects where you may look up many of the verses (it's not exhaustive) by their grammatical form, for instance, under "ACCUSATIVE" you may look up verses that are "adverbial accusative", or under "NOMINATIVE" you may look up verses under the section "qualitative predicate nominative". You may find the adjectival genitive section, or pluperfect periphrasitic - (I'm still only a beginner in Koine Greek so at the moment many of those terms don't make any sense yet…). There is also section in the index that lists verses that have "Septuagintisms" - which I find interesting as I have been doing some study on the Septuagint, its history and its quotation in the NT.

It is an interesting and handy work for students of Greek who wish to start building up their ability to easily read and comprehend Koine Grk.

Many thanks to the folks at Kregel Academic for sending me a free review copy of this book! (My review did not have to be favorable)… (meer)