This book provides a general introduction to the grammar and syntax of Hellenistic, or New Testament, Greek. With twenty-four chapters, it is suitable for two-semester courses. Each lesson is structured around equipping students to read passages drawn directly from the Greek New Testament. In addition to the traditional Erasmian system, students are offered the option of using a historical Greek system of pronunciation similar to that used in early Christian preaching and prayer. The book includes extensive reference tools, including paradigms for memorization, grammatical appendices and illustrations. The text is accompanied by a website that offers a workbook of passages for translation. Each chapter of the grammar concludes with a vocabulary list of Greek terms that appear in that lesson's assigned passage for translation, found in the online workbook. Audio recordings of all vocabulary words and translation passages, using the historical Greek system of pronunciation, are provided online.
It need scarcely be said that Christ's death constitutes the theological centre of gravity for Paul's entire soteriology (e.g., 1 Thess 5.10; 1 Cor 2.1–2; 1.23; Rom 5.6, 8;passim). One aspect of this is the atonement for humanity's sin. In the past, the presupposition of many scholars has been that the concept of Christ's expiatory death (e.g., Gal 3.13; 2 Cor 5.21; Rom 3.24–5; 8.3) is first and foremost a Jewish sacrificial idea, as defined in the Pentateuch.
At the outset of his book Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy (1992), Richard Swinburne differentiates between “sentences” and “statements,” a distinction that disengages his quest for rational revelation from biblical studies and the latter's historical treatment of biblical texts. Not only does this strategy reinstate the obsolete traditional form/content binarism, and presumes a correspondence account of truth, it also ignores the specific socio-cultural contexts and strategic aims behind all biblical texts. Swinburne's assertion that any God, being “God,” would reveal “himself” through prophets, perform miracles, and become incarnate as an atoning saviour, arises out of the culturally specific, Western, Christian tradition. His understanding of biblical miracles as violations of the laws of nature is based on a seventeenth-century understanding of miracles, as propounded by the British empiricist John Locke. His “four tests of [true] revelation” simultaneously grant preferential treatment to the Christian revelation, while facilitating the dismissal of [what he terms] “non-Christian” religions. His newly added section (2007) entitled “Moral Teaching” demonstrates how Swinburne's “revelation” (as a discursive practice) participates in non-discursive apparatuses of power and domination over women and lgbtq communities. Thus, in the end, this neo-conservative philosophical discourse on “revelation” employs the illusion of truth to extend itself as power over those who have been customarily marginalized by traditional forms of Christianity.
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