Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics by Daniel B. Wallace
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Book Reviews of Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics
Book Review: Very helpful
Summary: 4 Stars
Easy to unnderstand and very thorough. Very helpful for all serious Greek students.Book Review: Is it a grammar or an Evangelical apology ?
Summary: 3 Stars
Please do not misunderstand the provocative title of my comment: I am not saying that this book is worthless and that you should avoid buying it. On the contrary, I think that Wallace's grammar is an invaluable work worth every dollar you spend for it. First of all, unlike other grammars, this one is as thrilling as a detective novel. Of course, unless you are deeply interested in NT exegesis, you will probably find Wallace's huge treatise anything but gripping. But if like me you are an impassioned reader of the Gospel and its original text, you will surely love this book.And the good news is that it is not for advanced learners of koine Greek only. In fact I started using it with minimal knowledge of Greek and I have little doubt that a complete stranger to the language of Luke and Paul could also glean immensely useful information from its pages provided he be a serious student of the Scriptures.
Having said that I must warn potential buyers and readers that Wallace is not an objective grammarian and linguist at all. Unlike a real scientist, he does not put aside his own religious and philosophical convictions aside and look at the NT dispassionately. What he does almost sistematically is to advance his own Protestant views of Christ and atonement and other crucial points with the help of Greek grammar. Fortunately, he does state the opinion of scholars who disagree with him but he gives them minimal space. Most of the time he does not even quote them!
A perfect example of Wallace's bias is the discussion on the use of the prepositions "uper" and "anti" in relation to the question of atonement. He mentions the fact that W.Bauer translates these prepositions by "on behalf of" rather than by "instead of" but he does not illustrate or expatiate on Bauer's point of view. Instead the reader is presented with several pages of arguments in favor of his own opinion, so that the naive reader may end up thinking that the translation favored by respected scholars like Bauer has no solid ground under it. And that is only one example among many, many others.
Of course, one could argue that many dubious points of Greek grammar simply cannot be cleared without a previous choice and that all exegesis must involve a certain amount of eisegesis. This may be true but Wallace really goes too far. Does he write for only for his small chapel? Aren't there Catholics and eastern Orthodox and Jews out there too?
Strangely enough this is a BCE(before common era)/CE(common era)book. Does Wallace not realize that these acronyms are basically anti-Christian and contribute to the secularization of our culture?
I say to all Christian authors: FOR GOD'S SAKE USE BC AND AD !!!
So my advice to you is: buy this grammar. But be sure to buy another one to know the two sides of the Biblical coin.
Book Review: COULD HAVE BEEN A 5 STAR
Summary: 3 Stars
Really 3 1/2 stars, but Amazon doesn't have that rating. I learned a lot from this book (& am still learning). Wallace is very good at giving information that is easy to understand. The fault I have & I believe that it's a serious fault, hence the 3 1/2*, is that he puts too much of his personal theology into the book. In translating the Bible & in teaching exegesis which is a close cousin to translating, the scholar should be theologically neutral. It should be "This is what the Hebrew or Greek SAYS". One's own theology as to what it means, should be reserved for the commentaries & the pulpit. That's the problem I have with many Bible translations (yes, including the KJV in some places). That's also one of the reasons it's helpful to study Hebrew & Greek, to understand the words of the Bible, & not have to rely on translations, however good they may be.
That said, someone can still profit from this work. This is the book where I learned abt the Granville Sharp rule, & the real significance of the barking dog. I find myself grabbing it off the shelf for information when something new comes up. Just remember the advice of Douglas Stuart in his volume on commentaries,"just because a person is a"PhD" doesn't NECESSARILY mean that he or she is right & you're wrong."
Book Review: inferior to older and cheaper works
Summary: 3 Stars
I found this book very disappointing. It goes into much detail about minor points (uses of the vocative!) and ignores (idioms) or is light (prepositions) in others. I found it very unhelpful in unpacking difficult verses; passage after passage I looked up in the index only to find nothing of value.
Here's the real point. After buying this book I read Young's Intermediate Greek and Zerwick's Biblical Greek and found they cover almost everything in Wallace, better, more interestingly and in fewer words. Wallace seems to simply repeat stuff said better and earlier. Zerwick's exegesis is a lot more compelling.
Wallace does make a convincing case for the limits of grammar in exegesis, and it's nice that all his examples are fully translated and that his font is nice and big. But your time and money are better spent elswhere, the former of course in reading the actual Greek New Testament
Book Review: Dr. Phillip Gray Bremen Georgia
Summary: 3 Stars
Dr. Daniel B. Wallace has produced an excellent Greek grammar that has been found useful as the textbook for Intermediate Greek Readings courses at Southern Christian University. One would wish that his discussions of such passages as Mark 16:16 and Acts 2:38 had been a little less polemical. (He reverts, at times, to giving explanations consonant with the unique dogma of his own fellowship instead of strictly from the standpoint of Greek grammar.) But, all in all, this is a helpful volume. For an in-depth scholarly review, see [...]