Three new articles from the current issue of BAGL has been posted on its website, www.bagl.org/volume6. For those who aren’t aware, BAGL is a biblical studies journal, run by “the Centre for Biblical Linguistics, Translation, and Exegesis at McMaster Divinity College and the OpenText.org project (www.opentext.org)” and specializes in “the latest advances in linguistic study of ancient and biblical Greek” (taken from the website). There have been numerous articles on Greek linguistics in the past six years since the journal’s inception, including articles from varying perspectives on linguistics, such as Systemic Functional Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics.

The three articles are:

6.1. Jonathan M. Watt, “From Adams (1885) To Zimmermann (2009): In, With, and Under the Substance of Prepositions.”

6.2. Stanley E. Porter, “Greek Prepositions in a Systemic Functional Linguistic Framework.”

6.3. Laurențiu Florentin Moț, “Semitic Influence in the Use of New Testament Greek Prepositions: The Case of the Book of Revelation.”

Watt has been a steady contributor in the area of Greek linguistics, presenting quite frequently at various conferences and publishing in Greek studies, and is a professor at Geneva College in Pennsylvania. Porter (our co-blogger), of course, has been contributing to Greek linguistics since the 1980s and has been the premier proponent of Systemic Functional Linguistics for New Testament studies. Moț, a professor in Romania, has recently published his dissertation in the Linguistic Biblical Studies series with Brill, Morphological and Syntactical Irregularities in the Book of Revelation: A Greek Hypothesis (Brill, 2015).

These articles should be an interesting and stimulating read for Greek scholars and students, as the subject of Greek prepositions has been discussed at length in recent years, including a session at the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting in 2015 (from which Stan’s current article came; Steve Runge and Con Campbell were the other two presenters in that section), Murray Harris’s Prepositions and Theology in the Greek New Testament: An Essential Reference Resource for Exegesis (Zondervan, 2012), and most recently (just this past weekend) the conference at Tyndale House on Greek prepositions.

Readers of this blog are welcome to comment below on their thoughts on any of these articles on BAGL, or what they think about the attention that Greek prepositions has been getting lately. In any case, the articles posted in the current BAGL issue should be a great complement to the discussion already at hand.

— David I. Yoon