Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Choice Words on TDNT

I was thumbing throught the introduction of the latest edition of the NTI by Carson and Moo (a recent accquisition) and came accross these words:

"But the biblical theology movement was remarkably diverse. It included those who held that revelation was borne along on the great events of redemptive history, to which scripture bears witness, and those who produced the magisterial Theological Dictionary of the New Testament with its peculiar theologically loaded word studies. Nevertheless, by the 1960's the movement was largely dead, cut down by critic who dismissed the linguistic naivete of many of its exponents or who argued that the unity they found in the canon was not really there" (p. 51).

Doing a little redaction criticism here, I gather Carson wrote this excerpt (based on the British spelling of "borne" and the use of the word "magisterial" [see his commentary survey]). Thus, while the word "magisterial" may modify TDNT here, I take it to mean "large" rather than "good." This is reinforced by the beautifully accurate phrase "peculiar theologically loaded word studies." Linguistic naivete indeed. I could not have said it better myself; hence, you'll note I have temporarily added TDNT to my sidebar :-)

7 comments:

smlogan said...

yeah,
perhaps subtlety isn't carson's forte...and i'm with you on magisterial. the first time i paged through his survey i couldn't help but laugh at how often he seems to use that word.

as for tdnt...
the other day i stumbled across "hobby-horse" in the dictionary; you and kittel were side by side (for obvious reasons).

Nate Mihelis said...

nice :-) I actually take that as a compliment

T. Baylor said...

Perhaps the more obvious joke would have been, "Shouldn't the other two books in the side bar be placed under TDNT?" But that joke is tired -- so I won't use it.

smlogan said...

why stop now?

T. Baylor said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
T. Baylor said...

Because I am full of grace . . . I am oozing grace . . . grace is flowing like a river! But, none of you will ever understand grace.

Nate Mihelis said...

That wasn't very gracious...or maybe I just don't understand...