A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature

The University of Chicago Press

Foreword

Much of the historical material in forewords to the earlier editions of this lexicon is here included in condensed form.

The history of dictionaries specifically designed for the Greek New Testament opens with a Greek-Latin glossary of seventy-five unnumbered pages in the first volume of the Complutensian Polyglot of 1522, including the words of the New Testament, Ecclesiasticus, and the Wisdom of Solomon. The incompleteness, inaccuracy, and elementary character of this glossary reflect the low state of Greek studies at the time it was published, but it was the first in a long and useful succession of New Testament lexical works.

More in keeping with scholarly demands was the Lexicon Graeco-Latinum in Novum Domini nostri Jesu Christi Testamentum by Georg Pasor, published in 1619 at Herborn in Nassau. Pasor listed words alphabetically according to their roots, a procedure also adopted by Francis Brown, Samuel R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs in their Hebrew-Aramaic lexicon of 1907. In 1640 (Basel), Ludovicus Lucius put out his Dictionarium Novi Testamenti with words arranged for the first time in strict alphabetic order instead of by word-roots.

Many faults of contemporary NT lexicons were pointed out by Johann F. Fischer in his Prolusiones de vitiis lexicorum Novi Testamenti (Leipzig, 1791). Among these defects were neglect of the smaller words, whose frequent use makes them extremely difficult to analyze and classify, and insufficient attention to the background of New Testament words in Hebrew, the LXX, and general Greek literature.

Among the works that showed the effect of Fischer's criticism was Christian A.Wahl's Greek- Latin lexicon of 1822 (Leipzig). This was translated into English in 1825 by Edward Robinson, an eminent American biblical scholar. Robinson brought out his own Greek-English dictionary of the NT in 1836 (Boston).

Up to this time it was customary for dictionaries intended for scholars to provide definitions in Latin, though Edward Leigh in his Critica Sacra (London, 1639) had made a partial and apologetic attempt to give them in English, and John Parkhurst had published a Greek-English lexicon in 1769.

Karl Ludwig Wilibald Grimm published in 1868 (Leipzig) a thorough revision of Christian G. Wilke's Greek-Latin Clavis Novi Testamenti philologica (1839; 2d ed. 1851). Four years earlier, through special arrangement with Grimm's publisher, Joseph H. Thayer of Harvard University began the augmented translation of Grimm's book, published in 1886 as Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (New York and Edinburgh).

The first dictionary to appear after the epoch-making discoveries (especially of papyri) near the end of the nineteenth century was Erwin Preuschen's Greek-German lexicon of 1910. Unfortunately, it failed to make much use of the newfound material, which was of little interest to some scholars because of its documentary banality compared to the purity of Plato's tongue. But Preuschen's work did include for the first time the words of the Apostolic Fathers.

Upon Preuschen's untimely death in 1920, the revision of his lexicon was entrusted to Walter Bauer of Göttingen (b. 8 August 1877, d. 17 November 1960). When his revision appeared in 1928 (Giessen) as the second edition of Preuschen, it was hailed as the best thing in its field. A third edition, thoroughly revised and reset, came out in 1937 (Berlin), with Bauer's name alone on the title page.

For the fourth edition, Bauer undertook a systematic search in Greek literature down to Byzantine times for parallels to the language of the New Testament. Hans von Campenhausen acknowledged the magnitude of this task, when he reviewed its first three fascicles (TLZ 75, 1950, 349): We are here dealing with a work "which, when considered as the performance of one man, strikes one as almost fabulous. Not only was there a gigantic amount of material to be mastered, involving the most minute acquaintance with the whole body of Christian literature, but this task required at the same time the gift of combining and relating facts, and of preserving an adequate scholarly alertness which is granted to but few people; one thinks of the difficulty of immediately recognizing parallels in the respective authors and making proper use of them. This art is all the more admirable because its achievements manifest themselves only in the apparently insignificant form of articles in a lexicon, which purposely are kept as brief and factual as possible. Most of the readers will normally not become aware of what has been accomplished." F. Wilbur Gingrich echoed the accolade (NTS 9, 1962-63, 3-10).

On this fourth edition of Bauer's Griechisch-deutsches Wörterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments und der übrigen urchristlichen Literatur (Berlin, 1949-52), William F. Arndt (b. 1 December 1880, d. 25 February 1957) and F. Wilbur Gingrich (b. 27 September 1901, d. 19 October 1993) based A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (also known as BAG, for Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich). It was not their purpose to make a literal translation, which would indeed have been impossible; and they did not hesitate to recommend recourse to Bauer's original German to determine "exactly what Bauer says about any word." Their own contribution to the work was considerable, to judge from the list of over ninety entries cited as representative of "more or less significant adaptations or additions" in their 1957 edition.

In the course of making slight adjustments in the arrangement of entries, as well as correction of typographical and other errors in the original, Arndt and Gingrich added a few new words drawn especially from Papias and the apparatus in later editions of the NT text, not to speak of an interesting conjecture, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], included for the first time in a NT lexicon. In addition to Bauer's bibliographical notices, the American team called attention to the contributions of James Hope Moulton and George Milligan's Vocabulary of the Greek Testament (M-M) and Carl D. Buck's Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages. The latter partially made up for the paucity of etymological information deplored by Bauer in the foreword to his third edition of 1937. References were likewise given to all the words treated by Edgar J. Goodspeed in his Problems of New Testament Translation, and to some from Frederick Field's Notes on the Translation of the New Testament. Frequent reference was also made to the NT grammars of James Hope Moulton (2d vol. completed byWilbert F. Howard) and Archibald T. Robertson. Still remaining to be probed in depth is the phenomenon of similar semantic transference in languages whose users are separated by centuries, but Arndt and Gingrich offered some stimulus through exploration here and there of the New (Oxford) English Dictionary.

In their preface, Arndt and Gingrich sketched a brief history of their own endeavor: "When in 1947 the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod observed its centennial, a part of the thank offering gathered was set aside as a fund for scholarly research. The Lutheran Academy of Scholarship, Dr. M. H. Scharlemann president, had a prominent part in the discussions that...