Institute for New Testament Textual Research (U. S

This is one of those books which makes you wonder who the target market is.

The idea is simple: Take the Greek of the New Testament (according to the United Bible Societies' third edition) and determine the grammatical form of every word -- part of speech (noun, verb, etc.), number (singular, plural), tense or declension, etc.

It's a nice little thing to have if your Greek grammar is a little weak. Sure, you can look up the forms in a book such as an analytic concordance, but this way, you can just read right along.

But that means you have to be able to read all the hieroglyphs that identify the form! And it still doesn't tell you what the word means, just that it's a second person plural pluperfect optative (assuming that there is any such in the New Testament, which there probably isn't). And if you don't know the grammar well enough to read the ending, do you know what a pluperfect optative is anyway?

If you merely wish to know how well this book does what it sets out to do, the answer is that it does it very well. And all this analytical tagging could be the key to some very good linguistic studies. But if you're a student of the New Testament trying to understand the Greek language, the analytic concordance is probably a better tool than this book -- because it will help you to learn rather than just using the crib.… (more)