New Testament Lexicography and the Future

Abstract

The poverty of New Testament lexicography is well illustrated by the fact that the English-speaking world has no definitive unabridged lexicon of the Greek New Testament which takes into account the rapid strides that the science has made since I890. We have introductions and commentaries by the dozen, but the great lexicon still goes begging. J. H. Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament is the only unabridged dictionary available to the English-speaking student at the present time. It was first published at New York in i886 and in a corrected edition in 1889. In its day it was a monumental work, but * The author of the present article took graduate degrees at the University of Chicago, his doctoral thesis having the topic, Paul's Ethical Vocabulary (I932). He has taught since 1923 at Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania, since 1927 as professor in the department of Greek and religion. We count the paper as the first in the series of bibliographical survey articles that have been planned. it had the misfortune to come out just before the evidence from papyri, inscriptions, and other sources had worked a major revolution in the field. Professor Thayer based his work on the German Wilke-Grimm Clavis, but with much adaptation and improvement. One answer to the problem of lexicography at the present time would be a thoroughgoing revision of Thayer's Lexicon. A pocket-size lexicon which has been serving several generations of New Testament students is that by Thomas Sheldon Green, published in London and New York. The thirteenth edition of