Luke: A Handbook on the Greek Text is part of an expanding Greek commentary series by Baylor University Press that walks a reader through each word, phrase, and verse of the Greek New Testament. The body of the handbook offers an English translation of each section of the biblical text. Next, there is the full Greek text of a given verse. Then follows a word-by-word (and/or phrase-by-phrase) analysis of the Greek NT text. One advantage to this structure is that, without having to have recourse to any other books, the user of this handbook has the full Greek and English texts of Luke in front of them.
There is also useful material at the back of the handbook: a glossary of nearly 50 grammatical terms and concepts, a bibliography, a grammar index (with grammatical concepts listed in English and words listed in Greek), and an author index. If I wanted to trace Luke’s use of the double accusative, for example, I’d see a list of verse references in the grammar index for further study. This book is not for the basic Greek student. If you buy this expecting it to be a commentary, you will be very disappointed. This book will be of more use to intermediate Greek students who are working through the text and are sometimes uncertain how to parse or translate a particular word or phrase.
This is a specialized work and does not aim to situate each passage in its literary or historical context. The handbook will not replace a good lexicon. Some words simply have parsing information given, with little to no elaboration on the word’s meaning. To be truly comprehensive in this regard would double the size of the book, so it’s an understandable decision. Just keep BDAG close by as you read. That said, in this handbook, you will get detail even down to the level of Greek accents. I am excited to see more coming from this series.
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