A translation of the 3-volume work
Notes de lexicographie neo-testamentaire by the premier biblical exegete Ceslas Spicq, the
Theological Lexicon of the New Testament will surely take its place alongside other standard language tools. One plus to this work is that it is self-consciously theological. Spicq's quest is not for morphology, orthography, or even grammar or syntax; rather, he wants to uncover the religious meaning of the language used in the New Testament. To accomplish his task, Spicq mines the vast resources of epigraphical texts, papyri, classical writings, the Greek Old Testament, Hellenistic authors, and innumerable sources to inform his study of New Testament Koine. Not merely following in the footsteps of other such works such as the
Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, more than half of the words in the TLNT do not receive significant treatment elsewhere. Spicq's impressive familiarity with a variety of resources--from funerary inscriptions to papyri fragments--deems this work extraordinary.
In the upper portion of each
article entry in the TLNT, the Greek lexical form of the word or word group appears, and the lower portion contains the fully transliterated English form of the word as well as a brief definition.
Terms in the text itself are
transliterated for the nonspecialist, while scholars can quickly reference the original language in the article entry.
Scholars especially will appreciate the extensive
footnotes, which review a term's use in sources such as the papyri, in the Septuagint, and in classical and Hellenistic writings and then assess the value of this material for understanding the NT. Parallels in Jewish writings, including the Pseudepigrapha, Apocrypha, and Qumran, are also included.
Spicq supplies vital
bibliography from a wide range of resources. In this edition, any references to French, German, or other foreign language works that have been translated into English are given in their English form.
In the
resource notes, each term is conveniently keyed to
Strong's Concordance and cross-referenced to major lexical resources, such as Louw and Nida's
Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains or the
Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.
The 3 volumes of the New Testament are as follows:
- Volume 1 (ISBN 9781496483331) includes words beginning with ἀγα (aga) through ἐλπ (elp)
- Volume 2 (ISBN 9781496483348) includes words beginning with ἐμπ (emp) through ὀψω (opso)
- Volume 3 (ISBN 9781496483355) includes words beginning with Παι (pai) through ψευ (pseu)
