New Greek textbook by Stanley Porter

For many years Mounce’s Greek textbook has virtually dominated NT Greek instruction in most seminaries (or perhaps in most evangelical seminaries).

Despite its popularity, there have been many who have wondered ift does not represent the insights of recent linguistic scholarship.  Who better to write a new textbook?  Stanley Porter, of course.  And he did.

I mentioned this in a previous post (on Eerdmans forthcoming books): the book is called Fundamentals of New Testament Greek – due out in late July/early August.  Porter will offer a highly competent guide to the Greek language and put the learner in a position to interpret the NT (in Greek) without making common exegetical mistakes.

Eerdmans has not released much information about this book, which is unfortunate and makes it very risky for profs to adopt the book for this fall.  I am in such a position, as I am highly tempted to give it a go for teaching Greek this next year.  As far as I know, this is the breakdown of chapters for the first part of the book:

ch1: Alphabet, accents, pronunciationm noun jobs, parts of speech

ch2: 2nd decl. nouns, 1st and 2nd decl. adjectives

ch3: the article, verbless clauses

ch4: Intro to verbs, first aor. indic and infinitive

ch5: 1st decl. nouns; relative pronouns

ch6: second aorist and imperfect

ch7: 3rd declen nouns and adjectives; “to be”

ch8: Present and future active indicative and infinitive, contract verbs in -epsilon omega

ch9: Pronouns

ch10: Aorist, pres., fut active participles

ch11: middle voice: aor. and fut. indicative and infinitive

ch12: prepositions with one case. Demonstratives

ch13: Passive voice

ch14: Subjunctive

Ch15: More prepositions: more on pronouns

Ch16: Contract verbs, conjunctions, adverbs

In the end, if the book is released soon, I will use it as I admire Porter (et al.) and his linguistic work.  In particular, I have used Mounce and Duff and I find their discussion of verbal aspect to be very weak and outdated (esp. Duff).  Porter will certainly offer a more nuanced discussion.

Please – if anyone has any more information about this textbook, please share your notes/thoughts in the comments.  Thanks!