I examine the grammar of Matt 1:25 and argue there is an obligatory scalar inference meaning ‘after but not before.’ I conclude the grammar of Matt 1:25 contradicts the view that Mary remained a virgin after the birth of her son.

This study analyzes the information structure of Peter’s speech in Acts 2 using the framework developed for biblical Greek by Stanley E. Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell. Refining their approach, the study examines prime/subsequent, theme/rheme, and topic/comment structures to identify grammatically marked and semantically prominent features across phrase, clause, paragraph, and dis-course levels of the speech. The analysis identifies five major topics, with the second and third topical units structurally highlighted. The study ultimately discerns the primary topic and concludes with the central message of the speech: “God raised Jesus.”

Valency or argument structure—known by a variety of names in similar grammatical models, including valency grammar, word grammar, dependency grammar, and even functional grammar (Allerton, “Valency Grammar,” 301)—has an interesting if somewhat neglected history in light of the popularity of some other linguistic models. Nevertheless, it suggests various levels of hierarchy related to form, structure, and semantics that have often proved helpful in grammatical description. However, there are also some significant limitations to valency as a descriptive model—at the constituent, clause, and beyond levels—that indicate that supplementation is necessary. This paper will provide some positive and negative comments on valency as a grammatical framework in relation to recent study of New Testament Greek from a systemic functional linguistic framework.

This paper introduces Porter and O’Donnell’s Discourse Analysis of the Greek New Testament, the focus of discussion in a session of the Evangelical Theological Society annual meeting in 2024. The paper attempts to place Porter and O’Donnell’s introduction to dis- course analysis within the larger context of discourse analysis as a whole and the New Testament in particular. To do so, the paper begins with a brief history of discourse analysis from its inception to more recent developments in the field. It then responds to objections to use of discourse analysis in New Testament study that have hindered its use. The final section summarizes the contributions of Porter and O’Donnell’s volume, which provides a complete discourse analytic, even if it focuses upon the textual metafunction using Systemic Functional Linguistics.

This article offers a review of Porter and O’Donnell, Discourse Analysis and the Greek New Testament. The review is not merely an overview of the book’s contents but offers an application of the methodology that is promoted by Porter and O’Donnell. The article discusses the benefits of the model and method presented in the book while also acknowledging potential difficulties of the approach.

This review article examines Porter and O’Donnell’s Dis-course Analysis and the Greek New Testament: Text-Generating Re-sources, focusing specifically on their treatment of textual-metafunction components: cohesion and coherence; boundaries and units; and information flow and prominence. Porter and O’Donnell discuss all three of these features and demonstrate how SFL can offer a robust analysis of these three features of a discourse. Although their book offers numerous insights into the application of SFL to those features of discourse analysis, a few questions could be raised about some of their observations and examples. For information flow, there is still clarity needed about how the different levels of information flow relate to each other, and how the level of clause relates to default word order. Another important area for analysis with discourse analysis is prominence. There are several issues that could be addressed further with prioritization or ranking of signals of prominence. This is especially important when a single verb contains conflicting signals of prominence, where one feature indicates background, and another indicates foreground or prominence. However, Porter and O’Donnell have modeled a rigorous approach to discourse analysis that will focus attention on exegesis where it should be: on the text itself.