A GRAMMAR OF THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT IN THE LIGHT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCE

A GRAMMAR OF THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT IN THE LIGHT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCE

BOOKS BY PROF. A. T. ROBERTSON

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PREFACE

It is with mingled feelings of gratitude and regret that I let
this book go to the public. I am grateful for God’s sustaining
grace through so many years of intense work and am fully con-
scious of the inevitable imperfections that still remain. For a
dozen years this Grammar has been the chief task of my life. I
have given to it sedulously what time was mine outside of my
teaching. But it was twenty-six years ago that my great prede-
cessor in the chair of New Testament Interpretation proposed to
his young assistant that they together get out a revised edition
of Winer. The manifest demand for a new grammar of the New
Testament is voiced by Thayer, the translator of the American
edition of Winer’s Grammar, in his article on “Language of the
New Testament” in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible.

I actually began the work and prepared the sheets for the first
hundred pages, but I soon became convinced that it was not
possible to revise Winer’s Grammar as it ought to be done without
making a new grammar on a new plan. So much progress
had been made in comparative philology and historical grammar
since Winer wrote his great book that it seemed useless to go on
with it. Then Dr. Broadus said to me that he was out of it by
reason of his age, and that it was my task. He reluctantly gave
it up and pressed me to go on. From that day it was in my
thoughts and plans and I was gathering material for the great
undertaking. If Schmiedel had pushed through his work, I
might have stopped. By the time that Dr. James Hope Moulton
announced his new grammar, I was too deep into the enterprise
to draw back. And so I have held to the titanic task somehow
till the end has come. There were many discouragements and I
was often tempted to give it up at all costs. No one who has
not done similar work can understand the amount of research,
the mass of detail and the reflection required in a book of this
nature. The mere physical effort of writing was a joy of expres-
sion in comparison with the rest. The title of Cauer’s brilliant
book, Grammatica Militans (now in the third edition), aptly
describes the spirit of the grammarian who to-day attacks the …[download]