This book introduces sociolinguistic criticism to New Testament studies. It utilizes a wide range of sociolinguistic theories, principles, and concepts in treating the language and sociolinguistic contexts of the New Testament, social memory, orality and literacy, and the oral traditions of the Gospels, and various texts and genres in the New Testament.

In The Multilingual Jesus and the Sociolinguistic World of the New Testament, Hughson Ong provides a study of the multifarious social and linguistic dynamics that compose the speech community of ancient Palestine, which include its historical linguistic shifts under different military regimes, its geographical linguistic landscape, the social functions of the languages in its linguistic repertoire, and the specific types of social contexts where those languages were used. Using a sociolinguistic model, his study attempts to paint a portrait of the sociolinguistic situation of ancient Palestine. This book is arguably the most comprehensive treatment of the subject matter to date in terms of its survey of the secondary literature and of its analysis of the sociolinguistic environment of first-century Palestine.

In this volume, a leading expert brings readers up to date on the latest advances in New Testament Greek linguistics. Stanley Porter brings together a number of different studies of the Greek of the New Testament under three headings: texts and tools for analysis, approaching analysis, and doing analysis. He deals with a variety of New Testament texts, including the Synoptic Gospels, John, and Paul. This volume distills a senior scholar's expansive writings on various subjects, making it an essential book for scholars of New Testament Greek and a valuable supplemental textbook for New Testament Greek exegesis courses.

Text, Context and the Johannine Community adopts a new approach to the social context of the Johannine writings by drawing on modern sociolinguistic theory. Sociolinguistics emphasizes language as a social phenomenon, which can be analysed with reference not only to its broad context of culture, but also, through the use of register analysis, to its narrower context of situation. The Johannine writings have increasingly been seen as the product of a distinct Johannine Community, depicted by some scholars as a sectarian group, opposed both to wider Jewish society and to other Christian groups. This model has largely been constructed on historical-critical grounds, yet given our lack of reliable external information about the origin of the Johannine writings, a more fruitful approach may be to examine their lexico-grammatical and discourse features to determine what these imply about interpersonal relationships. This study compares selected 'narrative asides' from the Gospel of John with a passage section from 1 John and with the two shorter Johannine Epistles. It concludes that register analysis of these texts does not support the idea of a close-knit sectarian group.

This volume continues the major work published by the JSNT Supplement Series in the area of Greek linguistics of the New Testament, and explores what the editors believe are crucial phases in the application of linguistics to New Testament Greek. The first half of the volume includes essays on such topics as linguistics and literary criticism, linguistics and historical criticism, and linguistics and rhetoric. The second half includes essays dealing with the relations and uses of individual words, but ranges from oral composition to the value of word frequency in determining authorship. Some of these essays review established models of research; others propose new models and criteria of linguistic analysis.

Stanley E. Porter provides descriptions of various important topics in Greek linguistics from a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective; an approach that has been foundational to Porter's long and influential career in the field of New Testament Greek. Deep insights into Porter's understanding of SFL are displayed throughout, based either upon how he positions SFL in relation to other linguistic models, or how he utilizes it to describe topics within Greek and New Testament studies. Porter reflects on his core approach to the Greek New Testament by exploring subjects such as metaphor, rhetoric, cognition, orality and textuality, as well as studies on linguistic schools of thought and traditional grammar.

This volume examines and outlines a Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) model of discourse analysis and its relationship to New Testament Greek. The book reflects upon how SFL has grown as a field since it was first introduced to New Testament Greek studies by Stanley E. Porter in the 1980s. Porter and Matthew Brook O'Donnell first introduce basic concepts regarding discourse analysis and the major approaches towards it within New Testament studies. They then provide a detailed exploration of discourse analysis in terms of the textual metafunction, beginning with an introduction to the architecture of language within SFL, before exploring several individual elements within it. By focusing upon these individual components – in particular, theme and information structure, markedness and prominence, and coherence and cohesive harmony – Porter and O'Donnell introduce and exemplify the major resources of the textual metafunction.