Course Materials on Biblical Hermeneutics (NT 123)

Welcome to the Westminster Theological Seminary course NT 123, on Biblical Hermeneutics: Old and New Testaments!

I am providing various course documents on line, which you are free to download. Let me remind you that these course materials are very much works in progress. They are tentative in nature, and subject to repeated alteration and improvement. Not everything in them represents settled views on my part.

You may use all the course materials under the GNU Free Documentation License. For details, you must read this license. Briefly, the license allows you to use and pass on both unaltered and altered files, provided that you give credit to the author and that you grant to others the same freedom given to you.

Visual Presentations are provided in three formats: .ODP (editable), .PDF (fixed), and a second .PDF format that has cleaned out all the color in order for you to use it for note taking. The last of these formats contains some slides twice, the first time in the form that you will see in class, the second time with more expansive verbiage.

Visual Presentations

Older Forms of Presentations

Below are older forms of the presentations. These materials were used before I removed the material on rhetorical analysis of expository literature. In the last few years, rhetorical analysis of expository literature has come to be handled in the curriculum at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, as part of the final segment of Greek. It is now called bracketing (in a slightly variant form, "arcing"). For convenience, and for the sake of people who do not have access to the new curriculum in Greek at WTS, I have included the materials below. In 1C10LargOlderWithRhetoricalAnal.odp is included rhetorical analysis of expository literature in the form that I taught it. (This form differs in detail from bracketing and arcing, but is similar in conception.)

Syllabus from 2016 (pdf format only).

Text files

These files are text files that go with NT 123, both older and newer forms.

Useful pdfs

I have included some useful pdfs of books whose copyrights have expired.

Supplement

A textbook-like introduction to hermeneutics is Vern S. Poythress, Reading the Word of God in the Presence of God: A Handbook for Biblical Interpretation (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016). It is available for free download at <http://www.frame-poythress.org/ebooks/>. Print rights are retained by the publisher.

Those interested in reading more about language or about postmodernism may consult Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language--A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton: Crossway, 2009). It is available for free download at <http://www.frame-poythress.org/ebooks/>. The book contains a bibliography. Print rights are retained by the publisher.

Explanation

The open document format (.odp and .odt) contains the latest unicode encoding of Greek and Hebrew. 

You can view open document files with OpenOffice or LibreOffice, which are available for free. LibreOffice will probably prove better in the long run. You can view pdf files using Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is probably already on your computer.

The Open Document formats are preferred, for the benefit of permanent public accessibility. For further discussion of the issues of accessibility, see my article on "Digital Ethics and File Formats."

Fonts

Some files use Greek and Hebrew fonts. Others use special Roman alphabet fonts.  See my base page for access to these fonts.

by Dr. Vern S. Poythress
Westminster Theological Seminary
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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