My interest in Greek began before I even started seminary. As I prepared messages and lessons as a youth pastor right out of college, a desire grew in me to read and interpret the Bible in its original languages. In fact, one of the primary reasons I entered seminary was to gain some level of competency of Greek and Hebrew, but little did I realize what that would fully entail. As I studied Greek in seminary, I was introduced to issues in Greek grammar such as verbal aspect and discourse analysis, which led to pursuing a terminal degree specializing in Greek linguistics. During my doctoral studies, I came to realize that linguistics is more than simply a description of structural or formal features of language, but it entails having a (robust) linguistic theory that lays the foundation for the more atomistic analyses of texts. During my doctoral studies, I was introduced to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a theory of language interested in its social function and the systems (maps of the sets of choices a language user has based on the lexicogrammar) available to the language user. According to SFL, the language user is a social being, and language has a social function.
I have also long been interested in the Apostle Paul. Even as a teenager during the early years of my Christian life, I found myself reading through the Pauline letters more frequently than other parts of the Bible. But it was in seminary that I was first introduced to what is called the New Perspective on Paul, which I came to realize is really a new perspective on Judaism in relation to Paul. I had long thought that the Judaism that Jesus and Paul were arguing against was a religion of legalism and works-righteousness. Pharisee has simply become a synonym for hypocrite and legalist, but this New Perspective suggested a different view of Second Temple Judaism, a view of Judaism as a religion of covenantal nomism, a religion that advocated works of the law not to earn salvation but to remain within the covenant of God. Salvation was received by God’s grace, said the New Perspectivists; works proved their covenantal status. This viewpoint challenges the commonly-held view of Judaism as legalistic, and Pauline theology has never been the same since Ed Sanders published his Paul and Palestinian Judaism.
While I remember being told that linguistic approaches are rarely able to address theological issues, I discovered during my study of SFL that the concepts of register and context of situation might be useful for that purpose. Register is the language type that is used appropriate to—even constrained by—its context of situation. I realized that register analysis, a type of discourse analysis, could be useful in determining the context of situation in any of Paul’s letters and thereby may have resources to address a theological issue. Considering this, I decided that I would use SFL discourse analysis to analyze Paul’s letter to the Galatians in order to determine the situational context in that letter and whether this identification of a context of situation in Galatians would reflect a New Perspective or a traditional perspective on Paul. This monograph, then, is both an outline of SFL discourse analysis, including theory and methodology, and an application of that theory to identify the context of situation in Galatians in view of this New Perspective on Paul.