There are three criteria, yea, four, which mark fine scholarship, and happy are those who find them. The first is that a writer must invest years of devotion to his study in order to season it well. The second is that he must write lucidly so that all may savor it. The third is that the product must agree with a reader’s own conclusions; and fourth, it must excel far beyond one’s own research into that area. Indeed, Hughson Ong must be a happy man with this release of Sociolinguistic Analysis of the New Testament: Theories and Applications.
Analysis of the Greek New Testament, long under the umbrella of classical philology, has in recent decades benefitted from advances made on the living language front which help its readers monitor its contextually vibrant heartbeat. Traditional grammars depict what is supposed to be normative to a language, while linguistics deigns to reach across the world’s 7,100 living languages and extract commonalities that yield insight into the human mind and its speech behaviors. Bring that field together with sociology, which studies patterns of social behavior, and you gain an abundance of insight into the way people really use language. Sociolinguistics considers how the “independent” variables of social context (such as location, relationships, the purpose for the communication) influence the “dependent” variables (such as language/dialect choice, use of register, and means of persuasion). In this convergence of scholarly fields, the dead get to meet the living, the diachronic cooperates with the synchronic, and attentive readers can envision distant actors crafting their expression amidst the cross-cultural parameters of a Mediterranean world in its nascent experimentation with globalization.
My own publications in Hellenistic Greek linguistics associated with the Second Temple Period in Jewish Palestine have spanned more than three decades. So I am excited to see Hughson Ong laying hands on the theoretical concepts I have worked with and applying them to the same questions that have fascinated me, albeit with greater dexterity and nuance. As Joshua Fishman once framed it, we are trying to discern “who speaks what language to whom, and when.” In his investigations into New Testament test cases, Ong spins a felicitous web that elucidates the oral and literary dimensions of multilingualism, framing an ethnography of communication that navigates the tension between social identity and the pragmatism of people standing at the nexus of common discourse and uncommon text. While his work is meticulously documented, readability prevails; the scholar of ancient Greek, like the newcomer to the New Testament, can enjoy a vivid appraisal of factors that influenced the formation of this ancient book called the Bible.
Jonathan M. Watt
Professor and Department Chair, Geneva College (Beaver Falls, PA)
Adjunct Professor, Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary (Pittsburgh, PA)
December 1, 2020