Ryder A Wishart

McMaster Divinity College, Canada, Hamilton · New Testament

In this study, we offer an exploratory factor analysis of three corpora of Greek texts from the Hellenistic era. We draw generalizations from the data about some of the chief patterns of morphosyntactic variation within these texts, under the theoretical assumption that these patterns are indicative of register variation. This variation realizes ch...

This paper will examine recent scholarship on the topic of biblical law in order to demonstrate that biblical law is best understood as a common-law tradition. After outlining long-standing questions in regard to the nature of law in the Hebrew Bible, I will argue for a complementarian rather than supersessionist view of law, following the work of...

This paper argues that the underdeveloped notion of semantic similarity in Louw and Nida’s lexicon can be improved by taking account of distributional information. Their use of componential analysis relies on a set of metalinguistic terms, or components, that are ultimately arbitrary. Furthermore, both the polysemy within their semantic domains and...

This paper explores linguistic monosemy and the methodological priorities it suggests. These priorities include a bottom-up modeling of lexical semantics, a corpus-driven discovery procedure, and a sign-based approach to linguistic description. Put simply, monosemy is a methodology for describing the semantic potential of linguistic signs. This met...

Book Review published in the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism in 2017.

The focus of this study is Hellenistic Greek, a variation of Greek that continues to be of particular interest within the humanities. The Hellenistic variant of Greek, we argue, requires tools that are specifically tuned to its orthographic and semantic idiosyncrasies. This paper aims to put available documents to use in two ways: 1) by describing...

This review article critically engages two recent monographs that utilize Charles Ruhl's theory of monosemy to analyze the New Testament. After outlining Ruhl's theory, I discuss how Gregory Fewster attempts to model monosemy within the linguistic framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, and how Benjamin Lappenga does so within the framework o...

The lexical and grammatical tradition within biblical studies leaves the interpretive guidelines for exegesis unformalized. Polysemy provides no direction in addressing this issue, but serves only to blur the distinction between the invariant meaning of linguistic signs and the contexts and co-texts that specify and constrain those invariant meanin...

This paper examines recent input by both Mark Nanos and Brian Rosner on the issue of Paul and the law. It highlights what it believes to be two crucial, but mutually exclusive, insights from each of the two positions. Nanos’s input is that Paul positively approves of the law because he did not find anything inherently wrong with either Judaism or t...