Lexham Discourse Commentary: Colossians
Digital Logos Edition
A New Approach to Exegesis
Paul’s epistle to the Colossians is renowned for its high Christology, but how does this content fit into the broader discourse of the epistle? By paying attention to strategies of development and segmentation, Kristopher Lyle provides an explanation of how Paul’s audience would have understood his message as it unfolded. Similarly, at lower levels Lyle explains how Paul uses various cohesive devices and word order changes to build a shared mental representation and, ultimately, a coherent discourse.
The Lexham Discourse Commentary series
The Lexham Discourse Commentary series guides readers through the Greek text, integrating insights from the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament and Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament. Each volume in the series shows how various discourse devices contribute to the overall flow and structure of the New Testament books by providing a unifying analysis of each text.
Dr. Steve Runge’s approach complements traditional approaches by helping readers understand the exegetical implications of the writer’s choices. The Lexham Discourse Commentaries offer sustained analysis on the text, but do not engage issues like background, setting, and audience that preoccupy traditional commentaries. Instead, Runge applies his years of research in discourse grammar to editing this running exegesis of the Greek. If you have been disappointed by the lack of discussion about structure, discourse flow, and rhetorical strategies in modern commentaries, then the Lexham Discourse Commentaries are for you.
Learn more about the other titles in this series.
Top Highlights
“Paul invokes the metaphor THE HEAD IS CONTROL. In accordance with our folk understanding of the head controlling the body, the correlation between the literal head with those who are in positions of control is established as a metaphor so deeply it can be difficult to detect. These types of metaphors are taken for granted and processed with little effort. Even so, Paul’s choice in wording over another expression represents his intention to characterize the control (or authority or leadership) of Christ in a particular light. In the immediate context, perhaps the reason Paul chose this metaphor was to nix any notion that there should (or even could) be multiple authoritative figures in their lives—be they elemental spirits or human traditions. After all, there is only one head per body.” (Colossians 2:10)
“A discourse has to start somewhere, and statements like these establish a context within which further information can be added. Subsequent participants or topics can then be readily anchored to this initial one as the discourse develops. Writers may also help us prioritize the significance of ideas by adding devices that attract our attention to them; generally, the more attention-getting devices that are clustered together, the more significance we should assign.” (source)
“As an adjective, ἁγίοις frames the Colossians in terms of a manner of activity they routinely perform” (Colossians 1:2)
“the importance of the prepositional phrase ἐν Χριστῷ (in Christ) cannot be overstated enough” (Colossians 1:2)
“we reserve the term ‘topic’ to refer to what a proposition is about.” (source)
Product Details
- Title: Lexham Discourse Commentary: Colossians
- Author: Kristopher A. Lyle
- Series Editor: Steven E. Runge
- Series: Lexham Discourse Commentaries
- Publisher: Lexham Press
- Publication Date: 2017
- Pages: 177
- Resource Type: Commentary
- Topic: Greek Grammar
About the Author
Kristopher Lyle is a Language Editor at Faithlife Corporation. He holds a BA in Biblical Languages and Sociology from Houston Baptist University, and an MA in Biblical Hebrew from the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa) under the supervision of Christo van der Merwe. His research focuses on applying cognitive linguistic frameworks to our understanding of the biblical languages. He received the SASNES award for his MA thesis in 2013, and has since authored multiple articles on Biblical Hebrew lexical semantics.
About the Editor
Steven E. Runge holds a BA in speech communication from Western Washington University, a master of theological studies degree in biblical languages from Trinity Western Seminary in Langley, BC, Canada, and a doctor of literature degree in biblical languages from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, which was supervised by Christo Van der Merwe. In preparation for his doctoral research, Steve completed several years of study in the linguistic fields of pragmatics and discourse grammar.
He has served as an adjunct faculty member at Northwest Baptist Theological College, Trinity Western University, and Associated Canadian Theological Schools (ACTS) while completing his education. Steve presently serves as a scholar-in-residence at Logos Bible Software, where, along with Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament, he has developed the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament and the Lexham High Definition Commentaries.