Mounce Archive 26 - The "Law" of Faith

Bill Mounce is traveling this month and is taking a break from his weekly column on biblical Greek until April. Meanwhile, we’ve hand-picked some classic, popular posts from the “Mondays with Mounce” archive for your Greek-studying pleasure.

This week's post from the archive looks at another example of using punctuation in translation. Mounce shows how useful quotation marks can be in the context of Romans 3:27, in pointing out the difference between the law of works and the "law" of faith.

You can read the entire post here.

I’ve been musing on the role of punctuation in translation, and last week we looked at the dash in Romans 3:25. In v 27 there is an excellent illustration of another effective use of punctuation: quotation marks.

Paul has been talking about righteousness coming not through law but through faith. He writes, “Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the ‘law’ that requires faith” (TNIV). Notice the second use of law is in quotation marks. What’s going on?

(Continue reading the entire post here.)

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William D. [Bill] Mounce posts about the Greek language, exegesis, and related topics on the ZA Blog. He is the author of numerous works including the recent Basics of Biblical Greek Video Lectures and the bestselling Basics of Biblical Greek. He is the general editor of Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary of the Old and New Testament Words. He served as the New Testament chair of the English Standard Version Bible translation, and is currently on the Committee for Bible Translation for the NIV. The Mounce Reverse-Interlinear™ New Testament is available to freely read on Bible Gateway.

Learn more about Bill's Greek resources at BillMounce.com.