Nerdlets » Bible and Hermeneutics

New Book on James

Tommy — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:26:50 +0000

My dissertation advisor Dr. Dan McCartney has a new commentary out on the Epistle of James that I’m picking up today and looking forward to reading. You can get a copy too from the always wonderful Westminster Bookstore.

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A Helpful Bible Atlas

Tommy — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:51:42 +0000

I often find it helpful to have a Bible Atlas near me when I’m reading through large chunks of the Bible. I have been unable to find a real good online version, but here is a pretty decent offering from the Access Foundation. It is listed on Scribd as licensed under the Creative Commons non-Commercial Attribution license.

Bible Atlas

Codex Sinaiticus Online

Tommy — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:30:50 +0000

The full set of images and text from Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest complete copy of the entire NT, is now online. Check out their webpage. The interface is pretty slick, allowing you to change lighting options, zoom in and out, and bookmark and print pages. It also includes a transcription and translation. Anyone interested should definitely check this out.

Update: The always intriguing ReadWriteWeb has also posted a story on this, with a little analysis and some extra technical details. Read that here.

HT: NT Interpretation

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Exegetical Insight: Luke 8:10

Tommy — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:53:04 +0000

Every once-and-a-while I have an edifying experience in the course of grading. It’s rare, but it happens. In the course of reading over Luke 8:10, which my Greek students had to translate for their exam, I was forced to ask (and answer) a basic question. The question is begged by the Greek, but not by the English. Here is the verse:

Ὑμῖν δέδοται γνῶναι τὰ μυστήρια τῆς βασιλείας τοῦ θεοῦ, τοῖς δὲ λοιποῖς ἐν παραβολαῖς,

The question is: What has been left out of the second phrase, which is an incomplete idea? What has been elided from τοῖς δὲ λοιποῖς ἐν παραβολαῖς? Or, to put the same question another way: what are Jesus’s parable about? Are they morality tales? Proverbial remarks? Timeless truths?

The answer lies in the parallel between the two clauses, and, in particular, between their prominent datives (notice that the datives come first in each clause).

So the first phrase is “to you”, that is, to the disciples (and those who trust in the traditions they teach: Jude 20-23). The second phrase is about “the others.” The first phrase lacks a propositional phrase, the second a direct object. So the disciples are given something, but the others, though given the same thing, receive it through an indirect medium, the parable.

So what are Jesus’s parable about? If you had to put the central message of Jesus’s parable into a few words, what would those words be?

The answer lies in the question posed by the second clause of our Greek sentence. What is given to the others ἐν παραβολαῖς? The answer: τὰ μυστήρια τῆς βασιλείας τοῦ θεοῦ.

Mysteries about God’s Kingdom.

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BibleArc Gets an Upgrade

Tommy — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:08:42 +0000

I’ve mentioned BibleArc before. Apparently it has recently received a major upgrade with some new features, including automatic parsing of Greek words, the inclusion of the Hebrew OT, and enhanced sharing capabilities. Check it out.

Don’t know what arcing is? Check out this video from John Piper on how he uses this tool. If you are interested in arcing and other linguistic concepts as they apply to biblical studies, check out Cotterell’s Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation

New Bible Search Bar for your Blog (from Logos.com)

Tommy — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:51:25 +0000

In addition to their excellent reftagger plugin, which provides blog readers with Bible verse popups whenever they hover over a Biblical reference (try it with Heb. 1:1), Bible.Logos.com is now offering a free Bible Search Bar widget to put in your sidebar. Biblical Bloggers should definitely look into this as it makes things easier for your readers. Logos explains:

If you have biblical content on your website or blog, you’ll definitely want to consider adding the new Bible Search Bar to your sidebar. RefTagger allows your readers to have instant access to the Bible passages that you cite in your post, but what if they want to look up a verse that you don’t mention or launch a search for a word or phrase that you discuss? They could manually navigate to Bible.Logos.com, but the Bible Search Bar makes it even easier for your readers to find what they’re looking for.

The sidebar add-in comes in many shapes and sizes, and should be a convenient addition to any biblical blog. You can get it here. And don’t forget reftagger, if you don’t have it installed already, here.

Troubles for the Open Scriptures Project

Tommy — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:14:11 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

The Open Scriptures Project, which I describe here, has hit a (hopefully temporary) snag. The project is dependent upon James Tauber’s excellent MorphGNT, which is open-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. That license should protect derivative projects, but the German Bible Society has called that into question. You can read that here.

Long story short: I am voluntarily withdrawing my recently published eBook, which is based in turn on the Open Scriptures project, until this issue is resolved. Sorry for the inconvenience.

eBook of the Greek New Testament (UBS4) for the Kindle, iPod, or iPhone

eBook of the Greek New Testament (UBS4) for the Kindle, iPod, or iPhone

Tommy — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 06:17:09 +0000

Update: The links to the ebook in question have been (preemptively) removed pending licensing discussions. See here. Perhaps I will have time in the future to provide a Tischendorf version, which is in the open domain.

Having Googled long and hard for a free, accented, open-source, Unicode eBook of the Greek New Testament, and to no avail, I decided to make one myself.

Getting the Book

You can download the NA26/UBS4 Greek New Testament eBook in the following formats (right-click and “Save File As”): Kindle, Palm, mobi, and xhtml. Follow the instructions for your device. The Kindle version is the best, so use that if your device supports it. You can convert eBook files using the free application Calibre.

iPhone and iPod Touch users can use the free application Stanza with this guide to get everything set up (it’s easy).

If you need another format for your reader, try Stanza’s Desktop Reader to convert one format to another.

I will post about new releases and improvements on this site, so if you like what you see you may want to subscribe. There are a couple of improvements I would like to make–like sub-chapters and a better Table of Contents–but that will have to wait for another time. Stay tuned!

Licensing

The source text is for this eBook came from the MorphGNT with UBS4 (ver. 5.08) by CCAT and James Tauber, as produced by the Work Viewer web-app created by the Open Scriptures project. It is the same Greek text you will find on the much more robust Resurgence Greek Project and was originally derived from NA26.

This eBook is distributed and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, as allowed and required by the use of MorphGNT.

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The Open Scriptures Project

Tommy — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:40:05 +0000

We have had many occasions to mention the variety of online resources available for reading and browsing biblical texts here on Nerdlets.org. There is a lot of data online, and the continuing digitilazation of texts means the wealth of data is growing every day.

: Image via Wikipedia

Here’s the problem: every website or resource database or web-app has a different way of representing that data and the information that describes it, and not all of them provide ways for external sites and apps to interact with that data. The bottom line here is that it is currently impossible, or at least very difficult, to seamlessly “mashup” information from various sources.

For example, say you want to compare the text of John 8 in a couple of ancient Greek manuscripts, all of which are available online, but from different institutions. Currently you would have to go to each site independently, use the disparate methods to extract the data you need, and then mash-them-up yourself using a Word Processor or other tool. Cumbersome, no?

The Open Scripture project has the ambitious goal of solving this dilemma. From their web site:

Open Scriptures seeks to be a comprehensive open-source Web repository for integrated scriptural data and a general application framework for building internationalized social applications of scripture. An abundance of scriptural resources are now available online—manuscripts, translations, and annotations are all being made available by students and scholars alike at an ever-increasing rate. These diverse scriptural resources, however, are isolated from each other and fragmented across the Internet. Thus mashing up the available data into new scriptural applications is not currently possible for the community at large because the resources’ interrelationships are not systematically documented. Open Scriptures aims to establish a scriptural database for interlinked textual resources such as merged manuscripts, the differences among them, and the links between their semantic units and the semantic units of their translations. With such a foundation in place, derived scriptural data like cross-references may be stored in a translation-neutral and internationalized manner so as to be accessible to the community no matter what language they speak or version they prefer.

It’s still in its infancy, but they have released their first application, the Manuscript Comparator:

This tool allows two or more Biblical (currently New Testament) manuscripts or manuscript editions to be easily compared in side-by-side and unified views (no original unedited MSS are yet incorporated). It demonstrates a fundamental concept in the Open Scriptures framework: semantic linking. All of the contributing manuscripts are merged together to produce a single unified manuscript containing every attested variant; additionally, while merging, a manuscript’s words are linked to their corresponding words in the unified manuscript.

A full review of this tool is coming to Nerdlets.org soon.

The Open Scripture project is open-source, licensed under the excellent GPL 3.0. The source code is available on Google Code.

The people behind Open Scriptures will be presenting at the BibleTech 2009 conference.

HT: Biblical Studies and Tech Tools

NTGateway Gets an Upgrade

Tommy — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:10:33 +0000

NTGateway.com, an excellent repository of resources and articles about the NT, has recently been upgraded to make it more searchable, maintanable, and easier to navigate. Check it out.

You can read about the background for this upgrade here. From that post:

We’ve moved all of the content over to WordPress, slightly reworked the organization, added site navigation in the sidebar, and given it a fresh new look. Mark Goodacre will continue on as the editor and will continue to update the site.

Mark has moved the old NT Gateway blog to a new location and will continue to blog there. He has a new RSS feed, so you’ll need to subscribe to it to get all of the new content syndicated. The NT Gateway blog is restarting from scratch. It, too, has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.