Bible | Nerdlets

RefTagger Creates Bible Verse Popups for your Blog

Sep 132008

If you run a WordPress Blog you may be interested in Logos Bible Software’s RefTagger. It’s a handy little tool that automatically highlights and hyperlinks any biblical references in your blog. So if, for example, I begin to ramble about Heb. 2:9, the plugin will provide my readers with a popup so they know what I am talking about. Clicking on the link takes you to BibleGateway.com.

RefTagger is free, and has a number of wonderful options. You can select your preferred Bible Version (a global setting; you can’t change it on a case-by-case basis). You can also include links to the Libronix libarary, though I don’t have this software so cannot test it. Options are available for installing on other blogging software, but it is more difficult (copy/paste code in the right location).

Give it a run. It makes posting Bible-related content that much easier.

Reading Greek Online

Biblical Greek, Webapps and Websites 2 Responses »

Sep 112008

Bibleworks, Accordance, Logos, and other Bible software (my only experience is with Bibleworks) offer unmatched functionality and ease-of-use, but are relatively expensive and are tied to certain operating systems. There are alternatives, two of which offer a similar suite of basic features.

The Resurgence Greek Project

The Resurgence Greek Project (RGP) is a quick, easy to use, and full-featured source for reading the NT. RGP offers simple searching, flash card generation, vocab lists, and other handy features. It provides the morphology and definition of words on rollover (which is very convenient). The major disadvantage is that it does not use the USB/NA Greek text. Instead, it uses Tischendorf’s 8th edition by default, and provides options for using Codex Sinaiticus, both of which are in the public domain. This is not a major problem, and it is understandable given the free nature of the service, and Perseus does provide some (pretty basic) text-critical analysis.

The text is Unicode, so you should have no problem in copying and pasting.

The RGP’s search features are pretty limited, but you can search for words by inflected form or by lexical form, and it also provides you with some statistical analysis.

Another great feature is the extensive flashcard modules. In addition to standard vocabulary lists, the RGP has the ability to create a vocabulary list based upon any selection of text. You can generate vocab cards for the book of James, for example, or all words in Romans that occur 15 times or less. This is a really great feature for studying.

The major disadvantage is the lack of other Greek texts, particularly those relevant to NT backgrounds. Also, the only available lexicons are Liddell Scott and Thayer’s, and while Liddell Scott is fine (if a little inconvenient, see below), Thayer’s has too many deficiencies to be reliable.

The Perseus Project

The Perseus Project is much more ambitious. It provides the entire NT (find that here), but in addition includes almost every Ancient Greek work available to us, from Euripedes, to Josephus’s Antiquities, to the early church fathers, and all in either Greek or English (and some other languages). You can browse their collection of Ancient Greek texts here, and they have other collections available as well.

Like Zhubert.com, the Perseus Project provides morphological analysis and definition, though this information is not displayed by rollover. Instead, a pop-up window provides the information whenever you click on the word. Also, the default lexicon is the Liddell Scout (Middle Liddell), which is a great lexicon, but not tailored to NT use like BDAG. You can find NT/Koine definitions in Middle Liddell, of course, but they are sometimes buried.

The search features are quite impressive. You can search by inflected form or by lemma, but the real advantage here is the ability to see how a word is used in other Greek texts. Since Perseus includes so many Greek works, you can search across a wide range of boundaries. (This can be a disadvantage, however, if not united with a little linguistic common since; Herodotus’s λογος is not the same as that of the NT).

The other major advantage to the Perseus Project is that it is completely Open Source. You can download the whole project, from the software to the texts (they are all in the public domain), and run it from your own computer (get the software here, and the texts here). Doing so will set you back a Gig or two, but it might be worth it, because one major disadvantage of their web site is its general slugishness (demand seems to consistently outweigh their bandwidth).

Conclusions

For basic reading of the NT in Greek I heartily recommend The Resurgence Greek Project. Its the easiest to use, has the most features relevant to seminary students, and is quick and responsive. If you want more extensive search features, or would like to read other Greek texts (such as those by the Church Fathers, or Greek 2nd Temple Literature), then check out the Perseus Project.

ESV Firefox Plugin

Software No Responses »

Sep 102008

Mozilla, the good people behind Firefox, have recently introduced an experimental Firefox extension called Ubiquity, designed to help users interact with web data in a social world. Justin Taylor points out a new plugin from Crossway that takes advantage of this technology to make looking up (and interacting with) Bible verses easily. This is great news for bloggers, or other active Web 2.0 folks. Read about it here.

There is a more extensive description of Ubiquity here. Or you can try it out with these 15 commands for Ubiquity.

Greek Flash Cards

Biblical Greek, Software No Responses »

Sep 052008

Here is a post that reviews flashcard software for Greek and Hebrew. Some are free. some are not. I have recommended Bibleworks and Mounce to students before, but this post details some other options.

ESV Banners

Webapps and Websites No Responses »

Aug 202008

The ESV blog has new banners available for your web site, blog, email signature, or any other medium that allows users to paste HTML code (facebook, myspace, friendfeed, etc.). Get the code here.

Run Bibleworks 7 or 8 with Wine in Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10)

Biblical Greek, How to, Linux 39 Responses »

Aug 182008

My Windows readers will be perplexed by this post, so as a brief preface, let me just say feel more than free to skip this one (and any other “Linux how to” posts that might pop-up in the future). I spend most of my computer time in Linux, but there are a couple of Windows applications that I use regularly. Bibleworks is one of them. This post explains how I got Bibleworks to run in Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 8.10) using Wine. This guide is confirmed to work with Bibleworks 7 and Bibleworks 8 using any Wine version 1.0 and up (Bibleworks 6 has worked fine for years).

Here are the steps I used to run Bibleworks in Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 (though the instructions should also work in any Linux distro, like Fedora or OpenSUSE, that includes Wine 1.0 and later).

Step 1: Install Wine

You will need to most recent version (1.0 or higher). Use your distribution’s package-manager or follow the instructions for your distribution here (for Ubuntu, use this guide.

Step 2: Tell Wine to Play Nice

There are a few modifications that you will want to make to ensure that Wine plays well with Bibleworks. First, and most important, make certain that you are emulating XP. To do this, type “winecfg” in the command line, and make sure XP is the selected version.

Second, the default settings for Internet Explorer will not work with Bibleworks. We will need to change it. Do the following in a terminal to backup the default setup:

mv ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Internet\ Explorer ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/IE6BACKUP

Now we need to use the winetricks script to set up a fake Internet Explorer. In the command line:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

chmod +x winetricks

./winetricks

This will bring up the following window. There are a lot of great options here. The only one that you need to worry about at the moment is fakeie6. Select it and let winetricks do its work.

Step 3: Install Bibleworks 7

Now the fun part. Pop in your first Bibleworks disc. Open you favorite file manager and explore the CD. The application you want is “autorun.exe,” and it is best not to run it from the command line (since you will have to switch discs several times). Select the modules you want and start installing.

The only difficulty I ran into here is being a little trigger happy on the disc switching. When the window for exchanging disc opens, go ahead an put in the requested disc. Do not click OK until the disc is fully loaded. Once the disc icon shows up on your desktop (or “Computer” folder), it’s ready to go, and only then should you click OK. Jumping the gun here could result in Bibleworks never recognizing the disc, and you will have to start over. (If this does not work, you can copy the contents of each disc into a folder in your home directory, then use the command line and run wine /path/to/folder/setup.exe).

Once it’s installed, you will have a Bibleworks icon on your desktop. Drag and drop this to whatever launcher or menu you want, or just doubleclick to launch Bibleworks.

Step 4: Updates.

Shutdown Bibleworks and then start it up again. This saves your settings, which is necessary if you have a crash. You should do this anytime you make changes to Bibleworks, such as setting options or default versions.

Before tailoring Bibleworks to your personal needs, it’s a good idea to download all the updates. Sometimes an update can reset your settings, so update before your tweek.

You should be able to check for automatic online updates (this is why we ran the winetricks script). Do not use the dialog for this in the Options menu. Instead, go to Help – Bibleworks on the Internet – Check for updates. This should bring up the window to the left. Check all that you want (I recommend everything), and then click “Apply.”

It should work, and will eventually restart Bibleworks on its own.

Step 5: Getting Pretty

Check out this screenshot. Not pretty, right? That’s because the standard fonts are not really good in Wine. Go to Tools – Options. Select the Font Tab. Adjust as necessary. I used the default font for my Ubuntu theme, which looks very nice. You may also want to change your Greek and Hebrew fonts. For recommendations, check out this post.

Also, while you are in this dialog, set up the “Export” fonts for Unicode support. Use the screenshot to the left as a guide.

You can “pretty up” the rest of the interface by using the aforementioned winetricks script to install the “Core Fonts” package and “Tahoma.”

Step 6: Fixing Smaller Bugs

One minor annoyance occurs when Bibleworks starts and the Welcome Screen appears. In the bottom right hand corner of this dialog box you can uncheck the “Appear at Startup” button, but it won’t do any good. To keep this screen from appearing you need to manually change a line in the bw700.ini file. Located this file in your Wine/BibleWorks 7/ directory and change the following line:

ishowgetstart=1

Change the value to 0.

Step 7: Enduring Problems

There are several issues, but only one of them is major. The most obvious is the lack of any icons on the toolbar. This is really not a problem, however, since Bibleworks gives you many ways to get to the dialogs you need.

Update: Some of what follows is not an issue in Bibleworks 8, but help files do still crash Bibleworks.

The biggest issue is that modules that require Windows Help files (.chm) will crash Bibleworks when you close them. This includes many of the various “books” that Bibleworks provides, such a Gesenius’s Hebrew Grammar. There is a work around, however: don’t close the window after you open it. As long as you do not close the window, you can browse, read, copy/paste to your heart’s content. Bibleworks lets you have as many of these windows open as you want, so when you are done with them, just minimize them.

Work Around: You can always view the resource in a native Linux CHM viewer, such as gnochm. I have linked all the .chm files in the Bibleworks “databases” directory into a separate folder to make accessing these resources easier.

Finally, if you do have a crash, you will see the screen to your right. Make sure you select the last option. Bibleworks is a little over-protective. Do not allow it to delete your .ini file, as you will have to reset all your settings. Instead, select “Let the operating system handle the error” and just restart.

I very much recommend backing up your settings file, particularly if you make heavy modifications to the default options (such as specialized search versions, font choices, etc). Despite Bibleworks’s claim to the contrary, the bw700.ini file in the Bibleworks directory is not the file to backup. Bibleworks creates an .ini file in the Windows directory, and that is the one you need (this has been fixed in a recent update). To backup, simply browse to that directory and copy the bw700.ini file, or use the terminal:

cp ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/bw700.ini ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/bw700.ini_BAK

Do the same for the file in the Bibleworks directory, since the most recent version does use that file:

cp ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Bibleworks\ 7/bw700.ini ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Bibleworks\ 7/bw700.ini_BAK

Should you have any problems in the future, just restore your backup file. Windows users will benefit from this as well (I get the occasional crash there too).

I have not had too many crashes. It is pretty stable, for a Wine app, and you can always use something like VirtualBox if you need more stability. Also, whenever you spend a good amount of time changing your settings (such as default search versions, etc.), shutdown and restart to save your settings.

Conclusion

I hope this helps Linux users use this wonderful software. Please post problems (and solutions) in the comments. Here is one last screenshot, with everything running:

Hermeneutics and Teaching Children

Bible and Hermeneutics No Responses »

Aug 062008

Here is an interesting post by John Walton about children’s Bible curricula.

If we are negligent of sound hermeneutics when we teach Bible to children, should it be any wonder that when they get into youth groups, Bible studies and become adults in the church, that they do not know how to derive the authoritative teaching from the text?

He identifies 5 common and easily avoidable mistakes. The fifth I found particularly convicting:

Focus on people rather than God: The Bible is God’s revelation of himself and its message and teaching is largely based on what it tells us about God. This is particularly true of narrative (stories). While we are drawn to observe the people in the stories, we cannot forget that the stories are intended to teach us about God more than about people. If in the end, the final point is “We should/shouldn’t be like X (= some biblical character)” there is probably a problem unless the “X” is Jesus or God. Better is “we can learn through X’s story that God . . .”

Read the whole thing at Zondervan’s recently launched koinonia blog.

Marcion, the NT, and God's Care of His Church

Christian Theology and History No Responses »

Aug 042008

I have come across a wealth of interesting quotes as I prepare for New Testament Introduction class next term. Here’s one on the importance of Marcion (remember Marcion, the 2nd century semi-gnostic theologian who created his own canon?) in the development of the church’s canon consciousness:

The theological and methodological deficiencies of [Marcion's] canon should not…prevent us from appreciating the fundamental importance of the attempt. Marcion’s bible tabled once for all the question of a new canon, that is, the question of the ‘authentic’ witnesses to the original gospel, which were to provide the standard of all later tradition and the norm for the preaching of the Church. The Church as she was then situatied could not ignore this question if she wished to hold her own. But there was still a long way to go, through crises and controversies of many different kinds, before an answer was found. That answer stands today as our New Testament; but at the outset of the conflict such a thing did not exist. (Campenhausen, Hans. The Formation of the Christian Bible. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972. p165).

It’s a powerful reminder of God’s gracious providence in history, especially in times of trial and opposition. A man who fought against God’s gospel with incredible passion and consistency ultimately spurred the Church on to recognize what we know today as the New Testament.

How to Type in Greek Part II: Setting Up the Microsoft Greek Polytonic Keyboard

Biblical Greek 14 Responses »

Jul 072008

Now that you have a full appreciation of Unicode it’s time to setup windows to type in Greek (and Hebrew, for that matter).

Getting Started

First, open up your favorite document editor. I’m using OpenOffice.org, a free, powerful, and interpolatable solution to Microsoft Office. For testing purposes we need to use a Unicode font that supports the full set of Greek characters. If you’re using Vista, you can leave it on Times New Roman. Everyone else (and Vista users too, just to be safe), should set their font to either Palatino Linotype or Arial Unicode MS (I prefer the latter). Start typing. Still English. Now the fun begins.

Adding Keyboards

Access your control panel and select “Regional and Language Options.” I am using Vista, so the name’s might be changed for XP or 2000 (and if you’re using ME or 98, it’s time to either upgrade or switch to Linux). Click on the “Keyboards and Languages” tab, which will open a new window. Click the “Add…” a keyboard/language button, which opens up yet another window. Browse for “Greek,” and then select the “Greek Polytonic” keyboard. Other keyboards will not work; you need Greek Polytonic. Click Ok, then Apply. Notice the Greek keyboard has been added to your list.

You will need an easy and convenient way to switch between keyboards, so click on the “Language Bar” tab. Choose any option other than “hidden” (I suggest docking it in the taskbar). In the “Advanced Key Settings” tab you can set special keyboard shortcuts for switching between keyboards, in accordance with your preferences.

There are other keyboards you might be interested in. Notice that I have two keyboards under “English.” The “United States-International” keyboard allows me to type words like “Bëla Fleck,” “Käsemann,” and “vis-à-vis” with particularly pretentious accuracy. I also have a Hebrew keyboard installed, which requires some comment. The Hebrew keyboard included in Windows is terrible; the layout is counter intuitive, and it lacks vowel pointings. You will have to install another keyboard, which can be downloaded here. The download includes instructions for installation and a keyboard layout in PDF.

Now that our keyboards are installed, you should see a new little bar in your already-busy taskbar. This is your language bar, which you can use to select the language you want to type in, as well as the keyboard you want to use for that language (if you set up more than one). Select “EL”, which is the Greek setting (remember, the Greek word for Greek is ελληνος).

Typing in Greek

Now go back to your word processor and start typing. You should see some Greek characters now. If not, check your language bar again (sometimes switching applications causes the system to revert to your default language).

The Layout of your New Keyboard

Now you need to learn how to use your new keyboard. There will probably be some keyboard-concepts you are not familiar with, the most important of which are called “dead keys.” Dead keys are keys that only function in combination with other keys. The standard English keyboard does not use deadkeys, so if you are used to that keyboard, this might take same getting used to (as will the “US-International”) keyboard. With a little practice, however, you will be a master, and might even consider switching to a dead-key enabled keyboard as your default (as I eventually did).

To get started, press the ” key in your Word Processor. Nothing happened. That’s because Microsoft is waiting for another key. Now type “a”. You should see something like ἁ. Dead keys are used by the Greek keyboard to create all those diacritical marks necessary for typing in ancient Greek. Don’t worry, they’re all there, you just need to find where to find them.

Take a look at the following diagram. This is a keyboard map for the Polytonic keyboard. The keys in yellow are all dead-keys and will therefore only work in combination with an appropriate secondary key (and only “legal” Greek characters can be produced–the fabled λ with a smooth-breathing is still only a fantasy).

Now try this one. Notice that the Right “Alt” key (and ONLY the right one) is greyed-in. This indicates a new keyboard state. When you hold down the right Alt key, the keyboard “shifts” to allow access to different keys, which are shown in the keyboard map. Again, the yellow keys are dead keys, so the key combination “alt-q” followed by an “a” results in the following character: ᾴ.

There are four total keyboard states, two of which you already use: (1) Standard and (2) Shifted. Now you add two more: (3) Alt and (4) Alt-Shift. Remember, it is only the right Alt that does this.

A Full Keyboard Map

Microsoft used to have full documentation of the Polytonic Keyboard layout online, but it no longer appears to be available. Rather than distribute the whole document, which is needlessly long and complicated, I have copied their map images (which I believe are public domain) and placed them in my own PDF cheat sheet. Download it here!

One more note: you may be wondering how to access keys that used to be easy to get to, such as the “;” key, which is now a dead-key. The answer: certain keys can only be accessed by typing a dead-key followed by a space. These are usually keys that are not often used, so it’s not really a problem. A map for these keys is provided on the second page of the above PDF.

Conclusion

All this sounds intimidating, but you will get used to your new keyboard quickly, and you will be proud of your efforts. No more searching that horrible “insert symbol” dialog. No more dependency on software like Bibleworks for Greek characters. Dead keys are your friends!

Next up: the best fonts for Greek and Hebrew.

How to Type in Greek Part I: An Introduction to Unicode

Biblical Greek 11 Responses »

Jul 032008

Has this ever happened to you? You’ve spent a lot of work typing out a paper, or preparing some notes on the Bible, or posting some thoughts on a blog, and like a good little Greekling, you made sure to stick to the original languages. Now you want to share your efforts, either by distributing your paper (say, sending it to a professor by email), or publishing it on the web. Well, you might have a problem. If you did not use Unicode when typing Greek, your quotation of John 3:16 may look like this:

ou[twj ga.r hvga,phsen o` qeo.j to.n ko,smon(

Why does this happen? Well, it happens because you are using an ASCII-based font. What does that mean? Before 1997, most fonts were ASCII fonts; they were fonts that represented characters using an 8-bit system. A bit is either a 1 or a 0. An 8-bit number is a string of 8 ones and/or zeroes. When you use an ASCII font, each 8-bit number represents a different character: 00000001 is “a”, 00000010 is “b”, etc. The problem? An 8-bit number can only represent 256 characters (2 to the power of 8). Remember Zelda? He could only carry 255 coins because the NES was an 8-bit system, and could therefore only count to 255 (0 counts as a number).

So the problem is, in order to type in foreign languages we need more characters. 256 is plenty for most European languages, but when you add Mandarin, Hebrew, or Greek into the equation, you will have problems. Your ASCII Greek font gets around this by mapping Greek glyphs onto English characters. A glyph is the particular representation of a character. “A” “a” “a” and “a” are different glyphs of the same character: the first letter of the English alphabet. Since ASCII cannot represent every character in every language, it just changes the glyph to match the language in question and then maps those glyphs on English characters. So your ASCII Greek font is tricking the computer. You see θέος, but the computer sees y’eow. It thinks you are writing in English, not Greek. And the problem is: the computer is right.

Now that ASCII Greek font will work fine in a lot of cases, but what if you ever want to change the font in your paper? There are many reasons to do so. You find a font you like better. You want to distribute your paper to people that might not have access to your font. You want to post it online where is will be viewed with who knows what font. Bottom line: if reading your paper depends on a particular font, you’re in trouble. And if you ever do decide to change fonts, you’re out of look: the only way is to retype all that beautiful Greek.

Or you could use Unicode from the beginning. Unlike ASCII, Unicode supports up-to 32 bits (there are different subsets, but there’s no need to bother with that). That’s 4,294,967,296 possible slots, which is more than enough to support every character in every language. That’s the bottom line: Unicode lets us type out characters, not glyphs, so we don’t have to trick the computer. We can tell the computer from the beginning that we want to type in Greek–ancient Greek, to be precise–and the computer will respond accordingly. All major Word Processors support Unicode, as do most browsers. Its the standard, and you should use it.

So how do you set it up? Good question. The answer: if you’re using any modern Operating System (Windows 98 and after, any Mac, any Linux), it’s already running. Times New Roman is a Unicode font, and you can use it to type in Greek and Hebrew (though its not very pretty). The problem is, most of our systems assume we only want to type in English. We need to tell our system that we are smarter than it gives us credit, that we know Greek and will sometimes be typing in Greek. There is complicated, expensive, and bloated software out there on the web to help you do this, but they’re completely unnecessary. Windows (and Linux and Apple) can do it, and it’s not difficult. You just need to change a few settings, which we’ll do together (with pictures!) next post. And I’ll also provide some good open-standard font suggestions.

As a practical note, many of us simply copy and paste from our Bible software. For me, it’s Bibleworks, though the Perseus Project has the entire Greek bible online, and in Unicode. Bibleworks prior to version 7, for reasons I cannot fathom, did not support Unicode. Bibleworks 7 provides such support, but it is, for reasons I cannot fathom, not enabled by default. This is easy to change, however. Just go to “Tools” -> “Options” and click on the “Fonts” tab. Click “Export Fonts,” which will provide you with two boxes you can check. Check them, and you’re good to go. Now whenever you copy and paste from Bibleworks 7, it will export the text in Unicode. Finally, your readers will know the truth, regardless of their fonts:

οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον, ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν, ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλ᾽ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον.

More to come, and hope this helps.

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RefTagger Creates Bible Verse Popups for your Blog

Reading Greek Online

ESV Firefox Plugin

Greek Flash Cards

ESV Banners

Run Bibleworks 7 or 8 with Wine in Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10)

Hermeneutics and Teaching Children

Marcion, the NT, and God's Care of His Church

How to Type in Greek Part II: Setting Up the Microsoft Greek Polytonic Keyboard

How to Type in Greek Part I: An Introduction to Unicode

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