In a post entitled "Is the Bible that big of a mystery," Dan Wallace explores the tension between the necessity of learning biblical languages and the propensity of such learners to pride or even gnosticism. It is of course an excellent read. I think that it is important for biblical scholars to regularly remind themselves of their proper role within the church. Wallace, who wrote one of the most popular New Testament Greek grammars, is a particularly good source for this admonition.

Part of Wallace's article touches on the importance of original langue training for ministry:

It should be obvious to all Bible-believing Christians that those who are training for ministry ought to know the languages. This is a sine qua non. They must know them because they are teachers of the church, leaders of the flock. They are not called ‘shepherds’ for no reason.

It probably comes as no surprise that Wallace holds that Bible-believing Christians should learn the languages for ministry. What is interesting is how he phrases it here. This provides an excellent opportunity for my hobby of checking doctrinal statements to see if God or the scriptures are listed first. A quick check of the Dallas Theological Seminary (where Wallace teaches) website reveals that they indeed affirm scripture as primary. It would follow then that Christian ministers should be better with the scriptures than with theology proper, if the ordering of the doctrinal statement has any logical bearing on orthopraxy (maybe it doesn't, though). Read more »

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library hosts scans of H.B. Swete's "Old Testament in Greek According to the Septuagint." It is a public domain LXX, including introduction and textual apparatus. If you find yourself desiring to store the images on your computer instead of viewing them through CCEL's website, you can use this Python script which I created. It will grab all of the PNG files of the text and apparatus and arrange them in order, by volume.

The script itself is not much, but I decided to license it under the GNU General Public License, version 3. This script uses some Python 2 syntax, so I might convert it for Python 3 at some point (though it's not so great a taks). If CCEL decides to change the structure of their site, it may break this script.

I considered hosting the finished product here, and may do so in the future, but for now I am going to preserve the bandwidth.

• Biblical Hebrew portal
• Oregon State bike map
• Manufacturing Consent, a documentary about Noam Chomsky's analysis of mass media

I proposed an initial Django model for storing Greek parsing data in the Open Scriptures mailing list and it has generated a good amount of discussion. The central question is whether we should follow traditional yet problematic morphological parsing paradigm, or whether we should seek to implement a semantic paradigm. Mike Aubrey has written some good posts on the problems with the traditional paradigm (e.g. Robertson on the middle and passive voice).

Luckily with Django we can have an arbitrary number of parsing models for any given word. So from a technical standpoint, it is not a question of which model, so long as that model can be sensibly reduced to database fields.

From a grammatical point of view, I have mixed feelings. I think that there are some real problems with the traditional system, especially in terms of its terminology and treatment of "tense" and voice. I think there is some value in purely morphological descriptions (especially insofar as they provide an objective description of the word), but that should not be the end-all of understanding a word. And I tend to agree  that the introduction of a new technology paradigm (i.e. the Open Scriptures API) may be a good time to introduce new parsing paradigms. Read more »