Christianity

scripture

Now an SBL member

Submitted by nathan on Sun, 08/29/2010 - 09:31
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Yesterday I noticed a pilots' organization magazine belonging to my brother-in-law, and it lit a fuse in my brain. I should be a member of a "trade" association for my field.

So I signed up for the Society of Biblical Literature. It is obviously a pertinent choice for my studies of the Bible. The main benefit for me is access to their journal JBL. However, it will also be helpful to be a bit more "plugged-in" to the field than I have been. I signed up for the cheaper associate membership, since I don't expect to be submitting papers in the next year. Hopefully it is worth the money.

Open Scriptures sandbox API server

Submitted by nathan on Sun, 07/25/2010 - 20:36
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For the past few months I've been hosting a "sandbox" server for the Open Scriptures API. The purpose is to provide a proof-of-concept for the code, and to ensure that we know how to make the code work in production. It has been an adventure, since the code and its requirements have changed many times.

Tonight I reached an important milestone with the API server: I am now serving the API with a the full Tischendorf Greek New Testament text, using mysql as the database. Previously I had been only hosting the book of Jude, and only using sqlite for the database. So now I have a fully-functioning instance, with a full dataset, in a real production environment.

As an exmaple, you can visit here: http://api.ossandbox.info/texts/passage/Bible.Tischendorf:2Thess.1.1-2Thess.1.3 (that's 2 Thessalonians 1:1-3 in an XML format).

If you are interested in the project and would like to know more, check out our mailing list, and visit us on IRC in #openscriptures on irc.freenode.net.

(For the technically inclined, Open Scriptures is group of Django apps, bundled in Pinax. It is being served by Apache and mod_wsgi. Thanks especially to Patrick Altman and Brian Rosner for helping me get things up and running.)

Sunday Roundup

Submitted by nathan on Sun, 07/18/2010 - 18:14
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A few things of note:

  • A bunch of folks from the Open Scriptures project are hanging out in irc: #openscriptures on irc.freenode.net
  • The MorphGNT site is active and rumbling again.
  • James Tauber and Patrick Altman's οχλος is a tool for collabrotive corpus linguistics. The demo task provides an interface to enter morphological parsings on the gospel of John, and Tauber is even working on a cooler interface. I had wanted to launch something like this, but smarter people are taking care of it. It is official: this will be the coolest site on the web when it is done.
  • Speaking of active and rumbling, Kim and I visited Mt. St. Helens today.
  • OSCON is this week in Portland!

First Open Scriptures Hackfest

Submitted by nathan on Wed, 07/07/2010 - 11:52
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Over the long weekend I got together with Weston, and we did some work on Open Scriptures. This resulted in a storm of commits, and a much better code base. We have been fortunate enough to be joined by Patrick Altman, whose experience with Django led to some immediate improvements in the structure and functionality of the code. This in turn has inspired other work, and the project as a whole is moving a decent pace at the moment.

We are hanging out in #openscriptures on irc.freenode.net. If you are so inclined to drop in and learn more about the project, feel free to join the room.

Dan Wallace on learning biblical languages

Submitted by nathan on Thu, 06/24/2010 - 13:38
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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 »

Open English Translation

Submitted by nathan on Tue, 06/22/2010 - 14:59
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I was recently made aware of the Open English Translation project. It is an endeavor to create a new English translation (actually, multiple translations in various forms) using openly documented formats and copy-friendly licenses. That is just another way of saying that it is right up my alley.

In addition to the translation project, Rob Hunt is seeking to shake up a few aspects of customary Bible publishing practice, including chapters and verses, chapter headings, terminology (e.g. Old and New Testament), and order of books. Rob has also chosen an interesting rubric for textual criticism:

Segments which are not included in the most ancient manuscripts will be removed from the inline text.

Well, this is not exactly up my alley, but that's OK.

I encourage anyone who is so inclined to lend a hand where needed to this project. This is exactly what Bible publishing needs, in my opinion. As I have written before, there are practical and ethical problems with publishing translations under restrictive licenses. The OET project is a concrete step in the right direction.

Swete LXX downloader

Submitted by nathan on Sat, 06/05/2010 - 12:55
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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.

Lucifer

Submitted by nathan on Tue, 05/04/2010 - 04:46
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As a part of the adult education class I am facilitating at my church I will be introducing the writings of the latter prophets. I think this is the corpus of scripture with which adult Christians are least familiar. This probably has to do with the difficulty of reading such literature as compared with the narratives of the Torah, the former prophets, the writings, and the Gospels. Let's face it, Hebrew prophetic literature is not a breeze to read, but I think it is still quite rewarding. Jesus quoted from Isaiah more than from the law, for example.

So I thought for tomorrow night's class we'd take a look at an infamous passage of scripture, Isaiah 14:

When the Lord gives you relief from your suffering and anxiety, and from the hard labor which you were made to perform, you will taunt the king of Babylon with these words:

...

Look how you have fallen from the sky,
O shining one, son of the dawn!
You have been cut down to the ground,
O conqueror of the nations!

The payoff is of course that this passage is the source of the moniker "Lucifer" and a fair portion of the popular history of Satan. We'll discuss the contextual referent and much more. It should help foster discussion and get everyone engaged with this genre.

Against biblical illiteracy

Submitted by nathan on Sun, 05/02/2010 - 07:16
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I encountered an article by Hector Avalos entitle "In Praise of Biblical Illiteracy." I don't agree with the article, and I find its arguments to be problematic. Of particular concern is this portion, dealing with the effect scholars have on the scriptures:

Furthermore, this effort to promote biblical literacy depends on the illusion that there is such a thing as “THE Bible.” Just consider the fact that the text of our New Testament is a hypothetical reconstruction that is identical to no single manuscript extant in the first few centuries of Christianity. Our canon could have been made of many combinations and include books we don’t consider part of “biblical studies.”

Therefore, “the Bible” is partly the construction of scholars (ancient or modern), and today the power to define the Bible still resides mostly with ecclesiastical authorities, as well as with academic biblical scholars. So, even if believers hold “the Bible” to be relevant, it is because clerics and scholars have not divulged how much of it is constructed by scholars.

Besides being a misrepresentation of textual criticism and canonical studies, I really don't see the connection. People think the Bible is relevant because scholars have not divulged how much is constructed by scholars? Am I missing something? Have canonical studies and textual criticism somehow made the Bible more relevant to modern readers? How could that be? I just don't see the causality.

Translating glosses

Submitted by nathan on Tue, 04/27/2010 - 10:11
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Acts 9:36

Now in Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha (which in translation means Dorcas).

Here we have an example of a funny aspect of translation. Sometimes in the course of translation there are glosses from other languages. In other words, we are translating translations. So here is the question: should we transliterate the gloss as in the example above, or should we translate it into English? The convention for rendering names in translation is to transliterate, even if the name has a clear translatable meaning (in some cases a footnote is added). But this case is a bit different, because the comment by the author makes it clear that the name has some meaning, but English-speakers are not clued in to that meaning, since Dorcas is a meaningless word. So, why not:

Now in Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha (which in translation means Gazelle).

Would it work?

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