On Saturday I'm sharing in a morning of talk and discussion titled Digital Faith, hosted by the University of Auckland's School of Theology, the other speakers will be interesting and challenging all have blogs worth subscribing to:- Mark Brown @ Brown Blog
CEO Bible Society New Zealand & founder Anglican Cathedral in Second Life - Stephen Garner @ Greenflame
Lecturer in Theology and Popular Culture, School of Theology, University of Auckland - Heidi Campbell @ When religion meets new media
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Communication, Texas A&M University & author of Exploring Religious Community Online.
OGGB4 Lecture Theatre, Level 0, Owen G Glenn Building, Grafton Road, The University of Auckland
Saturday 5th September 9am-12pm
$5.00 morning tea provided
Labels: bible, culture, digital
¶ 12:55 PM
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John, the Hebrew Poet, has a really stimulating post (but then you'll say his posts usually are) A Style-Sensitive Translation of Luke 1:1-4. In it he agrues that: the style and register of the opening of Luke is "the high falutin’ prose in which the best history is traditionally written. In English, think Edward Gibbon or Thomas Macaulay."and offers a good first draft of what a rendering of these verses in such style would sound like.This is a drum several of us have banged before, most Bible versions obscure the style and register differences among biblical authors and passages. So a passage from Mark and one from Luke will sound more alike than the same passage from REV and CEV or even REV and NRSV. Thus the style and register preferred by the translation team takes precedence over that of the composers! This is plain barmy, nuts, and a great shame as it hides the human fingerprints that readers of Greek and the Semitic languages find all over Scripture.
J. K. Gayle and Doug Chaplin both post fine comments on John's post, suggesting how the following passages should sound. Is this a project that a team of bibliobloggers could collaborate on? Maybe, in view of the start already made Luke would be a good book to begin with? The contributors could all be authors on a site at Digress.it. Digress.it is a successor to CommentPress, a WordPress derivative that allows commenting at "paragraph" level on posts. Thus if the text of the proposed translation were posted with each verse as a separate "paragraph" others could comment at that level, and the translators could easily then produced a revised version in the light of suggestions.
Declaration of interest: I am exploring Digress.it with another project in view. I will describe that in another post soon.
Labels: bible, language, translation
¶ 8:03 AM
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FWIW, Gibbon was an amateur.
FWIW, I think Luke was too.
Thanks for this post.
By 
Bill, at
August 28, 2009 5:29 PM
Ah, the old "Gentlemen" versus "Players" distinction ;) Actually, often today since amateurs are "outsiders" they would write in more "typical" ways than professionals, but back then I am not sure that in terms of writing style or register such a distinction was relevant :)
By Tim, at
August 29, 2009 9:49 AM
- A Text without contexts is dumb! 2: Text without cotext is dumb (stimulated by teaching Understanding and Interpreting the Bible)
- Chance or Providence? (needed preparation for the next one)
- Direct speech in biblical narratives (I'm teaching biblical narrative again ;)
If they work for that then the series is working :) and 3.7GB in July (which equates to 16 podcasts each of which was downloaded more than 300 times during the month - not to mention the other 24 podcasts that were less popular).
Labels: audio, bible.reading, narrative, podcast
¶ 7:23 AM
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In the class we talked particularly about two sorts of tool Dictionaries and Commentaries. In this post I will focus first on the sorts of task for which different tools are useful, then in a later post I'll describe different sorts of tool found under the each of the two headings: Dictionaries and Commentaries.
Different tools for different tasks
For preference one does not dig a trench with a fork, but equally if one is breaking up clods a fork is more effective than a spade.
Bible dictionaries (a catch all term for encyclopedic works that relate to the Bible - not actually dictionaries at all) are really useful to get a quick fix on a person, place, object, activity, custom etc. in the context of Ancient Israel or the world of the Eastern Mediterranean under the Romans. That is if you have a term that needs explaining they are great to give you a quick fix of "background" information.
So, if you are reading Ezekiel 26 you probably realise that Tyre is a place rather than a round rubber tube, but you may want to know more... Likewise in Ruth there is mention a few times that Boaz is a "kinsman" (your translation may vary) and in chapter three Boaz explains that there is "another kinsman more closely related than [he]" (Ruth 3:12). This clearly is more than a matter of "what sort of cousin are you?" it is important to the book. To read Ruth sensibly you need to know more. Bible dictionaries exist to serve such needs.
[In the Ruth example you will meet a frustration known to dictionary aficionados as "hide and seek", most Bible dictionaries will not have a convenient entry headed "Kinsman", this case is particularly hard, and to find the information you were after you may need to spot that older translations speak of him as a "redeemer". Looking up that word may finally enable you to strike gold!]
So on the whole avoid consulting commentaries as long as you can. The more you work at a text before reading one the more chance you have of arriving at a destination determined by the text that is different from the one the commentator recommends ;)
Labels: bible.dictionary, commentary, study-skills
¶ 5:48 AM
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The series is for sale on Amazon UK :)
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Before naming his band of fools (a fine role in the mythical medieval court) he wrote about one of the nastiest stories in Scripture 2 Kings 2:23-24. For those of you too lazy to mouseover the link reftagger should have made this is where Elisha curses a crowd of teasing boys and some bears maul 42 of them. David then commands us:
- You’ve been asked to teach or preach on this passage.
- What would you say?
First I'd retell the story, or more likely read it from a good simple DE translation like the CEV. Then I'd point out that Bible stories almost never intend us to take their characters as examples. Think 2 Sam 11.
- act like David, forcibly (or at least through abuse of power) take any young woman you fancy
- act like Bathsheba, don't say a word even when such crimes are committed against you
- act like Uriah, be an unreasonable prig
We expect life to be fair - it is not. If there was proportionality in this story, Elisha the "good" prophet would control his temper, the bad boys would be good, and carry Elisha's pack for the poor old baldie, and above all a good God would not allow bears to attack mischievous but otherwise harmless kids. But life is not fair, get over it! AND (and here is where I would begin really to bring other Scripture into consideration of this passage) pray for the coming of the Day of the LORD when every sort of wrong and injustice will be put right.
Learn to live in a world "out of joint" (it is that way because of human sin, in which we hold shares) while looking for the coming of a new creation.
Labels: 1 Kings, narrative, theology
¶ 7:05 AM
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This is a fantastic response in so many ways. Definitely living in a world out of joint while looking toward a new world where justice reigns.
And of course I like being called indefatigable. :)
By David Ker, at
August 13, 2009 8:16 PM
Your take on David, Bathsheba, and Uriah is very nice. You don't any of them off the hook.
Here's my take on the 2 Kgs passage:
http://ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com/ancient_hebrew_poetry/2009/08/the-power-to-kill-and-restore-to-life.html
Labels: biblical.studies.online, hebrew.bible
¶ 8:28 AM
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The ethnic opposition to the military dictators in Burma has been either bribed or is being crushed into silence.
It is time you and I spoke up. At least we can oppose selling more arms to these thugs! Please sign up :)
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Except... since the upgrade to 3.1 we have had strange spellings accepted instantly by the spell chekker ("chekker" is an example - this is not normal NZ English spelling ;)
I have solved the problem, OO (like many citizens of the Imperial Homeland) is unaware that NZ is not part of Australia. I needed to tell OO that I wrote Australian English and now the spell checker works fine - though God help us if it ever starts to check pronunciation ;)
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Those Aussies get everywhere. Hadn't you noticed that one of the main balls in Quidditch is called a bludger?
By 
Doug Chaplin, at
August 6, 2009 11:29 AM
LOL!! x2
And Tim, it's only Australians and New Zealanders (and long time residents of one or other of the countries) that can distinguish differences in our pronunciations anyway.
Labels: biblical.studies.online, blogging
¶ 8:43 AM
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I am now only needing Windows to run Bibleworks, and occasionally Logos. All my other needs can be sorted by using Linux and Linux software (I'll really miss Camtasia, and no doubt some video conversion will not be as easy, but I'll manage.
So does anyone know (for a fact because they have been doing it) that a Linux Windows emulator will run Bibleworks and/or Logos? Or does anyonme know how to get Vista to access external (USB) hard-drives to give reasonable transfer rates?
To make an infuriating situation worse a newer external drive that I am using for backup comes with its own Synch program that runs as a portable app from the drive itself and it can copy files in seconds that Vista takes hours over :(
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I used BibleWorks 6 with Wine under Slackware, so I can say for sure that works. I don't know about the newer versions, though.
By Bryan, at
August 4, 2009 5:39 AM
I'm not sure if this will work, or it's cheap enough, but one option might be to run Windows XP inside a VMWare virtual machine under Linux?
Other things to try.
Does the external disk work slowly on another computer (in which case it might be a virus problem or a problem with the cable?). Or a power problem?
Did you optimize your external drive for "performance" in device manager. Apparently it can make a difference in the throughput (but YMMV).
Some people seem to think Vista's "Remote Differential Compression" feature might also be a problem?
Possibly TeraCopy might help too. http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php
By Stephen G, at
August 5, 2009 8:38 PM
Bibleworks isn't "supported," but you could probably try using crossover office.
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxlinux/
It's only $39 for the basic version. It is a commercial version of wine (which is not an emulator). I can't vouch for Bibleworks 8 on wine or crossover, as I can't justify the $350 for Bibleworks yet. It's recommended for the greek class I'm taking, but I'm real cheap too.
By Matt, at
August 18, 2009 3:19 AM
I know this is an old post, so I apologize for getting in so late on it, but I wanted to give my two cents, for what they're worth. I have been running BW8 on Ubuntu Linux in Wine for the last 6 months. It works perfectly with the exception of the chm files. That is the only thing that causes problems. There are many forums and website that are helpful, nerdlets.com was very helpful to me (comes up on a google search). Hope that helps some. I really love Ubuntu and BW8 and I'm glad I can use both together.
-Paul M
By PaulM, at
September 16, 2009 7:51 AM
Late is much better than never! Especially as I am still teetering on the brink... BW is really now the main program that I need Windows for, I'd miss access to all the Libronix books I've paid for over the years, but I use them seldom. I used to use Dreamweaver, and Camtasia but now usually use Open alternatives, I assume there are good Linux simple video editing options, but my main programs like Open Office, Firefox and Thunderbird are covered... So thanks for more food for thought :)
By Tim, at
September 16, 2009 8:07 AM
I run Bibleworks 6 using WINE and I have yet to discover something I cannot do (Crossover Pro won't work - version 6.0 is what I have). For BW7, I am running XP in a VirtualBox (under WINE, there are some menu issues and some other minor issues).
VirtualBox is really the best way to go for your must have windows apps.
I am considering an upgrade to BW8, but I really want to eliminate using XP altogether.
I may give Gramcord a try since I still use Bible Companion Series (in Crossover) for the Concordant Literal Version, but I have invested a lot of time in compiling the CLV for BibleWorks.
What to do?
By DRF1957, at
October 2, 2009 10:45 AM
