Archaic Christianity

My apologies to those who have tried to comment and have received errors. I've been trying to upgrade the comment form. I forgot to turn off some server-side validation...which was keeping some comments from being posted. My apologies! If you have any other issues, let me know. And Brett, thanks for pointing it out.

As I said the other day, I'm trying to end April with a bang. I've given you a gallery of readers, started and finished a series on how I think readers should work, and I am now giving you part three of my shibang.

This post is for all of you who found the earlier long-winded posts too...well...long-winded. The following are the guidelines we've discussed so far:

Though the content is most important, the physical characteristics of the reader can make a reader better or worse. If you are putting a reader up on the web you don't have to worry about the physical aspects of the book, and many of those will probably be decided by your publisher (I imagine...I've never worked with one). But here we're discussing more than the physicality of the codex form; we're also discussing page layout, font, etc.

So I've been blogging on types of readers and vocabulary considerations for readers. Now we're on to other potential aids for students that you can consider putting into your reader.

Sidenote on "Student"

I forgot to mention this earlier, so I'm making a sidenote here. I'm trying to use the word "reader" to consistently refer to the annotated text and "student" to refer to the person using this annotated text. Though "reader" would be perfectly appropriate for both, I figured that would be confusing. No promises on consistency though!

And I also want to point out that by "student" I mean anyone who is still working on learning the language...which I think includes just about anyone who wants to use a reader. I certainly include myself. So this is not meant to refer to someone in school...just someone who is learning. Now, without further ado...

There are several different types of readers. If you are writing one, not only do you need to decide up front who your audience is, you should probably go ahead and be clear about it. Different types of readers will require different skill sets, from you and them.

I have a great fondness for Greek readers, i.e., editions of Greek texts with notes that allow you to read them with greater ease. Those with text-critical notes are great, but the things that really help are notes on vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and idiom. Soon after I first started Greek I remember seeing Perschbacher's Refresh Your Greek and thinking, "Gee, I wish there was more of that around." Actually, I don't say "Gee" in normal speech. Regardless, this out-of-print work was great. Of course now you can get the Reader's Greek New Testament. Is it as good? Well, it's better than nothing at all, for sure, but it's not ideal. I don't own it yet and I'm not planning on buying one for general use as I love my NET/NA27 diglot. I'm just writing vocab in the margin that one as I feel the need.

I've been a little quiet lately, but only because I've been preparing some things for you. I just posted something I've been wanting to post for a while. Tomorrow you will see several follow-up posts. On Wednesday you'll see another something that I've been working on for a little while. Hope you find these posts interesting!

I love reader's versions of ancient texts. I think they are a great thing for learning. So in my continual attempt at not being completely useless, I present to you a gallery of readers for ancient Greek, with a few Latin sprinkled in for good measure (all pulled from my library save one). I'm doing this for a few reasons. First, some of you may not be familiar with these resources though you should be. Second, though some of these are out of print and/or not directly relevant to my perceived audience, I want to give you some samples to spark your thinking. I'll be following up with a post tomorrow, based on this one, with some of my musings on what makes a good reader and where that can fit into one's education.

Anybody local readers here in good ol' Dallas going to the CSNTM dinner tomorrow night? If you are let me know. We should chat.

For earth day, I made carbon dioxide. Plants need it to survive, so I did the earth a favor.

I know nothing about this manuscript other than what they posted on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog, but here's a link to Codex Maurocordatianus.

An article recently came out on the Christianity Today website about CSNTM and their work in Albania last year. If you're not familiar with CSNTM or that trip, give it a read.

So I have a question for all of you. If you have learned a language (living or dead) and gotten to the point were you feel comfortable with it (yes, that is very vague), how long did that take you? Can you think of something that would have sped that up (other than just studying more)? Can you think of anything that you think slowed you down?

Here are Archaic Christianity it is και ligature day. Yes, this is a holiday practiced by scribes throughout all of time. This holiday post is dedicated to Brett. Here, Brett, are more examples of funky και ligatures.

This is part n of my never-ending series on Greek handwriting. Here is another ligature:

I think I found another writer to add to my list of readings for April and May. I may need to wait to decide since I'm already unsure I'll hit my target. Anybody read him (in Greek) before? Thoughts? Fun? Boring? Easy? Hard?

Okay, you may not find this significant, but I do. Significant for me at the very least. I have read portions of works that I had not read previously in English. I have read small papyri that I had not read previously in English. I have never read an ancient work completely for the first time in Greek. At least, not until last night! Woohoo! I think I'll celebrate. Maybe I need to buy me a book.

I did it. Last night at around 11:45 I read the closing of the gospel. I would have blogged it last night, but as it was I had already posted four times yesterday, and two were quite lengthy. I needed something to post today anyway.

Over at his blog Mike posted a note about knowing a language fluently versus knowing a language linguistically. This was in response to my post yesterday about "knowing" a language. He's right, there is a difference. It's a good post, so go read it.

Doug, over at his blog on Metacatholic, just made a comment about my recent post on pragmatic concerns of learning Greek or Hebrew. I'm going to respond to that in a moment, but a few thoughts/questions first.

I've made quite a bit of progress since my report on chapters 16, 17, and 18. I expect to finish up reading the entire thing today. This document is a very quick read. The Greek is definitely on the easy side of the spectrum.

So now feedburner is irking me. I try to view my feed and it says I have three question marks appended to the beginning before the xml declaration. Well, I don't. I even checked the feed I have them:

Should you learn Greek or Hebrew, the languages in which the Scriptures were originally written? (Yes, Aramaic is in there too, but not much, and everything I say about Hebrew would apply to Aramaic as well as they are related) I bet this is a question that many a Christian ask. As someone who has learned biblical Greek and some Hebrew and Aramaic, indeed as someone who teaches the former, I am going to give you my perspective. The answer is not straightforward (even though part of me wants to tell you all to learn them), and there are a number of questions you have to ask yourself. And no, I am not going to try to word these questions in such a way that a definite "yes" seems like the only appropriate answer. My intention here is to give you practical advice on considering learning a biblical language.

I'm now going to follow the trend of everyone else in the world; I'm now going to host my feed through feedburner. The url to the fancy new feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArchaicChristianity. Kindly redirect your feed readers.

In my last (substantive) post I discussed a few things from the Protoevangelium of James 16, 17, and 18. I must give props to Nathan Stitt for linking τὸ ὕδωρ τῆς ἐλέγξεως κυρίου, "the water of the conviction of the Lord", with Numbers 5:11-31. I think you're right. Note this quote from that passage:

I'm trying out a service that will email my blog posts for those who don't use feed readers. This is a test point, as will be the next one. I'm trying to see if the email service groups them or if it will rain blog posts on my readers like a plague of Moses.

So last night and this morning I read through three more chapters of the Protoevangelium of James. Some thoughts:

So I got some new books from Amazon today. Yipee!

This morning I read through the 14th and 15th chapters of the Protoevangelium of James (abbreviated Prot. Jas. by the SBL Handbook of Style, btw...). There was one difficulty and I found a few interesting things. For context, chapter 14 is Joseph's inner dialogue on what he's going to do about the mysteriously pregnant Mary. Chapter 15 is Annas the scribe's discovery of a big (ὀγκωμένην) Mary and the scandal that brings up.

Miscellaneous thoughts I'm having today and news:

Nathan is learning Greek. Good for him. I recommend it highly myself! He's been pondering the best course for a while, and just posted again about how he's thinking of moving forward. He's considering Athenaze, and I think that is a grand idea if you want to learn to read the New Testament. On the surface this doesn't make any sense as Athenaze is for learning Classical Greek. But it is, and here's why.

I've decided to set some Greek reading goals for myself for the next two months. If anyone wants to keep up, I'll share my texts. Let me know. For this round I'm going to focus on narrative or narrative-like (the Shepherd of Hermas is apocalypse, but it and Revelation read like narratives sometimes, do they not?) texts.

Where will you get your textual variants? April DeConick over at the Forbidden Gospels Blog was musing on the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament and how it doesn't give you all of the information that is out there. She's right and it is worth a read. There's also a follow-up post. However, among the commentators I think there is a little confusion about some of the resources (for example, that Swanson's work is not an attempt to be exhaustive, which Chuck Grantham, a frequent comment guy here pointed out). In my continuous attempt to not be completely useless, I am going to contribute a little.

Here's another ligature, comin' at ya fast! This one is from Codex Hierosolymitanus. Here are ye ligatures of the day.

Update

So I've been working a lot lately. 10-14 hours day have been the norm. But, it looks like that is coming to an end. Yay! I can think, read, and post more.