Friday, November 24, 2017

#SBL2017 HyperNT – A new interactive database for the New Testament, Early Christian Literature and its reception history

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In the “SBL Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and
Christian Studies Section,” I was able to hear Jörg Röder (Universität Basel) present “HyperNT – A new interactive database for the New Testament, Early Christian Literature and its reception history.” As the picture above of one of his slides show, the goal is to draw together a specific Greek text with translations and texts and media of its reception linked with a wide range of contributors. He noted how this project is similar to HyperHamlet which provides a large database of the use of quotes from Hamlet and which is crowdsourced for its content. Nothing I can point to online for now, but this is an interesting and ambitious project.
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Wednesday, November 22, 2017

#SBL2017 - Most unexpected book title at SBL-AAR

Well, would you? #SBL2017

MorphGNT, James Tauber, #SBL2017 - Linking Lexical Resources for Biblical Greek

I returned from the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Boston yesterday, and I want to post some of my experiences there. I had some institutional stuff to attend to, so I didn't get to as many sessions as I would have liked, and I didn't even make it all the way through the exhibit hall.
I did make it to James Tauber's session on "Linking Lexical Resources for Biblical Greek" in the SBL Global Education and Research Technology Section. Tauber has done pioneering work on the web, and he and Ulrik Sandborg-Petersen are behind MorphGNT.
In this session, he described the issues behind the schemes, such as Strongs or Goodrick-Kohlenberger, used to tag Greek (or Hebrew) lemmas. There are problems in actually identifying some lemmas and how certain forms are related (ὁράω and εἶδον?). As more resources become available for integrating texts, translations, lexicons, etc., a better system is needed for identifying words and allowing for their use in existing resources.
As the above photo from his presentation shows, someone may identify δέω (#1 meaning either "tie" or "need") as a lemma and δεῖ (the impersonal "it is necessary" = #2) as a separate form. Someone else may want to distinguish the two meanings of δέω, and those could be assigned as #3 and #4 but still be linked in the new system under #1. Further, someone else may choose to include δεῖ #2 under the root #4, so then a new number can be assigned (#5) which links those two.
This way of creating new number assignments as necessary does allow for existing numbering schemes to be preserved and integrated, and it also allows for further granularization and linking as necessary. Clearly there's a lot of work to be done to make this viable, but it does show a way through the categorization issues.
More info HERE.
UPDATE: Tauber has now posted slides/audio of his presentation HERE.

BibleGateway App now with free downloadable NRSV


BibleGateway has updated their app (for iPad, Android, and Fire), and they now have made the New Revised Standard Version and a number of its parallel editions available as a free download. The app is nice, and to have the NRSV available offline makes it standout from other apps. If the NRSV is your preferred study version, and you would like it available offline and for free, this is what you want!

Greenlee's Concise Exegetical Grammar of NT Greek - Free Download


Apparently this may have been around for some time, but I just found it. J. Harold Greenlee's A Concise Exegetical Grammar of NT Greek is available as a free download from Asbury Seminary. It's available as a PDF, ebook, or for Kindle. Recommended!
HT: John Linebarger on the Anglican Biblical and Theological Languages Forum Facebook group.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Mark 3.22-26: An Exercise in Greek Conditionals


I am teaching an online Greek class and trying to develop exercises that put the grammatical concepts into actual practice. Below is a link to a PowerPoint exercise that walks you through the fascinating collection of Greek conditional statements in Mark 3.22-26.
BTW, the colorful nature of the text is due to the morphological coding system I use. I have a resource packet with different colored pages, and I share morphological coding schemes for the Bible software that matches those colors. (Accordance, BibleWorks, Logos) Indicative is gold, Subjunctives are pink, Infinitives are green, Imperatives are red, etc. So, when you see a gold indicative verb, you know to look on the gold indicative sheet for guides on translation.
HERE is the link to the PowerPoint. Let me know what you think!