ΑΓΑΠΗΣΕΙΣ

Blog Moving to ΑΓΑΠΗΣΕΙΣ.wordpress.com

2008-01-10T03:15:00.000-10:00

From now on, go to ΑΓΑΠΗΣΕΙΣ.wordpress.com to keep up with my blog and my resources on the Letter of James. Check out my Recent James Scholarship page there.

What I'm Reading Now

2008-01-09T00:16:00.000-10:00

Here are the readings that I have started with the New Year in the different categories...

1 Hermeneutics

Bruce Longenecker, Rhetoric at the Boundaries: The Art and Theology of New Testament Chain-Link Transitions (2005)

2 Theology

Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History (1950)

3 New Testament

George Guthrie, The Structure of Hebrews: A Text-Linguistic Analysis (1994)

4 Letter of James

Chris Morgan, "The Doctrine of God in the Epistle of James" (ETS paper, 2007)

5 Textual Criticism

David Alan Black, ed. Rethinking New Testament Textual Criticism (2002)

6 Greek

Devine & Stephens, Discontinuous Syntax: Hyperbaton in Greek (1999)

7 Early Church

Kirsopp Lake, trans. 1 Clement (75-110 A.D.)

8 Historical Christianity

Sinclair Ferguson, John Owen on the Christian Life (1987)

9 Old Testament

James Barr, Old and New in Interpretation: A Study of the Two Testaments (1966)

10 Jewish Backgrounds

James VanderKam, An Introduction to Early Judaism (2001)

11 Linguistics

William Alston, Illocutionary Acts & Sentence Meaning (2000)

12 Papuan Languages

Mark Donahue, "One Phrase Structure" (2000)

13 Discourse Analysis

Robert Longacre, Joseph: A Story of Divine Providence. A Text Theoretical and Textlinguistic Analysis of Genesis 37 and 39-48 (2003)

14 Translation Theory

Timothy Wilt, ed. Bible Translation: Frames of Reference (2003)

15 Missions

John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad! The Supremacy of God in Missions (1993)

16 Teaching Theory

Lingenfelter & Lingenfelter, Teaching Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Learning and Teaching (2003)

17 Marriage & Family

Tim & Joy Downs, The Seven Conflicts: Resolving the Most Common Disagreements in Marriage (2003)

18 Men & Accountability

Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God (2000)

19 Book Reviews

Larry Hurtado, The Freer Biblical Manuscripts: Fresh Studies of an American Treasure Trove (2006) -- reviewed by Hernández

Planned Reading Categories

2008-01-08T14:31:00.000-10:00

One of the new disciplines I have begun with the new year has been to follow a planned reading schedule across a variety of categories. In the past I have tended to focus my reading and research too narrowly on one topic to theexclusion of other areas. To combat this tendency, I have decided to pinpoint a significant number of reading categories and follow a plan to read in each category every week. To succeed in this I must read in several categories each day. Here are the reading categories that I have outlined so far in addition to daily Bible reading...

Hermeneutics
Theology
New Testament
Letter of James
Textual Criticism
Greek
Early Church
Historical Christianity
Old Testament
Jewish Backgrounds
Linguistics
Papuan Languages
Discourse Analysis
Translation Theory
Missiology
Teaching Theory
Marriage & Family
Men & Accountability
Book Reviews

Obviously, a lot of these categories are closely related or overlapping, and there may be a surprising lack of fiction and other areas to some people. Well, this is the plan for now. I may adjust it quarterly, and if I find that it's too difficult to read in this many areas every week, or if it's too weird to only come back to a book once or twice a week, I'll adjust the schedule. For the first week of the year, however, I got through all the categories in 6 days and it worked just fine to pick up where I had left off 6 days earlier.

Life Changes with the New Year

2008-01-07T11:10:00.000-10:00

I'm not usually one for making New Year's resolutions. But this year December had already been a time for thinking about changes that I needed to make in my life.

It started when my wife returned to the highlands in order to take our kids back to their school to be involved with classmates in all of the activities that come at the end of the school term. Therefore, I was alone in our remote village for two weeks at the beginning of December, and this kind of solitude always gives me opportunity to reflect on my role as a husband and father as well as to evaluate other areas of my personal and ministry life.

I was further prepared to make changes with the New Year when I was invited to meet with a group of men on a weekly basis to discuss a book together and to encourage and pray for one another. So I now had some outside accountability to keep up with the changes I was about to make.

So when the 1st of January came, the Lord had prepared me to put into action several ideas that had been rolling around in my head for some time.

Start each day in prayer and live more consistently aware of God's presence
Lead my family in worship each morning and evening
Exercise on a regular basis each week
Follow a planned reading schedule each day across a variety of categories

After one week, all of these disciplines have been put into practice very consistently. Now, how many weeks does it take to start a new habit? The challenge for me will be the many transitions that we face each year, moving between different parts of the country with different tasks and daily schedules in each place.

Greek Books Online

2007-12-27T17:11:00.000-10:00

The storefront at right is the latest bookseller with which I have done business online. I found a copy of David Hutchinson Edgar's Has God Not Chosen the Poor? The Social Setting of the Epistle of James for only £15.00 on Abebooks from Galloway & Porter. Of course, I also had to pay £5.50 in shipping and the exchange rate with the British Pound is hurrendous, but it was still almost half the price for what I could find this book for elsewhere. Merry Christmas to me! My fear is that this may be the second time I have purchased this book--is my other copy back in the States?! I wonder if Edgar's take on the rich and poor in James has anything to say about my book buying habits... Anyway, this must be one of the newest buildings in Cambridge, but the family has been running this business for over 100 years. I wonder if their great-grandfather ever thought they'd be making transactions in mere seconds with a U.S. customer living in Papua New Guinea! Thanks Galloway & Porter!

For those who don't pay ginormous internet charges, more and more books are becoming available online. When I got back from the village, I noticed that Rod Decker had blogged here about Carnegie Mellon University’s free online Universal Digital Library. I've already provided a link on this page to Rod Decker's excellent New Testament Resources page. Here is a sample of Greek resources that Rod found quickly at the Universal Digital Library...

A Brief Introduction To New Testament Greek, with Vocabularies, by Green
A Critical And Exegetical Commentary On The Revelation, by Charles
A Grammar Of New Testament Greek, by Moulton, Howard, Turner
A Grammar Of The Greek New Testament by Robertson, A. T
A Grammar Of The New Testament Greek by Buttmann and Thayer
A Grammar Of The Old Testament In Greek, Thackeray
A Greek And English Lexicon Of The New Testament by Robinson
A Greek-English Lexicon Of The New Testament, Grimm, Wilke, Thayer
A History Of Classical Greek Literature by Mahaffy and Sayce
A Manual Of Greek Historical Inscriptions by E L Hicks
A Pocket Lexicon To The Greek New Testament by Alexander Souter
A School Grammar Of Attic Greek by Goodell, Thomas Dwight
A Short Grammar Of Classical Greek by Adof Kaegi
An Elementary Greek Grammar by Goodwin, William Watson
An Intermediate Greek English Lexicon by William S Holdsworth
An Introduction To Greek And Latin Palaeography by Thompson
An Introduction To Greek Epigraphy Part I by E S Robert
An Introduction To The Study Of New Testament Greek, by Moulton
Essentials Of New Testament Greek by Huddelston
Greek Particles In The New Testament, by Margaret E Thrall
Hebrews In The Greek New Testament, by Wuest
Lessons In New Testament Greek: a Secondary Course, by Green, S. Walter
Syntax Of The Moods And Tenses In New Testament Greek, by Burton
Teach Yourself New Testament Greek by D F Hudson
The Expositor’s Greek Testament by Nicoll, W. Robertson, et al
The Grammar Of The Greek Testament by Samuel, G. Green
The Greek Testament by Morris Jastrow Jr
The Greek Testament Englished by William Burton Crickmer
The Greek Testament by Henry Alford
The Interlinear Literal Translation Of The Greek NT, by Berry, George Ricker
The Minister And His Greek New Testament by Robertson, A. T.
The New Testament In Modern Speech, by Weymouth
The New Testament In The Original Greek by Brooke Foss Westcott
The New Testament Rendered From The Original Greek by James A. Kleist
The Old Testament In Greek According To The Septuagint, by Swete
The Riverside New Testament A Translation by William G. Ballantine

Of course, many of these may be restricted to 15% free usage online.

Village Visit & Luke Workshop

2007-12-27T16:37:00.000-10:00

I'm sorry, I meant to leave one last post in October, explaining that I would be away in the village for a translation workshop. We left on 25 October and I didn't get back to the internet world until 12 December.

In that time, the 11 languages we work with produced alphabet picture books and drafted the last four chapters of Luke. We also hosted a national translator (pictured above) from a language southeast of Aitape who needed technical support in his work. It turns out that his language may be distantly related to some of the inland languages we already work with. Maybe I'll find time to report more on this last workshop here, but I'm not promising.

The last few weeks have been focused on family, and we took a short vacation to Lae just before Christmas.

Greek Bible Study

2007-10-24T23:59:00.000-10:00

Here's a new site for learning biblical Greek, called Greek Bible Study.

The graduated reader ability is especially cool. Select which chapters of Mounce you have covered, and the biblical text has ellipses for the words not learned yet. It will be better if they can eventually add all word frequencies to this function.

And I really like their philosophy of ministry and motivation...

The site is privately funded. It is not affiliated with any particular denomination or group, so that it might remain theologically neutral, encouraging the reading of the Scriptures themselves, God's Holy Word.
This work is being done as a service to the body of Christ at large, to the glory of God. May our prayer to God be: please teach us Your Word.

Another tool to help "everyday be Greek day"! (in the words of Scott Hafemann)

Jesus' Resurrection is "Unbelievable" in Luke

2007-10-21T03:31:00.000-10:00

As I mentioned in my previous post about Jesus’ resurrection, Luke emerges as the only gospel writer that presents the disciples’ response as one of amazement, that confused mixture of disbelief and joy. But…

…if there is joy, is there really disbelief? Or, is it possible that Luke uses the word ‘disbelieving’ in ch. 24 in a more idiomatic sense? After all, if you were to see Jesus raised from the dead, wouldn’t you have to say, “It’s unbelievable! I can’t believe my eyes!”

In Luke, the first post-resurrection response occurs after the women come back from the empty tomb (24:11). After giving a report of what they had seen and heard at the tomb, the text reads…

καὶ ἐφάνησαν ἐνώπιον αὐτῶν ὡσεὶ λῆρος τὰ ῥήματα ταῦτα, καὶ ἠπίστουν αὐταῖς.
And these words appeared before them as nonsense, and they were not believing them.

But what exactly does it mean when it says “these words appeared before them as nonsense” and “they were not believing them”? Could the disciples really not make grammatical sense of the women’s words? That much must not be true; otherwise, the text would not go on to say that they were not believing them. In order to not believe something, you have to first make sense of what you’re not believing. Therefore, it’s more likely that “these words appeared before them as nonsense” communicates just how unusual and unexpected the resurrection was. It was so out of the ordinary that we might describe it today as “unreal”!

So did the apostles really not believe the women? Did they think the women were just making up a fantastic story? Perhaps. However, the imperfect tense here—“they were not believing”—leaves open further possibilities.

In the very least, the imperfect tense communicates some kind of continuous response instead of a matter-of-fact statement of unbelief. The continuous nature of their “unbelief” suggests an ongoing discussion in which they were interacting with the women’s story. It may depict an interactive response from the disciples in which they continuously questioned the women in an attempt to understand the incredible details of such an amazing account. Also possible, but perhaps less likely, is that this represents a pluperfect use of the imperfect—“they had not been believing them”—thus describing an earlier response that did not necessarily continue. The reason I say that this possibility is less likely is that the pluperfect use of the imperfect is quite rare, and it is usually clear when it is used. Even if this interpretation is too much of a stretch for this particular word, the continuation of the story suggests that this is exactly what happened—their unbelieving response did not continue.

The next verse (24:12) tells how Peter got up and ran to the tomb, hardly a response from someone who did not believe. Peter’s actions at least reveal a determination to check out the women’s story. Of course, some would argue that Luke 24:12 is a “western non-interpolation,” a verse that was later added by all but the western witnesses of the text—an argument against its existence in the original text. One argument in support of this theory is that Peter’s response in vs. 12 of running to the tomb and returning home “amazed” does not fit within the literary context (Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 215, 217). But the supposed incongruency of unbelief and amazement occurs again in Luke 24:41 (Frans Neirynck, “Luke 24,12: An Anti-Docetic Interpolation?” In New Testament Textual Criticism and Exegesis, ed. A. Denaux, 158)…

ἔτι δὲ ἀπιστούντων αὐτῶν ἀπὸ τῆς χαρᾶς καὶ θαυμαζόντων εἶπεν αὐτοῖς, Ἔχετέ τι βρώσιμον ἐνθάδε;
While they still could not believe it because of their joy and amazement, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?”

Again, Luke’s record of the resurrection seems just too good to be true. Again, we find “unbelief” and “amazement” together. And joy too. So what can it mean? Does it make sense at all to say that the apostles “could not believe because of their joy and amazement”? Or do these passages suggest a more idiomatic meaning for unbelief? Had Jesus really risen from the dead? It was “unbelievable”! In Luke 24:11 they could not believe their ears. In Luke 24:41 they could not believe their eyes. But they really did believe the unbelievable. Their joy proves it.

So does Luke use the words ‘unbelief’, ‘amazement’ and ‘joy’ together to paint a uniform picture of emotion-filled belief in the resurrection for everyone in ch. 24? No way.

When Jesus walks with the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, it’s a different story regarding "unbelief" and "amazement." They tell him how the women “amazed us” with a report of an empty tomb and a vision of angels saying that Jesus was alive (24:22-23), but they were clearly “looking sad” (24:17). This sad look proves their unbelief. And so Jesus says to them in 24:25…

Ὦ ἀνόητοι καὶ βραδεῖς τῇ καρδίᾳ τοῦ πιστεύειν ἐπὶ πᾶσιν οἷς ἐλάλησαν οἱ προφῆται… O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken…

Only after Jesus explains the scriptures, accepts their invitation to come inside, and then breaks bread do they finally recognize him and believe. Their belief is proved by their action: they got up that very hour—the same hour which they had described as “towards evening” and “the day is nearly over” (24:29)—and they returned to Jerusalem to tell the apostles. They surely went back in the dark. But before they can give their report, the apostles report to them in 24:34…

ὄντως ἠγέρθη ὁ κύριος καὶ ὤφθη Σίμωνι.
The Lord has really risen and has appeared to Simon.

Even though it was only Simon Peter who had seen the Lord among the 11 apostles, the others believe and say that he has “really risen.” Their belief is then confirmed by the two who had met Jesus on the road to Emmaus (24:35) and then by Jesus himself who appeared before them while they were still talking about it (24:36). And then we find another combination of belief and amazement in 24:37…

πτοηθέντες δὲ καὶ ἔμφοβοι γενόμενοι ἐδόκουν πνεῦμα θεωρεῖν.
But after being startled and frightened they were thinking that they were seeing a spirit.

Interesting. Based on Peter’s testimony, they really believed that Jesus was alive. But when Jesus himself appears, they are so startled and frightened that they think they are seeing a spirit. But again, does this really mean that they do not believe in the resurrection? Jesus does not rebuke them for ‘unbelief’, but he says…

Τί τεταραγμένοι ἐστὲ καὶ διὰ τί διαλογισμοὶ ἀναβαίνουσιν ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ ὑμῶν;
Why are you troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your hearts?

The live appearance of Jesus after his death is such an unusual sight for the apostles, so Jesus begins to calm them by simply acting himself. “What’s bothering you?” He shows them his wounded hands and feet to prove that they are not seeing a spirit. Oh, and “What’s there to eat?”

And now he had a captive audience…
Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and He said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day, and that repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”
After a few more instructions, Jesus is lifted up into heaven. But no more fear and amazement on the part of the disciples, only worship and joy...

καὶ αὐτοὶ προσκυνήσαντες αὐτὸν ὑπέστρεψαν εἰς Ἰερουσαλὴμ μετὰ χαρᾶς μεγάλης καὶ ἦσαν διὰ παντὸς ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ εὐλογοῦντες τὸν θεόν.
And they, after worshiping Him, returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple praising God.

Luke's account of the resurrection is so believeable precisely because he records so well that strange mixture of unbelief and joy, which really isn't unbelief at all, but overwhelming joy and amazement at something so "unbelieveable." He really caught the wonder of it.

(The painting is "The Supper at Emmaus," 1606 by Caravaggio)

Forthcoming Titles on the Letter of James

2007-10-11T04:15:00.000-10:00

Here are a number of forthcoming titles, including several conference papers, on the Letter of James...

Varner, William. Forthcoming in 2007. “Can Discourse Analysis Help Solve the Problem of James’ Structure?” Paper to be presented at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, November 14, San Diego, CA.

Lockett, Darian R. Forthcoming in 2007. “The 'Two Ways': James' Strategy of Instruction in Obedience.” Paper to be presented at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, November 14, San Diego, CA.

Morgan, Chris. Forthcoming in 2007. “The Doctrine of God in the Epistle of James.” Paper to be presented at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, November 14, San Diego, CA.

Kotsko, Adam. Forthcoming in 2007. "Philosophical Reading Beyond Paul: Jean-Luc Nancy on the Epistle of James." Paper to be presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, November 18, San Diego, CA.

Lockett, Darian R. Forthcoming in 2007. “God and 'the World': Cosmology and Theology in the Letter of James.” In Cosmology and New Testament Theology, eds. Jonathan T. Pennington and Sean M. McDonough. London: T&T Clark.

Lockett, Darian R. Forthcoming in 2008. Purity and Worldview in the Epistle of James. The Library of New Testament Studies. London: T & T Clark.

Morgan, Chris, and ???. Forthcoming in 2007. James. Focus on the Bible Commentary. Christian Focus Publications.

The following title in [brackets] is my own guess for this forthcoming commentary that will be part of a new commentary series published by Brill and edited by Stanley Porter. The series itself may have a title something like A Linguistic Commentary of the New Testament...

Varner, William. Forthcoming in 2008. [A Discourse Linguistic Commentary on the Letter of James. A Linguistic Commentary of the New Testament], ed. Stanley Porter. Leiden: Brill.

More Letter of James Research from the Last 8 Years

2007-10-10T17:59:00.000-10:00

The second part of Matti Myllykoski's “James the Just in History and Tradition: Perspectives of Past and Present Scholarship" has just come out in Currents in Biblical Research.

I thought I'd use this as an opportunity to post other recent James scholarship that I failed to post last month in my posts on Recent Letter of James Research or More With Less Recent James Research or Doubts, Disputes and Distinctions of διακρίνω or Mariam Kamell's Recent James Research.

I am no longer adding these works to the RECENT JAMES RESEARCH heading on this blog down and to the right. I will eventually have everything compiled in a more useable format.

Myllykoski, Matti. 2007. “James the Just in History and Tradition: Perspectives of Past and Present Scholarship (Part II).” Currents in Biblical Research, 6:11-98.

Lockett, Darian R. 2007. “'Unstained by the World': Purity and Pollution as an Indicator of Cultural Interaction in the Epistle of James.” In Reading James with New Eyes, ed. Robert L. Webb and John S. Kloppenborg, 49-74. London: T&T Clark.

Taylor, Mark E., and George H. Guthrie. 2006. “The Structure of James.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 68:681-705.

Abegg, Martin G., Jr. 2006. “Paul and James on the Law in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” In Christian Beginnings and the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. John J. Collins and Craig A. Evans, 63-74. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.

Byron, John. 2006. “Living in the Shadow of Cain: Echoes of a Developing Tradition in James 5:1-6.” Novum Testamentum, 48:261-74.

Myllykoski, Matti. 2006. “James the Just in History and Tradition: Perspectives of Past and Present Scholarship (Part I).” Currents in Biblical Research, 5:73-122.

Taylor, Mark E. 2006. A Text-linguistic Investigation into the Discourse Structure of James. Library of New Testament Studies 311 (London: Clark).

McCord Adams, Marilyn. 2006. “Faith and Works, or, How James is a Lutheran!” Expository Times, 117:462-64.

De Graaf, David. 2005. “Some Doubts About Doubt: The New Testament Use of Διακρίνω,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 48: 733-755.

Batten, Alicia. 2005. “Ideological Strategies in the Letter of James.” Paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, November 19-22, Philadelphia, PA.

Kloppenborg, John S. 2005. “Reception and Emulation of the Jesus Tradition in James.” Paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, November 19-22, Philadelphia, PA.

Niebuhr, Karl-Wilhelm. 2005. “A Letter from Jerusalem: James in the Mind of the Recipients of His Epistle.” Paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, November 19-22, Philadelphia, PA.

Wachob, Wesley Hiram. 2005. “The Languages of ‘Household’ and ‘Kingdom’ in the Epistle of James: A Socio-Rhetorical Study.” Paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, November 19-22, Philadelphia, PA.

Watson, Duane F. 2005. “A Reassessment of the Rhetoric of the Epistle of James and Its Implications for Christian Origins.” Paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, November 19-22, Philadelphia, PA.

Guthrie, George H. 2005. “James.” In Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Revised Edition, ed. Tremper Longman, III and David E. Garland. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

Lockett, Darian R. 2005. "The Spectrum of Wisdom and Eschatology in the Epistle of James and 4QInstruction," Tyndale Bulletin 56: 131-148.

Lockett, Darian R. 2005. “'Pure and Undefiled Religion': Purity and Pollution as a Means of Cultural Antagonism in the Epistle of James.” Paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, November 19-22, Philadelphia, PA.

Evans, Craig A., and Darian R. Lockett. 2005. “James.” In Bible Knowledge Background Commentary: John, Hebrews-Revelation, ed. Craig A. Evans, 257-287. Colorado Springs, CO: Victor.

Popkes, Wiard. 2005. “Two interpretations of ‘justification’ in the New Testament: Reflections on Galatians 2:15-21 and James 2:21-25.” Studia Theologica, 59:129-46.

Michaels, J. Ramsey. 2005. "Catholic Christologies in the Catholic Epistles." In Contours of Christology in the New Testament, ed. Richard N. Longenecker. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Lockett, Darian R. 2004. “James' Intertextual Perspective on Perfection.” Paper presented at the Evangelical Theological Society National Meeting, November, San Antonio, TX.

Taylor, Mark E. 2004. “Recent Scholarship on the Structure of James.” Currents in Biblical Research, 3:86-115.

Baker, William R. 2004. “Wisdom in the Epistle of James and the Holy Spirit: Are They the Same?” Paper presented at the Evangelical Theological Society Annual Meeting, November, San Antonio, TX.

Baker, William R. 2003. “The Priority of God in the Epistle of James.” Paper presented to the Evangelical Theological Society Annual Meeting, November 20, 2003, Atlanta, GA.

Ng, Esther Yue L. 2003. "Father-God Language and Old Testament Allusions in James," Tyndale Bulletin, 54:41-54.

Jackson-McCabe, Matt. 2003. “The Messiah Jesus in the Mythic World of James.” Journal of Biblical Literature, 122:701-30.

Johnson, Luke Timothy. 2003. "Reading Wisdom Wisely." Louvain Studies, 28:99-112.

Spencer, Matthew, Klaus Wachtel, and Christopher J. Howe. 2002. “The Greek Vorlage of the Syra Harclensis: A Comparative Study on Method in Exploring Textual Genealogy.” TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, 7 [http://purl.org/TC] (http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/vol07/SWH2002/).

Albl, Martin C. 2002. “‘Are Any among You Sick?’: The Health Care System in the Letter of James.” Journal of Biblical Literature, 121:123-43.

Baker, William R. 2002. "Christology in the Epistle of James," Evangelical Quarterly, 74: 47-57.

Warden, Duane. 2000. "The Rich And Poor In James: Implications For Institutionalized Partiality," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 43: 247-257.

Johnson, Luke Timothy. 2000. “An introduction to the Letter of James.” Review and Expositor, 97:155-67. Also in Brother of Jesus, Friend of God, 24-38. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans (2004).

Schreiner, Thomas R. 2000. “Practical Christianity.” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, 4:2-3.

Stein, Robert H. 2000. “‘Saved by Faith [Alone]' in Paul Versus ‘Not Saved by Faith Alone’ in James.” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, 4:4-19.

George, Timothy. 2000. “‘A Right Strawy Epistle’: Reformation Perspectives on James.” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, 4:20-31. Previously published in Review
and Expositor, 83 (Summer 1986): 369-382.

Seifrid, Mark A. 2000. “The Waiting Church and Its Duty: James 5:13-18.” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, 4:32-39.

Julian, Ron. 2000. “A Perfect Work: Trials and Sanctification in the Book of James.” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, 4:40-50.

McCartney, Dan G. 2000. “The Wisdom of James the Just.” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, 4:52-64.

Akin, Daniel. 2000. “Sermon: The Power of the Tongue—James 3:1-12.” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, 4:66-74.

Cummins, Tony. 2000. "Justifying James: Covenant Faithfulness in the Life and Letter of James." Paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, November, Nashville, TN.

Two Ways and the Prayer of Faith

2007-10-06T23:59:00.000-10:00

Two of my Greek students are local pastors and one of them invited me to preach at the English service in the closest town. So I am preaching tomorrow in the town of Kainantu, Eastern Highlands Province, at the Evangelical Bible Church of Papua New Guinea.

My sermon title is "The Prayer of Faith" and I will be preaching mainly from the Letter of James.

Too often I hear Bible teaching which takes short passages out of context so that a works righteousness is emphasized. I aim to present what the Letter of James--the most works oriented writing in the New Testament--teaches about God's grace and mercy in response to prayers that reveal whole-hearted trust in him. I will present this within the context of the metaphor that our spiritual life is a journey in which we encounter two paths, the path of the wicked and the path of the righteous.

Besides the Letter of James, other scripture texts that will be included are Proverbs 2:1-15; 3:5-6; Psalm 1; 5:7-8; Isaiah 30:11, 15, 18; John 14:6; Luke 22:42; Hebrews 11:32-40.

Jesus' Resurrection is "Unbelievable!"

2007-10-03T15:29:00.000-10:00

Luke records several incidents in ch. 24 in which the resurrection of Jesus seems to the disciples—according to traditional interpretation—just too good to be true. But when we compare Luke’s account with the other gospels, Luke emerges as the only gospel writer that presents the disciples’ response as one of amazement, that confused mixture of disbelief and joy. They might have said in the English idiom, “It’s unbelievable!” while at the same time feeling the joy that only comes from experiential knowledge.

The shorter ending of Mark (ending at 16:8) concludes the gospel story with a picture of the women trembling and astonished because they were afraid after seeing an angel who announced the resurrection.

On the other hand, the longer ending of Mark programmatically describes the unbelief of three sets of disciples: those who had been with Jesus (16:11), two of them as they were walking into the country (16:13), and the eleven as they sat together (16:14). Mark is the only gospel that presents such a one-sided picture of unbelief after the resurrection.

Matthew’s accounts of the disciples’ post-resurrection responses are brief and more balanced in terms of belief and unbelief. He first presents the women returning quickly from the tomb “with fear and great joy” to tell the disciples what they had seen and heard from the angel (28:8). The resurrected Jesus meets them on their way at which point Matthew records that they “took hold of his feet and worshipped him” (28:9).

The only other response from Jesus’ disciples that Matthew speaks of occurs when the disciples follow the instructions that the women have evidently passed on to them about meeting Jesus in Galilee: “And when they saw him they worshipped him; but some doubted” (28:17). So in Matthew, we have two responses of worship with the caveat that some doubted.

John presents much more detail than Matthew does concerning the believing responses of Jesus’ disciples after the resurrection. John’s first recorded response to the resurrection is one of belief and autobiographical: “Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed” (20:8). Likewise, when the risen Jesus greets Mary Magdalene by name, she responds with “Rabonni!” and goes to tell the disciples, “I have seen the Lord” (20:17-18). That same evening, Jesus appears to the disciples, and after he greets them with “Peace to you” and shows them his hands and his side, John records that “the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord” (20:19-20).

Thomas is the singular example in John of post-resurrection unbelief: “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe” (20:25). But eight days later, Jesus appears again to the disciples and says to Thomas, “Reach here with your finger, and see my hands; and reach your hand here and put it into my side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing.” Thomas responded with “My Lord and my God!” (20:27-28)

A few more faith responses are recorded by John after Jesus instructs his disciples to cast their net on the other side of the boat and they haul in 153 large fish. Another autobiographical note includes John saying to Peter, “It is the Lord!” At that point Peter puts on his clothes and dives into the sea to go meet Jesus (21:7). When the rest of the disciples get to shore, John records, “Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ They knew it was the Lord” (21:12).

While the other gospel writers are more straightforward in their depictions of belief and unbelief after the resurrection, Luke’s distinctive voice presents a more varied and psychologically involved picture of the disciples’ responses. Luke’s story juxtaposes the language of “unbelief” at different times with the language of amazement, sadness, confusion, reasoning, and joy. Rather than uniformly understanding all the disciples to persist in unbelief, as the longer ending of Mark’s gospel suggests, Luke’s account shows in detail a variation of response among the disciples, just as we find more briefly and optimistically in Matthew and in John.

More on Luke's account of the "unbelievable" resurrection in the next post...

Mariam Kamell's Recent James Research

2007-10-02T00:22:00.000-10:00

Looking at my friend Jim Darlack's blog over at Old in the New, I was reminded of another friend's recent research on the Letter of James. Mariam Kamell of The Greek Geek is writing her PhD thesis on James at St Andrews in Scotland. Her recent research on James includes...

Mariam J. Kamell. 2006. “The Word/Law in James as the Promised New Covenant.” Paper presented to the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, November 19, Washington D.C.

_______. 2006. “The Emergent Need For James.” Paper given at the Evangelical Theological Society Annual Meeting, November 15. Washington D.C.

_______. 2006. "The concept of 'faith' in Hebrews and James." Paper delivered at the St Andrews Conference on Hebrews and Theology, 19 July. University of St Andrews.

_______. 2003. Wisdom in James: An Examination and Comparison of the Roles of Wisdom and the Holy Spirit. M.A. thesis, Denver Seminary.

I was able to attend Mariam's presentation of her paper at the St Andrews Conference on Hebrews and Theology. It was really well received. I look forward to Mariam's dissertation and much more in the future.

Biblical Studies Carnival XXII at SansBlogue

2007-10-01T13:27:00.000-10:00

Tim Bulkeley, Old Testament lecturer at Carey Baptist College in Auckland, New Zealand, has done a nice job of putting together the Biblical Studies Carnival XXII over at SansBlogue. He has divided the carnival up into the following categories...

Biblioblogger of the month
Biblical studies as an international discipline
Bible in General
Hebrew Bible
The Other Testament
Archaeology
Astronomy (or Interdisciplinary studies?)
Teaching
Technology
Writing and publishing
Digital scholarship

Linguistic Society of PNG in Madang

2007-09-28T05:15:00.000-10:00

I won't be posting anything for several days since I'm leaving for Madang today to attend the meeting of the Linguistic Society of PNG.

The meeting will take place not too far away from this tree that is always covered with--or should I say hung with--"flying foxes."

Doubts, Disputes and Distinctions of διακρίνω

2007-09-27T08:57:00.000-10:00

In 2001 I submitted a suggestion to the NET Bible translation committee for translating διακρινόμενος in James 1:6 as 'making distinctions' instead of 'doubting'. The suggestion was rejected.

'Doubting' is proposed in the Greek lexicons as a special New Testament meaning, but this simply is not necessary. The same word is used in James 2:4 with its normal sense. James 1:6 should not be read as "he should ask in faith without doubting." It is better read like this...

But he must ask in faith without making distinctions, for the one who makes distinctions is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed around by the wind.

I wonder how many people have struggled to understand the logic of not allowing for doubts in James 1:6 when the whole point in James 1:5 is that a person lacks wisdom and God gives it generously to those who ask for it without finding fault...

If anyone of you is lacking wisdom, let him ask of God, the one giving generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given him.

We need a child-like faith when we ask God for wisdom. A child-like faith can doubt, but a child-like faith will ask the Father and trust him to give what is best. This is the force of what it means to ask "without making distinctions." When we pray, we need to pray according to the Lord's will (cf. James 4:15), not specifying how we want our prayers answered without allowing for the possibility that God may have a better answer for our needs.

This accords with the pattern of James's readers in 4:3...

You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, in order that you may spend on your own pleasures.

Peter Spitaler (2007: 202) writes...

It is problematic to deduce a special NT meaning "doubt" (using reflexive expressions like "dispute with oneself" or "being divided against oneself") from the middle voice διακρίνομαι. Such reflexive meanings are not present in the classical/Hellenistic Greek because the middle διακρίνομαι consistently denotes a contesting partner other than - and outside of - oneself.

Here is the latest research on the word διακρίνω...

Peter Spitaler. 2007. "Διακρίνεσθαι in Mt. 21:21, Mk. 11:23, Acts 10:20, Rom. 4:20, 14:23, Jas. 1:6, and Jude 22-the 'semantic shift' that went unnoticed by patristic authors." Novum Testamentum 49:1-39.

Peter Spitaler. 2006. "Doubt or Dispute (Jude 9 and 22-23). Rereading a Special New Testament Meaning through the Lense of Internal Evidence." Biblica 87(2): 201-222.

David DeGraaf. 2005. "Some doubts about doubt: the New Testament use of Διακρινω." Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48(4): 733-755.

Norbert Baumert, SJ. 2002. "Das Paulinische, Wortspiel Mit krin-." Filologia Neotestamentaria 15: 19-64.

Perhaps with the recent outburst of scholarship on this word, translation committees will be more willing to hear suggestions for better translations where διακρίνω occurs.

Luke's Trial of Peter around the Fire

2007-09-25T23:58:00.000-10:00

I want to suggest some arguments for interpreting the pericope of Peter's denial as a kind of court trial. Introducing the account of Peter's denial of Jesus in Luke 22:54-62, I. Howard Marshall says this in his NIGTC commentary...

In Mk. the arrest of Jesus is followed by a night-time trial of Jesus, the mocking of Jesus and the denial by Peter (Mk. 14:53-65); since Luke has recorded a morning trial in place of Mark's night-time trial, he has necessarily placed the accounts of the denial and the mockery before his trial scene. The result is that we are given a further example of the πειρασμός in which the disciples were placed (22:46)...

πειρασμός means 'test', 'trial' or 'temptation', so Marshall introduces this narrative section by pointing out that a unique feature of the way Luke tells the story is that the 'trial' of the disciples during Jesus' arrest is highlighted more than in the other Gospels. He doesn't limit the sense of 'trial' to the court, but referring to the German scholar W. Dietrich, Marshall continues...

According to Dietrich, 145-157, the Lucan narrative is more forensic in character, various witnesses in turn making an accusation against Peter, first a woman (whose testimony is ipso facto suspect) and then two men (whose testimonies confirm each other). The scene reaches its climax in the confrontation of the denier by the One who has been denied. Thus the roles of Satan as accuser and Jesus as the defender of Peter (22:31f.) are depicted in the actual narrative.

However, for several of the unique features of Luke in this pericope, Marshall states, "No plausible explanation of the change has been suggested." He says this about the servant girl in 22:56 referring to Peter in the 3rd PERSON in Luke instead of the 2nd PERSON as it is in Mark. However, this could readily be explained as the girl accusing Peter within a trial scene. The unique use of the vocative 'woman' on Peter's lips may function to discredit her testimony. The three accusers in the Gospels are different. Luke is the only one that includes two men, which may also be significant for interpreting this as a trial.

In Luke 22:59, Marshall sees no evidence of a trial scene...

ἐπ’ ἀληθείας (4:25; 20:21) replaces Mk. ἀληθῶς, a word which Luke reserves as an equivalent for ἀμήν (except Acts 12:11). The accusation is in the third person, diff. Mk., Mt., Jn., a change for which no redactional motive can be seen.

However, these changes may also serve to picture Peter within a forensic trial. While the other Gospels have this man speaking directly to Peter, Luke tells the story that the man is speaking to the others around the fire about Peter. It gives a greater sense of Peter being on trial with a witness giving testimony. This also explains why he says ἐπ’ ἀληθείας, literally "upon truth" or "based on truth." Rather than just meaning 'truly' or 'certainly' (as in Matthew and Mark), "upon truth" in Luke gives this statement more the sense of Peter being on trial in court. This man is giving a testimony based "upon truth" or based on evidence. The evidence that he gives that Peter was with Jesus is: "for he is a Galilean."

The oil on canvas painting is "The Denial of Saint Peter" by Gerrit van Honthorst, c. 1623, and is housed at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

"Source Text" for a Bible Translation Cluster Project

2007-09-24T23:59:00.000-10:00

These days I’m doing an advisor check of a Bible translation for Luke 21-24. The vernacular translation will be used as the source text for related Austronesian languages at a translation workshop in November and December.

The back translation into the pidgin trade language will be used as the source text for two different groups of neighboring but completely unrelated Papuan languages at the same workshop. The cross-fertilization that comes from working together in a workshop approach is one of the highest values of this project. Even though the translators come from unrelated languages, they share ideas with one another about the translation problems they encounter each day, and they are learning about different kinds of translation solutions even though they might not have had the same problems.

So it’s important that we do a thorough exegetical check on this translation and its back translation, since the exegesis will be multiplied 11 times. I’m not the only one doing this exegetical check. There are normally four of us doing it separately and passing our notes to one another. This is in addition to the national translators who drafted the translation and are also developing their own exegetical skills.

When I say that this translation and back translation will be used as “source texts,” this only refers to the initial step of using the computer program Adapt It to make a first draft. Adapt It is good at remembering the predictable stuff in a translation so the translators have more time to spend thinking about the tougher translation issues. This draft will be edited many times before it goes through advisor and consultant checks and finally gets printed. Throughout the process, the translators consult multiple English and pidgin versions as well as various translation helps. Their translations are also checked against the original language texts (Greek for the Gospel of Luke) by the advisors and consultants working with the project.

Johnson on Theology and Ethics in the Letter of James

2007-09-23T17:00:00.000-10:00

Yesterday, I was looking at Luke Timothy Johnson's "EPILOGUE: The Importance of James for Theology" in his collection of essays, Brother of Jesus, Friend of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004). I don't think I ever read this essay when I bought the book after it first came out. I was pleased to see that one of the main arguments of my current M.A. thesis on coherence and discourse structure in James agrees with Johnson's discussion (pp. 246-8) of James's theology.

Most distinctive in James's understanding of God (as patristic interpreters and Kierkegaard perceived) is that God is the giver of gifts. James makes the point three times. In 4:6, James takes from the text of Proverbs 3:34 ("God resists the proud but gives grace to the lowly") the lesson that "God gives more grace" (meizona de didōsin charin). That this is neither a random nor a careless observation is shown by James's very first statement concerning God in 1:5, that God "gives to all simply (haplōs) and without grudging (mē oneidizontos)." Finally, there is the programmatic statement in 1:17, "every good and perfect gift comes down from above from the father of lights with whom there is no change nor shadow of alteration." Taken together, these three statements assert that God's giving is universal, abundant, without envy, and constant. Such a view of God is the basis for James's perception of reality as God's creation, open to his constant care but also answerable to God as the source of all that is good. This view of God is, in turn, the deep premise for James opposing an ethics of solidarity to the logic of envy, for in the first the world is construed as an open system in which cooperation makes sense, while in the second the world is considered a closed system in which competition is demanded.

This theme of God giving is implicitly in the letter a lot more than what Johnson states, and even with the “give” terminology in 5:18 (where heaven “gave” in response to Elijah’s prayer). I love how Johnson develops this discussion of God's gifts in terms of the world being an open system where God’s gifts oppose a closed system where we would have to compete in envy with one another.

Because God does not exist in isolation from the world but is in constant and active relationship with the world, human existence is defined in terms of a story in which both God and humans play roles. The story has as its past what God has already done: created the world and humans as representatives ("first-fruits") of that creation; revealed his will in the law and the prophets and "the faith of Jesus Christ"; implanted in humans the "word of truth" and "wisdom from above" and "spirit." The story has as its future what God will do in response to human behavior within God's creation: God will judge the world; will reward the innocent and faithful and persevering, who have spoken and acted according to "the royal law of liberty." And God will punish the arrogant and oppressive who blaspheme the noble name by their aggressive and hostile attitudes and actions against God's people. The present of the story-line is found in the moral decisions made by James's readers, above all their choice to live as friends of the world or as friends of God (4:4).

Relating what God has done and will do in the past and future to our present moral decisions is exactly what I do in my thesis. Most people think of James in terms of the imperative wisdom ethics. But this cannot be separated from the indicative statements about God.

It is of first importance, then, to understand that James does not "do theology" in an abstract manner, as a form of speculation about or study of God. Rather, James uses his theological propositions precisely as warrants and premises for his moral exhortation. His statements about God and his commands do not sit side by side in accidental juxtaposition. The two kinds of statements are intimately related. In James's 108 verses, there are some 59 imperatives (46 in the second person, 13 in the third person). And these imperatives are almost always accompanied by explanations or warrants, for which James uses participial constructions (1:3, 14, 22; 2:9, 25; 3:I), gar clauses (1:6, 7, 11, 13, 20, 24; 2:11, 13, 26; 3:2, 16; 4:14), and hoti clauses (1:12, 23; 2:10; 3:1; 4:3; 5:8, 11). The commandments are also sometimes connected to purpose clauses (1:4; 5:9) or used in the context of an implied argument signified by the use of oun (4:4, 7; 5:7, 16), dio (1:21; 4:6), or houtōs (1:11; 2:12, 17; 2:26; 3:5). In these connections, it is always the theological statement that stands as the cause or the purpose or the motivation or the warrant for the moral action recommended. James's moral exhortation, in short, is grounded in James's understanding of how humans are related to God. Because of this, each of the moral exhortations in James invites reflection by readers not only about their own lives—how to translate and perform James's script in the texture of their actual existence—but also about the nature of the world and of the God who creates, shapes, and saves the world in which humans are invited to participate as a sort of "first-fruits."

I don't always agree with everything that Johnson says about the Letter of James, but I resonate with these three paragraphs more than just about anything I have read in Jamesian scholarship.

More With Less Recent James Research

2007-09-22T02:34:00.000-10:00

In addition to the more recent titles on the Letter of James that I posted yesterday, I am also adding some titles to the RECENT JAMES RESEARCH list that are a few years older...

The following essays all come from this edited volume by Chilton and Evans. I have only included those titles that deal more or less specifically with the Letter of James...

Bruce Chilton. 2005. "James, Peter, Paul, and the formation of the Gospels." In The missions of James, Peter, and Paul: Tensions in early Christianity, ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans, 3-28. Supplements to Novum Testamentum, 115. Leiden: Brill.

Peter H. Davids. 2005. "James and Peter: The literary evidence." In Chilton and Evans, 29-52.

John Painter. 2005. "The power of words: Rhetoric in James and Paul." In Chilton and Evans, 235-73.

Bruce Chilton. 2005. "Wisdom and Grace." In Chilton and Evans, 307-22.

Wiard Popkes. 2005. "Leadership: James, Paul, and their contemporary background." In Chilton and Evans, 323-54.

Peter H. Davids. 2005. "The test of wealth." In Chilton and Evans, 355-84.

Marianne Sawicki. 2005. "Person or practice? Judging in James and in Paul." In Chilton and Evans, 385-408.

Jacob Neusner. 2005. "Sin, repentance, atonement, and resurrection: The perspective of rabbinic theology on the views of James 1-2 and Paul in Romans 3-4." In Chilton and Evans, 409-34.

Peter H. Davids. 2005. "Why do we suffer? Suffering in James and Paul." In Chilton and Evans, 435-66.

Ithamar Gruenwald. 2005. "Ritualizing death in James and Paul in light of Jewish apocalypticism." In Chilton and Evans, 467-86.

Bruce Chilton. 2005. "Conclusions and questions." In Chilton and Evans, 487-94.

Patrick J. Hartin. 2005. "'Who is wise and understanding among you?' (James 3:13): An analysis of wisdom, eschatology, and apocalypticism in the Letter of James." In Conflicted boundaries in wisdom and apocalypticism, ed. Benjamin G. Wright III and Lawrence M. Wills, 149-68. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

Patrick A. Tiller. 2005. "The rich and poor in James: An apocalyptic ethic." In Conflicted boundaries in wisdom and apocalypticism, ed. Benjamin G. Wright III and Lawrence M. Wills, 149-68. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

William R. Baker. 2005. "Book of James." In Dictionary for theological interpretation of the Bible, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, 347-51. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.

Patrick J. Hartin. 2004. James of Jerusalem: Heir to Jesus of Nazareth. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.

The following essays were newly published in Luke Timothy Johnson's 2004 Brother of Jesus, friend of God: Studies in the Letter of James. I'm listing these studies separately, but I'll be adding the essays that were reprinted in this volume according to their original publication details.

Luke Timothy Johnson. 2004. "Prologue: James's significance for early Christian history." In Brother of Jesus, friend of God, 1-23.

__________. 2004. “A survey of the history of interpretation of James.” In Brother of Jesus, friend of God, 39-44.

__________. 2004. “The reception of James in the early church.” In Brother of Jesus, friend of God, 45-60.

__________. 2004. “Journeying east with James: A chapter in the history of interpretation.” In Brother of Jesus, friend of God, 61-83.

__________. 2004. “How James won the West: A chapter in the history of canonization.” In Brother of Jesus, friend of God, 84-100.

__________. 2004. “Gender in the Letter of James: A surprising witness.” In Brother of Jesus, friend of God, 221-34.

__________. 2004. "Epilogue: The importance of James for theology." In Brother of Jesus, friend of God, 235-59.

The following essays are from the edited volume by J. Schlosser. I have only included the English titles for now...

Robert W. Wall. 2004. "A unifying theology of the Catholic Epistles: A canonical approach." In The Catholic Epistles and the tradition, ed. J. Schlosser, 43-71. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press.

Richard J. Bauckham. 2004. "The wisdom of James and the wisdom of Jesus." In Schlosser, 75-92.

John S. Kloppenborg. 2004. "The reception of the Jesus traditions in James." In Schlosser, 93-142.

Jonathan P. Yates. 2004. "The reception of the Epistle of James in the Latin West: Did Athanasius play a role? In Schlosser, 273-88.

Matthew Spencer, Klaus Wachtel & Christopher J. Howe. 2004. "Representing multiple pathways of textual flow in the Greek manuscripts of the Letter of James using reduced median networks." Computers and the Humanities 38:1-14.

David Instone-Brewer. 2004. "James as a sermon on the trials of Abraham." In The New Testament in its first century setting: Essays on context and background in honour of B. W. Winter on his 65th birthday, 250-68. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Bruce Chilton. 2004. "James, Jesus' brother." In The face of New Testament studies: A survey of recent research, 251-62. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.

Mariam J. Kamell. 2003. Wisdom in James: An Examination and Comparison of the Roles of Wisdom and the Holy Spirit. M.A. thesis, Denver Seminary.

Luke L. Cheung. 2003. The Genre, Composition and Hermeneutics of James. Carlisle: Paternoster.

Patrick J. Hartin. 2003. James. Sacra Pagina Series, vol. 14. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.

David E. Aune. 2003. "Letter of James." In The Westminster dictionary of New Testament & Early Christian Literature & Rhetoric, 238-41. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox.

Benjamin J. Pehrson. 2002. Noachic allusion and echo in James 3.1-12: Implicatures of new creation eschatology. M.A. thesis, Wheaton College Graduate School.

David C. Parker. 2002. "The development of the critical text of the Epistle of James: From Lachmann to the Editio Critica Maior." In New Testament textual criticism and exegesis: Festschrift J. Delobel, ed. A. Denaux, 317-30.

Wesley Hiram Wachob. 2002. "The apocalyptic intertexture of the Epistle of James." In The intertexture of apocalyptic discourse in the New Testament, ed. Duane F. Watson, 165-86. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

Luke Timothy Johnson. 2000. “An introduction to the Letter of James.” Review and Expositor, 97:155-67. Also in Brother of Jesus, friend of God, 24-38. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans (2004).

Douglas J. Moo. 2000. The Letter of James. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Recent Letter of James Research

2007-09-21T23:59:00.000-10:00

I have recently become aware of several new works of scholarship on the Letter of James. Under this blog’s heading of RECENT JAMES RESEARCH, I am adding ten titles that have been published in the last year. Six of these are essays that come out of edited volumes rather than journals or monograph series, so I give you the pretty front covers next to the essay title included in each one...

Richard Bauckham. 2007. "James and the Jerusalem community." In Jewish believers in Jesus: The early centuries, ed. Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik, 55-95. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson.

The following five titles that include the "Search Inside!" logo can be browsed and searched online with the Amazon Online Reader. This is even true for Beale and Carson's Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament even though it has an availability date from Amazon.com of November 1st. Follow the links.

D. A. Carson. 2007. "James." In Commentary on the New Testament use of the Old Testament, ed. G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson, 997-1014. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.

James M. Darlack. 2007. Pray for reign: The eschatological Elijah in James 5:17-18. M.A. thesis, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. (available for free download here)

Patrick Hartin. 2007. "The religious context of the Letter of James." In Jewish Christianity reconsidered: Rethinking ancient groups and texts, ed. Matt Jackson-McCabe, 203-31. Minneapolis: Fortress.

John S. Kloppenborg. 2007. “Diaspora discourse: The construction of ethos in James.” New Testament Studies 53:242-70.

Peter Spitaler. 2007. "Διακρίνεσθαι in Mt. 21:21, Mk. 11:23, Acts 10:20, Rom. 4:20, 14:23, Jas. 1:6, and Jude 22—the “semantic shift” that went unnoticed by patristic authors." Novum Testamentum 49:1-39.

David G. Horrell. 2007. "The Catholic Epistles and Hebrews." In Redemption and resistance: The messianic hopes of Jews and Christians in antiquity, ed. Markus Bockmuehl and James Carleton Paget, 122-35. London: T&T Clark.

Huub van de Sandt. 2007. "James 4,1-4 in the light of the Jewish two ways tradition 3,1-6." Biblica 88:38-63.

Kurt Anders Richardson. 2006. "Job as exemplar in the Epistle of James." In Hearing the Old Testament in the New Testament, ed. Stanley E. Porter, 213-29. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Donald J. Verseput. 2006. "James 1:19-27: Anger in the congregation." In Interpreting the New Testament text: Introduction to the art and science of exegesis, ed. Darrell L. Bock and Buist M. Fanning, 429-40. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

(Bock and Fanning's Interpreting the New Testament Text also has the "Search Inside!" feature)

I hope to review these and other works of Jamesian scholarship as I have time.

It’s good to see so many topical volumes including essays on James since we too often have not seen James factored into theological enquiries of early Christianity and the New Testament. It looks like the tide is finally changing.

Announcing Habitualist.com - go James Tauber !

2007-09-20T11:19:00.000-10:00

The slogan is "Make a habit of it."

James Tauber is once again working on a project that really piques my interest (see my previous posts about his Greek Nominal Paradigm Browser and how he introduced me to Many Eyes).

There are many things that I want to be more disciplined about, activities that I want to be a regular part of every day, or every week. Today, James introduced his new website Habitualist.com.

The site hasn't launched yet, but it does give an idea of what we can expect from this site in the future...

List the things you'd like to do on a regular basis and group them into routines
Track your success or failure and monitor your progress over time.
Share tips with others who are working on developing the same habits.

I don't know if the 3rd aspect of the site means that it will be some kind of social networking site, but whether it is or not, this is the most intriguing aspect of the idea. It looks like it won't just be a tool to help one develop good habits--it's going to be a way to network ideas and benefit from the experience of others.

I know that I can do no good thing in my own power. I need God's grace, and part of that grace is what he gives us through relationships with others.

Let's make a habit of it together.

PhD in New Testament?

2007-09-19T10:13:00.000-10:00

Are you looking to pursue a PhD in New Testament? Nijay Gupta has laid out a pretty comprehensive set of factors to consider here from an evangelical perspective for schools in both the U.S. and U.K.

Some of the faculty that Nijay lists for schools have changed since his essay was written (e.g. Richard Bauckham is retiring from St Andrews, Markus Bockmuehl has moved from Cambridge to St Andrews [UPDATE 2007-09-23: and then on to Oxford], Peter Williams has moved from Aberdeen to Tyndale House).

The castle in Nijay's blog header is Dunstanburgh Castle, which can be seen from my wife's aunt and uncle's cottage in Northum-berland, England. This is not too far from Durham University where Nijay is studying. Here's another view...

Many Eyes: A Tool For Proofreading?

2007-09-18T11:42:00.000-10:00

James Tauber made me aware here of an online application by IBM called Many Eyes, a tool for creating and sharing visualizations of data. Since James has done a lot with Greek inflectional morphology, the visualization he created at Many Eyes is of dative plural masculine nominal endings in the Greek of the New Testament. Even though James's data is not a natural text composed of words, he has effectively used the "Word Tree" visualization on the Many Eyes site to show the patterns of letters that appear in various endings for masculine plural dative nominals in NT Greek.

The Many Eyes site describes the "Word Tree" visualization...

A word tree is a visual search tool for unstructured text, such as a book, article, speech or poem. It lets you pick a word or phrase and shows you all the different contexts in which it appears. The contexts are arranged in a tree-like branching structure to reveal recurrent themes and phrases.... A word tree is a visual version of a traditional concordance.

I am considering this online application as a tool for proofreading lengthy texts using the "Word Tree" visualization. I am nearly finished with an M.A. thesis that needs to be reduced. One way to reduce the thesis is to remove redundancies. If I upload the full text of my thesis onto the Many Eyes site, I could use it to find instances of repetitiveness in the thesis. Here is what Many Eyes turns up for a search of "noachic" in my previous M.A. thesis, "Noachic Allusion and Echo in James 3.1-12: Implicatures of New Creation Eschatology"...

One drawback for using the tool this way is that it can only show me potential redundancies where I have used the same word and not where I have used different words to express the same meaning. Another drawback would be that I would have to do searches for individual words and look at the visualizations for only those words in order to see where they occur in the same context. Which words would I check?

Nothing will prove more valuable for removing redundancies than a fresh reading of the text. However, in that reading, if I come across statements that sound a little bit too familiar, the Many Eyes tool may prove valuable for looking up specific words and quickly getting a visualization of how those words are used in context. One nice feature of the "Word Tree" visualization is that you can sort the results by occurrence order, frequency order, or alphabetical order. Frequency order would be the most useful for determining redundancies.

500th Book Added at LibraryThing.com

2007-09-17T06:02:00.000-10:00

I added the 500th book to my collection at LibraryThing.com today. Check it out here.

So what was the 500th book? Finally, after several years of searching, I finally found this book for a decent price through Germany's Amazon.de site:

Matthias Konradt. 1998. Christliche Existenz nach dem Jakobusbrief: Eine Studie zu seiner soteriologischen und ethischen Konzeption. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 406 pp.

The translated title is "Christian existence according to the Letter of James: A study in its soteriological and ethical conception."

From what I have read, my understanding of James seems closest to that of Matthias Konradt, so I'm looking forward to reading this, and improving my German at the same time.

James Tauber's Nominal Paradigm Browser

2007-09-13T13:48:00.000-10:00

I have added a link under Greek Resources on the Web to James Tauber's Nominal Paradigm Browser for nominal forms in the Greek New Testament.

New Testament Greek Course Nearly Done

2007-09-10T17:24:00.000-10:00

The 18 Papua New Guinean students take their third and final exam tomorrow during this 6-week introductory NT Greek course. It's been a great learning experience for me as the teacher, and hopefully for them too. Teaching every day, morning and afternoon, for 6 weeks is quite difficult. I'm really thankful for the help I had.

I will soon be catching up on other responsibilities that have been put on hold. I hope to blog more on how the course went. I've got some posts started, so I'll try to finish at least some of them.

Tomorrow and Wednesday, most of the students will start their long journey home to families and communities who will have dearly missed them for 7 weeks. Several of the students return for a New Testament Exegesis course that starts only 3 weeks after this Greek course finishes. Pray for safe and speedy travels, valuable time spent at home, and the grace of God to give them everything they need, especially as they often face criticisms from family and communities for wasting their time doing things like this.

Cause of Joy in 2 Corinthians 2:3 - #1

2007-09-02T10:43:00.000-10:00

Last Wednesday at Better Bibles Blog, Wayne Leman has asked Who Will Be Joyful? concerning the last part of 2 Corinthians 2:3. I have really enjoyed studying this letter ever since I took Scott Hafemann's Advanced Koine Reading course on 2 Corinthians at the Wheaton College Graduate School in 1999. So I had to respond to Wayne's questions.

The exegetical problem is indicated by the split between English versions...

1. Paul wanted the Corinthians to have the same joy that he did

2. Paul wanted the joy of the Corinthians to make him joyful

Versions following option (1) include...

for me to be happy is for all of you to be happy (REB)
that you would all share my joy (NIV/TNIV)
that my joy would be yours (NET)
when I am happy, then all of you are happy too (TEV)
whatever makes me happy also makes you happy (GW)
that you would share my joy (NCV)
that my joy is yours (HCSB)
if I am happy, it means that all of you will be happy (The Source)

Versions following option (2) include...

when you should make me feel happy (CEV)
my joy comes from your being joyful (NLT)

Versions that allow a somewhat ambiguous interpretation of options (1) and (2) include...

that my joy is [the joy] of you all (KJV)
that my joy would be the joy of you all (RSV, NRSV, ESV, NASB)

Here is the heart of Wayne's post (written before it was acknowledged that the last 5 versions are quite ambiguous and they were grouped with option [1])...

If we simply counted versions, option 1 would win by majority rule. But exegesis can't be determined just by voting. Some kinds of evidence may be more important than others. Sometimes a minority position eventually becomes a majority positions.
We must also take into account internal evidence (such as logical flow) for understanding a passage: What makes most sense in the context? For me, it makes most sense for Paul to be saying that he wanted to be made happy by how the Corinthians responded to his previous instructions to them. But the Greek doesn't tilt me one way or the other. In such a case, many say that we should leave an English translation "ambiguous" since the Greek is "ambiguous." But I cannot think of a way to leave the English ambiguous in this case. (I'd like to hear from you if you can.) Sometimes, when translating, there is no way to leave a translation ambiguous when we are unsure what the source text meant. At a minimum, in such cases, I believe we should include a footnote explaining that the Greek could have two different meanings.
Do you think that the linguistic evidence in the Greek text tilts us more strongly toward option 1 or 2? And what leads you to think that if you do? And if you are not sure which option should be chosen in translation of 2 Cor. 2:3, what do you suggest an English translation have in its text and in its footnote?

Good questions Wayne! In response to his questions, it has been acknowledged that the KJV, RSV, NRSV, ESV, and NASB are quite ambigous. This is because the ‘of’ in English can indicate that Paul’s joy either comes from ‘you all’ or that his joy would move in the opposite direction. David Lang responded to Wayne's post and suggested...

One way to preserve the ambiguity might be to focus on the connection between
Paul's joy and that of the Corinthians, rather than on who brings joy to whom. Possible wordings might be:
"being confident in you all, that my joy and yours go hand in hand."
"...that my joy is connected (joined? linked?) to your joy."
"...that my joy is connected to all of you."
"...that my joy depends on all of you."
Of all of these, suggestion 1 is the least "literal," but I think it sounds the most natural. Suggestion 3 is the closest to the original Greek construction, while still being ambiguous. Suggestion 4 is the least ambiguous and comes down on the side of saying that the Corinthians' joy would make Paul joyful (your option 2).

This is a great translation discussion that stems from the ambiguity of the Greek genitive phrase πάντων ὑμῶν 'of all of you'. I tend to agree that if the Greek is ambiguous that we should try to leave our translations ambiguous as well.

However, this verse is not talking at all about joy moving from Paul to the Corinthians or from the Corinthians to Paul. And I don't think a translation should be left ambiguous here. It’s true, if we just look at the Greek of this last clause in the verse, it appears quite ambiguous…

πεποιθὼς ἐπὶ πάντας ὑμᾶς ὅτι ἡ ἐμὴ χαρὰ πάντων ὑμῶν ἐστιν.
having confidence in you all that my joy is [of] all of you.

Alternate interpretations of the genitive phrase “of all of you” could be read as “my joy is [from] you all” or “my joy is all of yours.” There is certainly a difficult exegetical question here concerning the cause of joy and how that joy is functioning in Paul's argument. However, the immediate and wider contexts in the letter argue against an interpretation that has to do with joy itself being transferred from one party to another. More on that next time…

Early Syriac Translation Technique, Genitive Absolutes & ἔτι

2007-08-26T04:33:00.000-10:00

In my last post, I talked about the distinction between Greek ἔτι 'still' and the simultaneous relative time significance of the present tense participle. After coming to the conclusion that ἔτι is not merely redundant with the simultaneous time significance of the present participle, the question became more intriguing to me as I considered how some early translations of the Greek New Testament handled something like a potentially redundant ἔτι.

I took a look at Peter Williams’ Early Syriac Translation Technique and Textual Criticism of the Greek Gospels, published in 2004. You can see Justin Taylor's interview of Peter Williams as Williams has recently taken over as warden of Tyndale House in Cambridge, UK. Williams points us to reviews of his book here, some of which are available online. I have no knowledge of Syriac, so I am completely dependent on the textual apparatus of NA27 and Williams' monograph for the Syriac text.

In his introduction, Williams (2) summarizes three broad explanations regarding the presence of similarities and differences between Greek manuscripts and the Syriac versions...

The first is the hypothesis that the translation is essentially a literal representation of its Vorlage, the second, that formal alterations were made in the process of translation, and the third, that alterations were made in the process of transmission of the translated text to us.... It is contended here that the Vorlage Hypothesis has been used too much and the Translation Hypothesis explored too little.

In the 21 brief rules that Williams (294) includes in Appendix 1 for using Syriac as evidence for support of a Greek Vorlage, he includes this one about adverbs...

(13) Be careful using [Old Syriac] witnesses to attest the omission of the adverbs ἐκεῖθεν, ἔξω, ἔτι, μόνον, νῦν, and τότε. Never use [Old Syriac] to attest the absence of ἤδη.

This is one of two rules in which Williams uses the language of "be careful" instead of "do not," so that gives us a hint that Syriac is a bit more consistent in formally representing ἔτι and other adverbs than it is with other features of the text. Looking more specifically at Williams' section on adverbs, he (160) gives this introduction...

In broad outline the data below suggest that the [Old Syriac] tradition in particular did not feel constrained always to represent these elements when they were present in the Greek. It should be remembered that the [Old Syriac] translation is not one that seeks formal correspondence with its Vorlage, and that in many cases no equivalent Syriac adverb was readily at hand to match the Greek one. There is no reason to believe that there was a systematic decision not to represent adverbs. Rather, whether consciously or subconsiously, these adverbs were sometimes felt not to be important enough to be translated.

Regarding ἔτι specifically, Williams (163) writes...

Greek ἔτι is a word which receives no fixed equivalent in Syriac because it fulfills so many different functions.

Before looking at the Syriac data for ἔτι, what were my expectations? I figured if the Syriac translation omitted a representation of ἔτι, one explanation might be that ἔτι was considered unnecessarily redundant with the simultaneous time aspect of the present participle. Of course, there are other possible explanations for Syriac omissions. Williams (163-64) suggests some alternate explanations (but he is responding to the common practice of hypothesizing an equivalent Greek Vorlage for instances of Syriac omission)...

It is possible that factors causing variation in Greek manuscripts and in Syriac texts could be partly independent. Some variation in Greek manuscripts could be explained by the small size of the particle and therefore its natural oversight in transmission. Variation in Syriac witnesses could be ascribed to the lack of a ready Syriac equivalent in many contexts in which it occurs. Of course, variation in Syriac manuscripts inevitably will also affect the Greek manuscripts from which the Syriac translations are made.

Of 37 occurrences of ἔτι in the Gospels, Williams only finds three references where the Syriac omits the particle over against a consistent Greek tradition: Lk. 8.49; Lk. 9.42; Jn. 16.12. In addition to these, he cites two other references in which the Syriac tradition omits ἔτι where there is only weak support for omitting it among the Greek manuscripts: Mt. 19.20; Lk. 22.71. Williams (164) concludes...

These five cases take the edge off our confidence in the correctness of NA27's notes saying that [the Curetonianus version of Old Syriac] and [the Sinaiticus version of Old Syriac and the Peshitta version] witness against ἔτι in John 4.35 and 11.30, respectively.

In other words, since in 5 out of 37 cases there are Syriac texts which omit ἔτι where there is little or no support for such an omission among the extant Greek manuscripts, then Syriac may exhibit a certain tendency to omit ἔτι for reasons other than simply following the Greek Vorlage.

Since Williams stated in his introduction that the Translation Hypothesis is explored too little, I would like to explore one possibility for the infrequent Syriac tendency to omit ἔτι where the likely Greek Vorlage includes it. In 2 of the 3 cases in which Syriac witnesses omit ἔτι over against the entire Greek tradition, the adverb is part of a genitive absolute construction.

In Luke 8.49 ἔτι αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος "while he is still speaking" follows immediately after Jesus' statement to the woman who has been healed from her 12-year hemorrhage. Since the previous verses include Jesus speaking, the ἔτι in vs. 49 is truly redundant. It is not needed to show that Jesus was speaking before the action of the main verb began. The verse still means the same thing if the ἔτι is omitted. It is possible that the Syriac would have been deemed unnatural if the redundant ἔτι were formally translated. Therefore, the omission in Syriac can possibly be attributed to formal alteration in the process of translation while maintaining the same meaning.

In Lk. 9.42 ἔτι δὲ προσερχομένου αὐτοῦ ἔρρηξεν αὐτὸν τὸ δαιμόνιον "while he was still approaching, the demon threw him down" comes after Jesus has told a man to bring his son with a demon to him. In this case the omission of ἔτι changes the meaning of the text ever so slightly. Without ἔτι the action of the genitive participle happens simultaneously with the main verb in which the demon throws the boy down: "while he was approaching, the demon threw him down." Without ἔτι it is possible to understand the demon's activity being initiated almost as soon as the boy begins his approach. But with ἔτι included, it is apparent that the boy has been approaching Jesus before the demon attacks him. However, such a slight change in meaning may have been easily overlooked by the Syriac translators. Even if they were aware of the fact that they were leaving it out and the slight difference that would make in meaning, they may not have recognized any importance in maintaining such a detailed distinction. Furthermore, perhaps it would have sounded unnatural to speak of the boy "still coming" when it had not yet been specifically mentioned in the text that he had already started to come.

Zephyr update on August 27:
Williams takes the 5 out of 37 instances of the Syriac omission of a representation of ἔτι and states that this suggests some kind of "Syriac tendency." However, he appropriately restricts his conclusion and merely states, "These five cases take the edge off our confidence in the correctness of NA27's notes... in John 4:35 and 11:30."

Perhaps there is some Syriac tendency to omit a formal representation of ἔτι, but since at least a few of the 5 instances of Syriac omission can readily be explained by translation factors, any 'tendency' might be more usefully applied if it is understood as a more specific kind of formal alteration in the translation process. I suggest that the specific formal alteration in translation is a tendency for Syriac to omit representations of ἔτι when ἔτι might be considered redundant in the text.

Looking at the two texts to which Williams makes application of the suggested tendency (Jn. 4:35; 11:30), it seems apparent that there are translation factors of redundancy involved similar to those references that include the present participles in Lk. 8:49 and 9:42.

In Jn. 4:35 Jesus says...

οὐχ ὑμεῖς λέγετε ὅτι Ἔτι τετράμηνός ἐστιν καὶ ὁ θερισμὸς ἔρχεται;

Don't you say, "There are still four months and the harvest comes"?

The use of καὶ 'and' here is iconic in that the order of the clauses reflects the natural order of sequential events in time. Therefore, the ἔτι is not necessary to give the right meaning in this text. It might have been considered redundant by the Syriac translators.

In Jn. 11:30 the redundancy of ἔτι is perhaps more apparent. The text reads...

οὔπω δὲ ἐληλύθει ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἰς τὴν κώμην, ἀλλ’ ἦν ἔτι ἐν τῷ τόπῳ ὅπου ὑπήντησεν
αὐτῷ ἡ Μάρθα.

Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but he was still in the place where Martha met Him.

We can think of the word οὔπω 'not yet' as the negative equivalent of ἔτι 'still'. Jesus had not yet gone to the new place because he was still in the old place. The old place is the place where Martha met him, and that meeting occurred in vs. 20. Of course, even though Jesus had not yet gone to the village, this does not entail that Jesus was still at the place where he met Martha. However, the 8 verses of dialogue that follow vs. 20 are naturally understood to have occurred in the same place where Martha met Jesus and they started talking. Thus, we might say that even the whole second clause in vs. 30—"but he was still in the place where Martha met Him"—is logically unnecessary. Yet more specifically, the representation of ἔτι 'still' in combination with οὔπω 'not yet' is probably somewhat redundant, especially since there has been no mention of Jesus moving from the place where he has been for the last 10 verses.

Given the above discussion, I would agree with Williams that the other Syriac omissions of a representation for ἔτι "take the edge off our confidence in the correctness of NA27's notes" that indicate that the Syriac supports the Greek omission of ἔτι in John 4:35 and 11:30. However, I want to argue more strongly than Williams does at this point that this is probably a tendency that is influenced by translation factors. This is not just a general tendency to omit a representation of ἔτι that is equally applied across the board.

I think that sufficient arguments could also be made for translation factors being involved in the other passages where Syriac omits the representation of ἔτι (Jn. 16:12; Mt. 19:20; Lk 22:71). It would be interesting to continue this investigation and consider if the use of ἔτι seems to be less redundant (or less susceptible to other translation factors) in the instances where the Syriac does include a formal translation of this adverb.

Genitive Absolute & Redundant ἔτι?

2007-08-25T22:07:00.000-10:00

Today in my Greek course, I introduced the genitive absolute construction. An interesting question came up regarding the relative time relationship of the present genitive participle to the verb and the use of ἔτι 'still'.

I introduced genitive absolutes by looking at Mark 14:43. Jesus tells his disciples that the hour has come for the Son of Man to be betrayed. His betrayer has drawn near. Then in vs. 43, it reads,

Καὶ εὐθὺς ἔτι αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος παραγίνεται Ἰούδας…

And immediately, while he is still speaking, Judas arrives…

The genitive absolute construction includes an anarthrous (no article) genitive participle (λαλοῦντος “while speaking” in Mk. 14.43), and it usually appears at the front of a sentence and usually with a noun or pronoun (αὐτοῦ “of him” in Mk. 14.43) also in the genitive case. The significance of the genitive absolute construction is that the agent of the participial action is different than the agent of the main verb in the sentence. If it was the same agent performing both actions, then the participle would be in the nominative case, not the genitive.

Present tense participles signify continuous or repeated action that happens at the same time as the main verb. Thus, if the main verb is understood to have happened in the past, the present participle is also understood to have happened in the past concurrent to the action of the main verb. Likewise, if the main verb is present or future, the present participle happens simultaneously in the present or the future, respectively. Therefore, in Mk. 14.43 the word ‘while’ is frequently used in English translations to show this simultaneous action.

So a question was asked in class about ἔτι ‘still’. What is the difference between the simultaneous time indicated by the present participle and the meaning ‘still’ from ἔτι? What is the significance of ἔτι? If ἔτι was not there, would it have the same meaning?

This is the kind of question I’m thrilled to hear my students asking. It means they are thinking critically about the text and how to best translate it accurately into their own languages. It’s also an opportunity for me to think on my feet, and to quickly give my students the best educated guess that I can quickly come up with. But it’s a chance to model humility, and to let them know that I’m not always sure of the answer. This leads naturally into teaching them how to seek out the answer to such questions on their own.

My first response was that the meaning of ἔτι ‘still’ and the simultaneous action significance of the present participle seem virtually identical. I suggested that the text would pretty much have the same meaning if ἔτι was not there. But perhaps the ἔτι gives more prominence to the idea that Jesus was speaking at the same time that Judas arrived. I compared the use of ἔτι to the (redundant) use of nominative subject pronouns, since the verbal morphology already includes the person and number of the subject. When a subject pronoun is also used, it is usually there for emphasis, or to contrast to some other subject in the context. Likewise, ἔτι might be used with the present participle to emphasize the simultaneous action.

After thinking about this further, however, I consider that ἔτι has somewhat of a different function than to indicate simultaneous action. The use of ἔτι 'still' suggests that the action of the participle starts before the action of the main verb, and then the start of the main verb action occurs before the participial action has finished. This is in contrast to the aorist participle that signifies action that has been completed prior to the main verb.

Thus, ἔτι in Mk. 14.43 makes it clear that Jesus had already been speaking about his betrayer coming before Judas arrived. Without the ἔτι, it may be possible to interpret this text as Jesus talking and Judas arriving at the same time such that Jesus didn’t start talking before he caught some clue that Judas was approaching with the crowd that was with him. With the ἔτι, however, it becomes clear that Jesus had started speaking first and Judas arrived before he finished.

There are 13 other New Testament references where ἔτι occurs in the same clause with a genitive absolute:

Mt. 12.46 Jesus still speaking, his mother and brothers standing outside
Mt. 17.5 Peter still speaking, cloud overshadowed (transfiguration)
Mt. 26.47 Jesus still speaking, Judas arrives (betrayal)
Mk. 5.35 Jesus still speaking, they come from synagogue leader’s house
Mk. 14.43 (2) Jesus still speaking, Judas arrives (betrayal)
Lk. 8.49 (2) Jesus still speaking, they come from synagogue leader’s house
Lk. 9.42 Spirit-possessed son still approaching, the demon slams him down
Lk. 14.32 he (other king) still being far away, he (the king) asks for peace
Lk. 15.20 [lost son] still being a distance away, the father saw him
Lk. 22.47 (3) Jesus still speaking, Judas arrives (betrayal)
Lk. 22.60 Peter still speaking, rooster crows
Lk. 24.41 disciples still not believing, Jesus said to them… eat
Jn. 20.1 Mary Magdalene comes, darkness still being
Ac. 10.44 Peter still speaking, Holy Spirit fell

A quick glance at these other references confirms the conclusion that the combination of ἔτι with a present genitive participle signifies a participial action that has started before the action of the main verb and is still continuing at the time the main verb begins. It does not seem to indicate, however, how long the two actions continue simultaneously.

Often, it seems that the start of the main verb action represents the completion of the participial action. Thus, the ἔτι with present genitive participle combination seems very similar to the use of the aorist genitive participle, which signifies subsequent action. However, an ἔτι with the present genitive participle indicates an overlap of action, even if that overlap means that the completion of the participial action is concurrent with only the very start of the main verb action.

It is probably significant that ἔτι does not occur in the same clause with an aorist participle in the New Testament. Although ἔτι may represent an overlapping of subsequent and simultaneous time, it is more clearly associated with the simultaneous time significance of the present participle. Nevertheless, it seems an inherent property of its lexical meaning that it should indicate an action that has previously started. In Mk. 14.43 the use of ἔτι is a sign that Jesus is knowledgeable about the future and he is in control of the event in which he is betrayed.

Bible Translation and Stomach Idioms

2007-08-21T12:45:00.000-10:00

I was recently asked if I had a story about Bible translation that would interest children. Well, children like to talk about their body parts, and one thing that's really fun is our bellies. Many of the language communities in Papua New Guinea think of the stomach and/or the liver as the seat of emotions, feelings, and cognitive processes. So the following explanation about Bible translation was written for children. I have simplified the language expressions from one of the languages I work with that refer to the stomach and to the liver, and I have translated them all back into English with the word 'belly'. Enjoy...

Most languages in Papua New Guinea only like to use words that refer to things that you can see and touch. They do not have many words that refer to emotions and qualities about people that we cannot touch like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, grace, mercy, hope, faith and faithfulness. But they usually do have ways of expressing these meanings.

One way that languages in Papua New Guinea frequently express these kinds of ideas is by describing how their bodily organs are feeling. We do the same thing in English. We can say that someone feels ‘broken-hearted’, or one can “harden his heart.” Or, I can say that “my heart goes out to you.” You can “lose heart,” “pour out your hearts,” “open your heart to someone,” “take heart,” or even—“eat your heart out.”

Languages in Papua New Guinea have lots of expressions like this too, but the difference is that instead of talking about their hearts, they usually talk about their bellies. It may sound really funny to us, but they might think it sounds funny if they heard us talking about our noses running and our feet smelling. They might wonder if we were really upside down! But every language has their own unique way of talking about how we experience the world around us.

In one language of Papua New Guinea, they can say “good-belly” as a way of welcoming someone. They say “belly-talk” when they make a decision. If you “give-belly” then you are loving someone. For taking pity on someone, you would say “belly-cutting.” If you are worrying, then you’d say “belly think.” If people do not agree, they are “belly-fighting.” To be angry is to have a “sharp belly.”

So when the translators from this language were trying to translate Luke 1:50 where Mary says that God’s mercy extends to those who fear him, at first none of us knew how to express ‘mercy’ in their language. In the pidgin trade language Bible of Papua New Guinea, grace and mercy are almost always translated with the same word that refers to some vague notion of kindness. But many times when we read about God’s mercy in the Bible, it often refers to God lovingly holding back his judgment on our sins.

I explained to the Onnele translators that it's like when God is angry with us for our terrible sins, but then he decides to love us anyway and not give us the punishment we deserve. When the translators from Papua New Guinea heard this, they knew exactly how they needed to translate mercy—“God’s sinking belly.” That’s what they say when a person relaxes his anger. His belly goes down for us. And now the Onnele people can understand about God’s mercy in their own language. Words that sound funny to us, but very meaningful to them.

Learn New Testament Greek - Dobson #2

2007-08-21T07:25:00.000-10:00

I started reviewing John H. Dobson's Learn New Testament Greek here. I failed to mention that we are using the 3rd revised edition, with accents, published in 2005.

Today I just want to comment that this 3rd edition has the Greek accents added whereas the 1st and 2nd editions only had breathing marks. I never used those earlier editions, but I must say that this is a step forward. Even if students don't learn anything about accent marks, they ought to at least become familiar with seeing them there. Also, the accent marks are an aid to memory, since it is helpful to learn vocabulary by consistently hearing and saying the words with the accent on the right syll-A-ble.

But I must say that wow, there seems to be a lot of typographical mistakes in this 3rd edition. Many of them are so obvious that even someone who has finished their first year in Greek should be able to recognize them--breathing marks pointed the wrong way, accents, missing accents, extra letters, missing letters, missing iota subscripts, wrong letters.

I have found enough of these types of errors that I have wondered if there is a list of errata available somewhere. Does anyone have some contact information for John Dobson? Or, since this edition was published by both Piquant Editions in the U.K. and Baker Academic in the U.S., which publisher would be more likely to have such a list of errata. It's been two years since it was published, so I'd think someone has already made such a list.

In edition to such typographical errors, the pagination has changed since the 2nd edition. The editor has not done a very good job of making sure the pagination coordinates well with the layout. For example, in section 12.8 we are given three paradigms--near demonstrative pronouns, relative pronouns, and the neuter noun. In the 2nd edition, the neuter noun paradigm falls on the following page. In the 3rd edition, the verticle space between these three paradigms is almost completely absent so that it appears that the headings "Masculine... Feminine... Neuter" at the top of the demonstrative paradigm carries over to the relative pronouns and the neuter nouns. Well, that's good because it should carry over for the relative pronouns. But that's bad because it shouldn't carry over for the neuter nouns. In the 2nd edition, the fonts are different enough, too, so that there is a more distinct difference between the demonstrative pronoun paradigm and the relative pronoun paradigm. In the 3rd edition, it just runs together with only the headings "Singular" and "Plural" separating the individual parts of the paradigms and the separate paradigms themselves.

Follow-up By Zephyr at 4:55 PM--
To give you some idea of the frequency of the typographical errors. I have found 12 in the first 21 chapters. So perhaps this is not as bad as my description above would suggest. But these are just the ones I've happened to notice. I did not read the first 21 chapters thoroughly to check for these kinds of mistakes.

Also, I compared those 12 mistakes with the 2nd edition. Of the 12 errors I found in the 3rd edition, the 2nd edition includes the same material for 10 of them. Interesting enough, the 2nd edition has all 10 of these correct! So the errors in the 3rd edition are all errors that were introduced with the 3rd edition.

Reading the Letter of James #1

2007-08-19T23:59:00.000-10:00

Contrary to a previous post, I only preached this one Sunday on James. We have an opportunity to allow a visiting translation consultant preach next week, so I agreed to preach both my sermons today. Well, I actually combined them into one.

A few weeks ago, we heard a sermon on how we should read the Old Testament. We were reminded that God is always the main character, accomplishing his purposes despite the sinful nature of his people. This was illustrated for us in the story of Jacob in Genesis 27.

So today I talked about how we should read the New Testament book of Jacob. That’s right—the Greek name for James is really Ἰάκωβος, ‘Jacob’. And it’s addressed to the ‘twelve tribes’ even as Jacob was the father of the twelve tribes of Israel.

But more than the fun similarity of the names, the Letter of James is often thought of as the New Testament book most like the Old Testament. It’s called New Testament wisdom literature. More than any other New Testament book, it speaks about what we must ‘do’. We are to persevere so that we can become mature or ‘perfect’. We are to hear the word of God and do it. We are to have faith with works. The Law is spoken of in favorable terms.

Because of this emphasis on what we do, Martin Luther called it eyn rechte stroern Epistel, “a right strawy epistle,” and in 1522, in his first translation of the New Testament into German, he allocated it to an obscure place behind Revelation. He called it an epistle of straw, alluding to 1 Corinthians 3.11-13…

For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is
Jesus Christ. Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver,
precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man's work will become evident; for
the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself
will test the quality of each man's work.

So is James really an epistle of straw? Can we move beyond Luther in our appraisal of James? Well, it is clear that Luther himself moved beyond his earlier perspective since he preached and taught from James in later years.

How should we read James? Is there more there than just practical wisdom? Is it more than just a collection of unrelated topics?

This series of posts (Reading the Letter of James) will focus on how to read James in a way that moves beyond the typical understanding of it as a serious of separate topics. What can we learn from “James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ”?

My sermon today was about God's grace and mercy in James. Although there is much in James about what we do, God's grace is the beginning and end of it all. Just like in the Old Testament, God is also the main character of the New Testament, and in the Letter of James. More on that next time...

Wikipedia - Good for Research or Not?

2007-08-19T23:27:00.000-10:00

Wikipedia is that online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. And it has made the headlines this week when a student created a software program that allows you to figure out who has edited articles from the history of computer IP addresses that have accessed the site. It's pretty interesting to see who has edited what.

Bibliobloggers (first by Ben Witherington III and then by Jim West) have begun commenting on this and the usefulness of Wikipedia and other internet resources for academic research. But I really must side with Mark Goodacre on this one. Good on you, Mark, for encouraging your students to engage their resources critically!

Part of the reason the internet is such a valuable resource is that it makes many resources available quickly. This enables research to be pursued critically much more readily than the perusal of print resources. Not that the internet should replace research of print resources, but the process of critical evaluation can happen so much more quickly (and broadly) using the internet. I have often found that Wikipedia touches on a wider range of issues relating to a topic (and links to related articles) that aren’t always covered by more specialist resources.

It wasn't until the last class of my second M.A. program (at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics) over a year ago that I was required to do some internet research for a class project. We were supposed to interact critically with the sources we found. While I skipped "Andy's paper" on the topic I was researching (even though he got an 'A'), I did include the Wikipedia article among other quality sources that I found. Comparing the resources allowed me to evaluate the Wikipedia article. I found that although other internet resources went into more detail and were perhaps more accurate in some respects, the Wikipedia article had value that other resources did not. And Wikipedia pointed me to other resources as well!

The unique aspect of Wikipedia that makes it attractive as a source is that it is easily editable by anybody. Although that may also be its greatest weakness, it is at least potentially a great check for accuracy and comprehensiveness. Their strict “no original research” and “neutral point-of-view” policies mean that only verifiable information is allowed. These seem to be good checks for reliability. Of course, there is always the question of the Wikipedia editors' bias.

Wikipedia doesn’t need to be ruled out as a source. But we do need to critically assess anything we read.

Blessing and Cursing our Brothers

2007-08-18T11:48:00.000-10:00

Dr. Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary, has issued a corrective for Wiley Drake, the California pastor who has called his congregation to pray curses on those who have opposed his combined religious and political activites. Witherington gives us a more appropriate hermeneutic for understanding human curses found in the Bible...

His supposed Biblical precedent for this is the imprecatory psalms of David. I don't know what seminary this pastor went to, but boy has he misunderstood those psalms. They don't reveal the will of God in such matters, rather they shed God's light of truth on what is in the wicked heart of human beings, including in David's heart, that old murderer and adulterer.
Witherington continued to point out Jesus’ and Paul’s teachings in the New Testament (Matthew 5.44; Romans 12.14) about loving our enemies, blessing them, praying for them, and NOT cursing them.

This is a good reminder to me. I have recently considered the appropriateness of following in the footsteps of Elijah and calling down fire from heaven. Seriously, when my house and my family are threatened, my first inclination—even my second, third, and fourth—is to respond in kind. And I don’t mean kindly, but in the same kind of way, but perhaps worse. After all, I’ve got God on my side, and I could show them what power really is, right? But when the disciples considered doing this, Jesus rebuked them because that was not the right spirit…

When His disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” But He turned and rebuked them, and said, “You do not know what kind of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them.”
Luke 9.54-56

One response to the Witherington’s post raised the issue of God's purposes in OT curses...

What is the best way to view these psalms of cursing? I have been reading Christopher Wright's book Mission in the OT and as I read the post I was reminded of the Abrahamic promise that God would curse those who curse Abraham's descendants. I wonder if some of these psalms are outworkings of this promise. Of course, it should always be kept in mind that the central purpose of the covenant with Abraham was to bless the nations with the knowledge of God.
I appreciate Witherington's follow-up comments, especially since he brings James into the mix...

I think actually Luther had a very good point when he said that in the prophets God speaks to us, but in the psalms we speak to God, and what is in and on our hearts is truly and truthfully revealed. How then are such psalms God's Word? The answer is not difficult-- they show God holding up a mirror to us so we will see our own hearts and what is in them-- ranging from praise to cursing. As James once said-- blessing and cursing should not be coming out of the same human mouth or heart for that matter.
I love this illustration of God’s word being like a mirror so that we can see our own hearts. The last devotion I gave in the Greek course this week was from 2 Corinthians 3.18...

Beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, we are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.
Even though mirrors normally just show us the reality of what we look like (imperfections and all), when we look at God’s word as a mirror, or when we look at our Lord Jesus as a mirror, God uses the mirror to actually change us. We are transformed so that the glory in the image of Jesus is reflected back into us. We become like Jesus. His desires become our desires.

What is so interesting to me about the comparison between the comments of Jesus and James in Matthew 5.44 and James 3.1-12 is that they both have the spiritual status of the Christ-follower in mind, not primarily that of the enemy. Thus, not only does Jesus say to "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" in Matthew 5.44, the next clause says, "so that you may become sons of your father in heaven." While we are urged to pray for our persecutors, the issue in focus in Matthew 5 is our own standing before the Father who acts graciously to both the just and the unjust. I'm surprised that the text doesn't urge prayer so that ‘your enemies’ can come into relationship with the Father. Instead, it says so that YOU may become sons of your father. Perhaps that's what Pastor Wiley Drake should be concerned about.

And what about Christians who follow Jesus' ethics? Has Pastor Drake in some way become our enemy? How should we respond to him and about him? Let's hope we reflect our Father's character.

By the way, the follow-up comments to Ben Witherington’s post includes an interesting translation-related question regarding the Arabic name for God, Allah. Arabic Christians and Muslims worship a God named Allah. But the Muslim Allah is the God of jihad and curses, and the Christian Allah is the God of blessing and love for one’s enemies.

Is Greek a "Must" to Love God?

2007-08-18T01:16:00.000-10:00

My first several posts on this blog included references to learning Greek as a spiritual discipline of the mind. This was discussed in my July 30th posting Love God and Others: ΑΓΑΠΗΣΕΙΣ, in my July 31 posting Teaching New Testament Greek: Guiding Principles, in my August 1st postings Learning Greek is a Spiritual Discipline and Luther and Hafemann on Studying Greek, and in my August 2nd posting Researching God's Word, My Sometimes Idol.

A friend viewed these posts and asked...

Can I still love God with my mind if I don't know Greek?

This is a great question. One might wonder from all my ramblings about the topic if my answer might be 'no'. But of course, there are lots of opportunities in which one can use the mind to love God. We use our minds to love God any time that we use critical thinking skills to weigh the input we're receiving from the world around us and submit that process to what we know of God's revelation to us.

But what about using the mind specifically in the process of understanding the scriptures? Can I still love God by using my mind to study his word if I don't know Greek? Well, certainly you can. You can read God's word, seek to understand his word, live of life of prayer informed by his word, and do his word, applying it critically and creatively in the world around you.

But what is God's word and what is your responsibility for training others in how to read it? No matter what English version you're reading, it's still a translation from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek manuscripts, and there is no such thing as a perfect translation. Don't get me wrong. I appreciate the fact that Philip explained the scriptures to the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:35), and that people like John Wyclif, William Tyndale, Martin Luther, William Carey, and Cameron Townsend advanced the cause of Bible translation so that the common people can hear God's word in a language they understand. And that's why I'm an advisor for mother tongue translators.

But the fact remains that the scriptures were originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Anything else is a translation. No translation can reflect the intricacies of the source text language, and attempts to thoroughly do so may easily lead to information overload or distort the focus of a passage.

Every translation is also an interpretation. Even if the translators seek to remain unbiased in translating the meaning of the text, it is impossible to translate without interpreting the source text. They may do it inadvertently, but they do it.

Without the use of the original language tools, one can compare translations and read commentaries. But if one is willing to do that time-consuming work on a regular basis, why not rather learn Greek and Hebrew and interact more meaningfully with those secondary sources?

Here's what William Mounce says about this in his Basics of Biblical Greek grammar...

The main purpose of writing this book is to help you to understand better and to communicate more clearly the word of God.... Remember the goal: a clearer, more exact, and more persuasive presentation of God's saving message. But is knowing Greek essential in reaching this goal?

Mounce uses an illustration of an engine overhaul to make his point...

What tools do you select? I would surmise that with a screw driver, hammer, a pair of pliers, and perhaps a crow bar, you could make some progress. But look at the chances you are taking. Without a socket wrench you could ruin many of the bolts. Without a torque wrench you cannot get the head seated properly. The point is, without the proper tools you run the risk of doing a minimal job, and perhaps actually hurting the engine.

This reminds me of a saying I have often heard my dad say. Whenever we're working on a project and we struggle to get it right for a while before we find the proper tool for the job, my dad always says, "It's easy... when you have the right tool." When you finally have the right tool, you wish you hadn't wasted all that time trying to do the job with the wrong tools. The right tool does the job right and it does it quickly. The same is true for the task of studying God's word. Mounce continues...

The same is true with preaching, teaching, preparing personal Bible studies, and learning Greek. Without the proper tools you are limited in your ability to deal with the text....

But there is more. Almost all the best commentaries and biblical studies require a knowledge of Greek. Without it, you will not have access to the lifelong labors of scholars who should be heard.

So can we love God with our minds without Greek? Of course we can! But Greek is an invaluable tool for studying God's word more precisely and meaningfully.

Learn New Testament Greek - Dobson #1

2007-08-18T00:30:00.000-10:00

It's not #1. This is just my 1st post about it. The textbook we are using for the New Testament Greek course is John H. Dobson's Learn New Testament Greek. This textbook was chosen by others who developed the course before I was asked to teach, so I cannot be credited or blamed for this choice. But at least I have the opportunity to review it. You can see where it lines up with other grammars according to Mark Goodacre's poll of favorite Greek grammars at his NT Gateway Weblog last month. My choice would have been William Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek, which ranked highest in Mark's poll. I used Mounce when I started over learning Greek the summer before I entered the Wheaton College Graduate School in 1998. But perhaps Dobson's approach is the best choice for Melanesian students and the learning style that they are familiar with. I'll blog more about this later.

The first thing I can say about Dobson's textbook is that it far beats the textbook with which I was introduced to Greek in 1994. When I was at Houghton College, we used Story and Story's Greek to Me. Although it's a cute title for a Greek textbook, I'm afraid that was also the result--Greek was still pretty much a foreign language for me. The main feature of Story and Story's textbook was these little cartoon drawings that were meant to be used as mnemonic devices to learn vocabulary and grammar. The only one I remember was the first one in the book for the word ἐγείρω, which means "I raise up." A Robin Hood character is raising up an 'egg-arrow'. That one was actually pretty helpful. The others were not.

My contention is that mnemonic devices work best when the learners create them in their own minds.

Perhaps it would have worked better if the cartoons were in color like the one here, but the black-and-white line drawings had too much detail to easily make them out. My time would have been better spent using my own brain to learn Greek than trying to figure out what somebody else's memory aid was supposed to mean.

The main feature of Dobson's Learn New Testament Greek is that it has was designed for non-native English speakers. This means that grammatical terminology is only explained after the forms have been introduced in exercises that illustrate how they fit within the context of sentences. For example, the terms 'nominative', 'accusative', 'genitive', 'dative', 'masculine', 'feminine', and 'neuter' are only introduced in ch. 12, pg. 67, after these things have been introduced in successive chapters with only the use of English glosses.

I do appreciate the attempt to teach Greek in a way that follows some natural language-learning principles. I hope that the abundance of practice exercises in each chapter proves helpful to my Melanesian students who so frequently learn skills within their cultures by doing them, not by reading about them.

Because of the avoidance of grammatical terminology, the section headings in each chapter normally do not contain any description of the section's content. It seems that the book was intended simply to be used as a step-by-step procedure. This lack of descriptive headings, however, makes the book difficult to use when one wants to go back and review earlier content.

Certainly for people who speak English as a second language, the use of grammatical terminology could amount to information overload. Since I am teaching national Bible translators and pastors who regularly consult secondary literature, however, one of the goals of the course is for them to become familiar with the standard terminology. So in class, I use the terminology, and I remind them that they will not be tested on the terms. But I tell them I want them to be familiar with it so they have some idea what others are talking about when they come across these words in commentaries and translation helps. I usually get a classroom full of approving nods.

Cheap Theses and Dissertations

2007-08-17T16:48:00.000-10:00

Rick Brannon of Logos Bible Software (what a great resource for those of us who need to carry our libraries with us to the farthest parts of the world!) recently posted about the high cost of some academic publications and one possible way to get similar content for cheaper.

Rick's post was about a book that I have desired related to one of my latest interests in biblical studies, textual criticism. James Royse's dissertation, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri, is a groundbreaking study in textual criticism that is frequently referenced in current literature on the subject. And now we can buy it for just $369.00 from Brill! Ouch! Well, that's the difference between publishing 100,000 copies of a book that will end up in every bookstore around the world and printing only several hundred copies that will end up in every major university research library around the world (and in the personal libraries of a chosen few who deem the subject worthy of such expense).

But even for those of us who think the book might actually be worth it's weight in gold, what if we just don't have the gold? We can either find it in our local research library--but I'm a few thousand miles away from my local research library(!)--or we can follow Rick Brannon's suggestion. Royse's original 1981 dissertation of 751 pages is available from UMI Dissertation Express for $41.00 plus shipping. That's still quite a bit, but it's 89% off the price from Brill. Of course, we don't know how much the dissertation has been changed in the last 26 years. Royse has not been idle for the last quarter century.

This option for getting Royse's dissertation reminds me of another service that's available to get electronic copies of theological theses and dissertations. Theological Research Exchange Network, or TREN, sells graduate studies in PDF format for a relatively small price. For example, an M.A. thesis from Wheaton College Graduate School titled "Noachic Allusion and Echo in James 3.1-12: Implicatures of New Creation Eschatology" is available there for $15.00. That one was completed in 2002 by someone very close to me. Of course, I could give you a higher quality searchable PDF for free.

But something I just noticed for the first time yesterday is that TREN offers all of their titles for free to TREN authors...

And remember if you are the author of a title on this list or in the TREN E-Docs library (www.tren.com/e-docs) and would like a free PDF copy of your file please write to me at rwjones@tren.com to request your copy. I'll be glad to email it to you pronto. Also, as an author if you notice a title in the TREN Edocs library that you'd like to have let me know. It's yours for the asking. Many thanks for your participation in TREN.

I don't know how long that has been true. I have purchased a few TREN titles in the last year. But now I and any other TREN authors can get all the other titles for free.

If you're not a TREN author, there are other great deals I just learned about today. Some of their titles are always offered for FREE! And you don't have to buy the other titles individually for $15.00. A 6 month subscription costs $100.00 and allows you 25 titles ($4 each). A year's subscription is $200.00 and allows you 70 titles ($2.85 each). There's a deal there for libraries too.

Zyphyr update on August 26, 2007:
I have learned today that I was mistaken about TREN authors being able to get unlimited TREN e-docs for free. The offer is simply for a free copy of the author's own work plus ONE additional title. Sorry for the confusion!

Greek and James: God's Grace and Mercy

2007-08-12T23:11:00.000-10:00

I'm going to be relying heavily on the Lord's grace and mercy over the next two weeks.

In the Greek course, we will be reviewing after only 10 days of class...

Greek alphabet and diacritical marks
present verbs
imperfect verbs
subjunctive mood
contract verb forms
the gender, number and case of nouns and articles
personal pronouns
relative pronouns
demonstrative pronouns
adverbial and substantival participles

This next week Iwill be introducing...

capital letters
forms of εἰμί ('to be' verbs)
prepositions
infinitives
the gender of participles
and giving the first exam

So what does this have to do with James? Well, nothing, except that I will be preparing at the same time for my preaching responsibilities over the next two weeks at the international church here.

Here is what I have communicated to the church...

If you would like to prepare to hear God's word over the next two Sundays at the English morning service, the sermons will come from the Letter of James. It might be the most helpful if you try to read James as a coherent whole and not as a collection of unrelated topics. From James, we will continue to hear what we were hearing this morning. As it was summarized at the end of the message today, our faith comes from and is directed towards Jesus from beginning to end.

And the sermon titles for the next two Sundays...

19 August: "James on God's grace in the believer's life journey"
26 August: "James on God's mercy in the believer's judgment"

Consider it all joy,

Zephyr

The Meaning of the Word "the"

2007-08-07T17:30:00.000-10:00

Since I was out sick yesterday, today was my first day in the classroom with 13 students who have been learning Greek for a week and 5 students who just arrived over the weekend. So the first group read chapters 10-12 for today while the newcomers are somewhere around ch. 6. My goal is to help make this course as successful as it can be for everyone, so I'm just thrilled that we have a full classroom and that the newcomers made the effort to earn their travel fare and make the long trek here.

Today in class, I decided to go back and review the main content in chs. 7-9, even though it was covered yesterday in my absence. I figured with several new members of the class and the quick pace of the course, it couldn't hurt to spend a little more time on review.

Since feminine nouns were introduced in ch. 9, this led to a comparison of Greek, English and the students' local languages in regards to the use of articles. I suspected that many of them did not even have definite articles in their languages. I made the point that Greek is very different from English in the use of definite articles, since English only uses 'the', but Greek has a paradigm of articles that includes three genders and five cases. And then someone asked...

What does the word 'the' mean?

Good question!

In English we call 'the' the definite article. It specifies a noun that is definite. It's known information. I used an example of a boy who walks into the back of the class. We could refer to that boy as 'the boy' because everyone in the class saw him come in and the noun phrase 'the boy' would refer specifically to him. On the other hand, if I talk about a boy that I can see walking by the window in the back of the class, I need to refer to him as 'a boy' because no one else knows who I'm talking about.

Because the definite article is used with nouns that refer to known information introduced earlier in a text, it serves a discourse function. The definite article doesn't operate only at the sentence level. In this way, English and Greek can be very similar in the use of articles.

On the other hand, there are differences. One readily observable difference is the use of articles with names in Greek! So when we read 'the God' in Greek, this should not necessarily trigger our normal English-language understanding of such a phrase. Greek also regularly speaks of 'the Jesus' just like it refers to 'the James' and 'the Peter'.

Greek Course Goes On Without Me

2007-08-06T15:00:00.000-10:00

I came down with a bad cold on Tuesday, the day before the Greek course started. I survived the first three days of the course, teaching for most of 6 hours each day. I thought the weekend would give me a chance to rest up and get over it, but it steadily got worse on Saturday, and by Sunday it was clear I had a sinus infection.

So I contacted the three mentors who are helping with the course and asked if they could cover for me on Monday. I saw the doctor and started taking meds. She said I could go back on Tuesday if I was up to it. I'm so thankful for these assistants and all they're doing to help the course run smoothly.

One of the biggest reasons I don't want to be out for more than this one day is that 5 new students arrived late to the course over the weekend. They had to travel all night by boat and all day by vehicle to get to the course. It's going to be tough for them to catch up after missing the first three days of an intensive course, but we'll help them be successful.

Singing Greek Prayers for Greek Learning

2007-08-03T18:08:00.000-10:00

'Kumbaya' is that old campfire song that has been sung so much that it tends to usher forth groans. But many Papua New Guineans also know the song, at least in the pidgin version. And so we sing it in Greek as a prayer at least a couple times a day to let Jesus know that his presence is welcome in our study of Greek. He is Lord of the beginning, middle and end, just as we started singing from Revelation 1:8 on the first day of class. And so we also invite Jesus to come and be present with us in our study of Greek:

ἔρχου ὧδε κύριε, (3x)
ὦ Ἰησοῦ κύριε

Come here Lord, (3x)
Oh, Jesus Lord.

Having the guitar close by to sing these songs is a good tool for when we need to maintain our focus on learning Greek as a spiritual discipline. It can be easily forgotten when we're learning to recognize and write a new alphabet, forcing our tongues to make new sound sequences, and trying to distinguish between all those little diacritical marks that we see in the text.

Greek Diphthongs, Diacritics and Punctuation

2007-08-02T09:30:00.000-10:00

Here's the next Greek lesson for those who mastered the alphabet...

1. Greek includes these diphthongs (two vowels that make one sound). Notice that four of them have Upsilon as the second vowel and four of them have Iota as the second vowel:

 αυ     αι

 ου     οι

 ευ     ει

 ηυ     υι

2. Greek has these improper diphthongs (a small iota written under α, η, or ω). We can remember which vowels can have a iota subscript by noticing that it is only the three vowels that have some kind of dent or open area at the bottom of the vowel. All the other vowels have rounded bottoms.

 ᾳ  ῃ  ῳ

3. The Greek letter gamma (γ) is pronounced as /n/ or /ng/ (called a 'gamma nasal') when it comes before other velar letters (made with the back of the tongue touching the top of the mouth):

γ is pronounced  /n/  or  /ng/  before κ, χ, ξ, or another γ

αγκα = angka
αγχα = angkha
αγξα = angxa
αγγα = angga

4. Greek includes these other diacritical marks:

 Accents:
  ά    (acute accent)
  ὰ    (grave accent)
  α` or ᾶ   (circumflex accent)

 Accents with breathing marks:
            smooth  rough
  acute       ἄ       ἅ
  grave       ἂ       ἃ
  circumflex  ἆ       ἇ

 Apostrophe: ’
  (δι’  αὐτοῦ'  from   διά  αὐτοῦ,  'through him')

When a preposition ends with a vowel and the next word begins with a vowel, the final vowel of the first word drops out and is marked with an ’ apostrophe. This is similar to English contractions (I am becomes I’m, and we are becomes we’re )

 Diaeresis: αϊ

(two dots over the second vowel to show that this is NOT a  diphthong producing a single sound, e.g. Ἠσαϊας, Isaiah)

5. Greek includes some punctuation marks that differ from English:

            Greek  English
 Comma:     λόγος,  word,
 Full stop: λόγος.  word.
 Colon:     λόγος•  word;
 Question:  λόγος;  word?

Researching God's Word, My Sometimes Idol

2007-08-02T07:00:00.000-10:00

From my last post, I must recognize that I need to be the learner just as much as the teacher regarding this call from Scott Hafemann that I passed on to my students:

I would like you to think about Greek as loving the Lord with your mind in the same way that you engage in loving the Lord with your heart and your soul and your strength in all the other pursuits of your life.

Oh, how often I need to hear this in my own daily ministry routine. It's ironic that I can be so deep into God's word—preparing for a translation session, a teaching assignment, or delving into a biblical research interest—and yet I can easily approach God's word as a work project devoid of any real relationship with God.

I'm not talking about reading the Bible as a task to be checked off. No, for me it's that I too often fall in love with the practice of the reading the word instead of loving the Presence of the Word who can speak into every minute of my life. I love my work, and I enjoy the flowers alongside of the road. But I can get so engrossed in the details of the exegetical pathway that I lose sight of the journey's destination. In this sense, even my time in God's word can become an idol. It reminds me of something that my first undergraduate Bible teacher, Carl Schultz, used to say at Houghton College:

Make sure that in your exegesis you do not exit Jesus.

I think he was talking about a certain brand of scholars who tend to divorce the divine Jesus from the biblical text. But the warning applies equally well to my pursuit of biblical scholarship without it being a spiritual discipline offered in love to God.

When the study of God's word lacks devotion to God himself, it could be an idol for me. Do I love my academic discipline more than my Lord and my God?
μὴ γένοιτο. May it never be!

But he gives a greater grace. Therefore it says, "God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
James 4.6-8

Lord, give me your grace each day to draw near to you, and won't you arouse me from my spiritual wandering when I simply follow the daily grind?

Meaning of ψιλον

2007-08-02T05:15:00.000-10:00

The question came up in class about whether the letters of the Greek alphabet had meanings like so many of the Hebrew letters do. It's clear that Omicron and Omega are related 'o' vowels as we can tell when Omicron gets lengthened to Omega in subjunctive forms. The very names of these vowels mean "small 'o'" (o-micron) and "big 'o'" (o-mega).

We also know that epsilon and eta are related in the same manner. So my students wanted to know the meaning of ψιλον found in Epsilon and Upsilon. Although Eta (as the long 'e' vowel) relates to Epsilon in the same way that Omega relates to Omicron, they do not correspond in the meaning of their names the same way that Omega and Omicron do. It is not 'e-micron' and 'e-mega'! So does the 'ta' have a meaning in the vowel Eta?

And what does ψιλον mean? I have seen suggestions of 'plain', 'bare', 'simple', and 'strait'. But that also raises the question of the Upsilon. What was the corresponding non-plain, non-bare, non-simple, or non-strait u vowel earlier in the history of the Greek language? It was the Digamma. Both Upsilon and Digamma derived from the Phoenecian letter Waw. Linguistically, that the /u/ sound would be related to the /w/ sound makes perfect sense.

Knowing a little bit of this Greek language history helps us with Koine Greek. Why doesn't the verb ἀκούω contract? The Upsilon has replaced an earlier Digamma. Why doesn't the verb καλέω lengthen its contract vowel? A Digamma had formerly followed the Epsilon (examples from William Mounce, Basics of Biblical Greek, 1993, pp. 134, 160).

But can anyone clarify the meaning of ψιλον and tell us what its corresponding non-ψιλον vowel means?

Luther and Hafemann on Studying Greek

2007-08-01T19:04:00.000-10:00

When I first found out that I would be teaching the introductory New Testament Greek course to national Bible translators and pastors in Papua New Guinea this month, I had to write my former Greek teacher, Scott Hafemann, right away. He was the first one who ever thought I would be doing this. Back when I was taking his classes for the Wheaton College Graduate School in 1998-99, I knew I was studying Greek so I could be a better qualified advisor to national Bible translators. But he was confident that I would be training mother tongue translators to use the Greek text for themselves.

So when I wrote to Scott with the news, he immediately made available to me the CD for his soon-to-be-released online course for distance learning through the Semlink Office at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

In the first lesson on the CD, Hafemann reminded me of a quote from Martin Luther that he had recited for us in class in 1999. Luther talks about how important the study of Greek is…

Insofar as we love the gospel, to that same extent, let us study the ancient tongues. And let us notice that without the knowledge of languages we can scarcely preserve the gospel. Languages are the sheath which hides the sword of the Spirit, they are the chest in which this jewel is enclosed, the goblet holding this draught. Where the languages are studied, the proclamation will be fresh and powerful, the scriptures will be searched, and the faith will be constantly rediscovered through ever new words and deeds.

I explained Luther's images of the sheath, the chest, and the goblet so that my English-as-a-second-language students could fully grasp the word pictures. Papua New Guineans frequently use 'tok piksa' in their daily conversations. Judging from the nods and groans that accompanied the teaching, I believe Luther's message spoke powerfully to the students. One student even came and asked for the quote after class. He got the following quote from Hafemann as a bonus.

Echoing Luther in his online course, Hafemann states:

Our study of the Greek language is not an end in itself, but we study Greek for the sake of knowing scripture, and we know scripture for the sake of understanding God’s self-revelation to us, and we want to understand God’s self-revelation to us that we might live in relationship with him. So Greek for the sake of scripture, scripture for the sake of knowing the Lord, and knowing the Lord for the sake of living in relationship with him. Greek and the gospel: inextricably linked...

It’s a spiritual discipline. Learning Greek is not simply an academic exercise. It’s a calling and it’s a privilege. It is a spiritual exercise like any other spiritual exercise, whether it’s prayer, fasting, worship. I would like you to think about Greek as loving the Lord with your mind in the same way that you engage in loving the Lord with your heart and your soul and your strength in all the other pursuits of your life.

That is what I am asking my Greek students to do here in PNG. Throughout the 6 hours that we have together each day, we intersperse the lectures and group activities with prayer, singing, Christian greetings, and lessons from God's word that illustrate the Greek material. They are used to hearing explanations of God's word through two or three subsequent translations, and they said "maybe something has gone missing." So they are motivated to learn Greek so they can really hear God's message to them and live in relationship with him.

Learning Greek is a Spiritual Discipline

2007-08-01T17:00:00.000-10:00

My passion for Greek was ignited in 1998 when I started graduate school at Wheaton College and took classes from Dr. Scott Hafemann. His teaching was a model for academic rigor that is not divorced from a life of faith lived in service for others. His challenge was that the study of Greek not simply be an academic exercise, but a spiritual discipline in which we love God with our minds (cf. Mark 12.30). This was a challenge I needed to hear.

So, this is how I seek to teach my intensive introductory New Testament Greek course to Papua New Guineans this month. One of the things we are doing as we learn Greek is to learn Greek scripture songs.

We started with the alphabet. In Revelation 1.8 we read that "Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the one who was, and is, and is to come, the ruler over all things." So Jesus used the Greek alphabet to explain his sovereignty. He is ruler of all. And that means he is ruler over this Greek course. An intensive NT Greek course that meets for 6 hours a day for 6 weeks is difficult! But Jesus is ruler of this course as well.

So the first song we learned goes like this:

Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon,
Zeta, eta, theta, iota,
Kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron,
Pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon,
Phi, chi, psi, omega,
Ἰησοῦς ἐστίν τὸ Ἄλφα καὶ τὸ Ὦ
(Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega)

It sure is pretty powerful to hear a room full of Papua New Guineans belting this out full voice on the first day of class. Although it seems a little bit like 1st grade with the alphabet in big letters up on the wall across the length of the room, it's not just an academic exercise. Even the foundational lesson on the alphabet is a spiritual discipline of singing praise to Jesus as Lord.

Greek Alphabet and Pronunciation

2007-08-01T16:30:00.000-10:00

This was covered today during the first day of class.

For those of you who would say that Greek is "Greek to me," here's a lesson for you...

1. Here is the Greek alphabet in capital letters and lower case letters with their names:

Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ
Μ Ν Ξ Ο Π Ρ Σ Τ Υ Φ Χ Ψ Ω

α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ
μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ τ υ φ χ ψ ω

alpha beta gamma delta epsilon zeta eta theta iota kappa lambda mu nu xi omicron pi rho sigma tau upsilon phi chi psi omega

2. These Greek letters look similar to Latin letters and also represent similar sounds:

α β δ ε ι κ ο ς τ υ
alpha beta delta epsilon iota kappa omicron sigma tau upsilon

3. These Greek letters look like Latin letters but represent different sounds:

η (ēta) is not 'n'. The Greek letter η makes an /e/ sound, transliterated as ē.

ν (nu) is not 'v'. The Greek letter ν makes an /n/ sound.

ρ (rho) is not 'p'. The Greek letter ρ makes an /r/ sound.

χ (chi) is not 'x'. The Greek letter χ makes a /kh/ sound, transliterated as 'ch'.

ω (ōmega) is not 'w'. The letter ω makes an /o/ sound, transliterated as ō.

4. These Greek letters are transliterated with two letters:

θ = th
ξ = ks, xs, or x
φ = ph, pronounced /f/
χ = ch, pronounced /kh/
ψ = ps

5. The Greek letter sigma is written differently when it appears at the end of words:

σεισμός, seismos, 'shaking, earthquake'
σής, sēs, 'moth'
σιτιστός, sitistos, 'fattened'

6. Greek vowels and ρ (rho) must have breathing marks ( ̔ or ̓ ) if they begin a word:

ἀ, a (smooth breathing)
ἁ, ha (rough breathing – makes 'h' sound)

ῥ (rho) and ὑ (upsilon) always have rough breathing when they begin a word.

7. Greek has two sets of vowels that relate to one another:

ω (ō mega) is the long form of ο (o micron)
η (ēta) is the long form of ε (epsilon)

Teaching New Testament Greek - Guiding Principles

2007-07-31T19:17:00.000-10:00

Tomorrow I start teaching New Testament Greek to 19 national translators and pastors in Papua New Guinea. Here are the guiding principles that I included in the syllabus:

The study of New Testament Greek is a spiritual discipline. We learn Greek in order to know and understand the New Testament scriptures better. We study the scriptures in order to know God more. Therefore, the study of Greek is one way that we love God with our mind.
The study of New Testament Greek is a tool for ministry. We learn Greek not simply for our own good, but to love and serve others. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek. Koine means 'common' – it was the language of the common people. We learn Koine Greek not to raise ourselves up above others, but to become better equipped to communicate God's message to all people.
The study of New Testament Greek is foundational for independent exegesis of New Testament texts. We learn Greek not to strengthen our own biased interpretations of the text, but to better understand the range of possible and probable meanings that can be derived from the language used. Therefore, the study of the Greek language goes hand in hand with understanding general principles of interpretation.
The study of New Testament Greek is inseparable from our knowledge of other languages. Knowledge of other languages aids the student in learning Greek by recognizing the similarities and differences between languages. Such cross-linguistic comparison also aids the student in communicating the meaning of Greek texts into other languages, whether that communication occurs in oral or written explanation or in translation.
The study of New Testament Greek is necessary for understanding secondary literature about the New Testament. In order to follow the discussion in commentaries, theologies, and translation helps, one must be familiar with the patterns of Greek language and standard grammatical terminology. Even if a student is not able to master the Greek language, familiarity with the standard terminology will be helpful in using exegetical resources and translation helps.
The study of New Testament Greek is a valuable discipline to pursue in a pattern of continued lifelong learning. In a 6 week course, one can only be introduced to the Greek language. However, skills and resources that will help the student to continue making progress in the study of Greek will be introduced. Self-discipline is key to the ongoing learning process.

Love God and Others: ΑΓΑΠΗΣΕΙΣ

2007-07-30T04:35:00.000-10:00

The blog title ΑΓΑΠΗΣΕΙΣ is the Greek word for "you will love." It's the word used in the Greek New Testament (e.g. Mark 12.30) when referencing the Hebrew confession of faith—the Shema’—in Deuteronomy 6.4-5. I have chosen ΑΓΑΠΗΣΕΙΣ as the title of this blog because its double use in Mark 12.30-31 summarizes what this blog is about:

knowing God's word
in order to love God
and love others

In Mark 12.29-31, Jesus anwers the question, "What is the greatest commandment?" He responds by quoting the Shema’ from Deuteronomy 6.4 that pious Jews would have confessed every morning and evening:

Hear, oh Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

Jesus continues from Deuteronomy 6.5:

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

While the Hebrew only has a tripartite division of the person, Jesus adds the 'mind' as a fourth aspect with which to love God. The meaning is the same: love God with all of who you are.

In Mark 12.31 Jesus continues with the second greatest commandment:

The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.

This blog is devoted to the interpretation of scripture in order to love God and love others. Some of my primary interests to be included in this blog are...

biblical exegesis
biblical theology
use of OT in the NT
Greek language
Hebrew language
Bible translation
linguistics
discourse analysis
cognitive semantics
the Letter of James
textual criticism
teaching
preaching

Many of my interests are quite academic in nature, yet I do not wish to live in my own little world of books and research. I want to pursue these interests in such a way that I love God with all of who I am and also love others more than myself. Thus, in this blog I wish to love God and others by sharing my everyday thoughts concerning the above disciplines.