Announcing Habitualist.com - go James Tauber !

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...

1. List the things you'd like to do on a regular basis and group them into routines
2. Track your success or failure and monitor your progress over time.
3. 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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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:

1. "being confident in you all, that my joy and yours go hand in hand."
2. "...that my joy is connected (joined? linked?) to your joy."
3. "...that my joy is connected to all of you."
4. "...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…