It's Christmas Eve. I don't know about you, but here in Bellingham we have at least 2 feet of snow on the ground, which is very unusual for this time of year. And it's still snowing; we got 4-6" more overnight—with more on the way, according to the weather-dude. I get to shovel my driveway for the fourth time in a week! The Christmas Eve service at our church has been canceled. Mail delivery is off-and-on (so much for that "neither snow nor sleet nor hail" bit). We're hoping the garbage truck makes it to pick up our garbage today. And I've been working from home (thanks, Logos!) since last week Friday. This will be the first real white Christmas, with lots of snow, that I can ever recall experiencing.

I wanted to wish a Merry Christmas to all who read ricoblog, and express my gratitude as well. I know my posting has been sporadic this year; hopefully the posts that I've made have been interesting and thought-provoking in some way.

I've come across a few unique tools and charts that I wanted to make sure all you folks out there in TV-land knew about. I find them incredibly interesting and think that you might too.

So enjoy these goodies, and Merry Christmas!

Christmas Goodie #1: What's in Your Bible? An interactive Canon Comparison Chart.  This is from Bible Study Magazine (which is published by Logos), put together my my friend and colleague (in that order), Vincent Setterholm. You're likely aware that most protestant bodies accept 66 books in the Biblical canon, and that there are "apocryphal" or "deuterocanonical" books that are accepted into other traditions' canons. But did you know that the Ethiopian canon (the widest canon) has both a "broad" and "narrow" canon, and that the broad canon includes stuff like purported letters of Peter to Clement? Check the chart out to get a glimpse of the sorts of things going on in the canons of other traditions.

Christmas Goodie #2: Biblindex: Index of Biblical Quotations and Allusions in Early Christian Literature. This as well is very awesome, hat-tip to Kevin P. Edgecomb at Biblicalia. I've mentioned Biblia Patrisica on this blog before; it is a 7 volume (plus one supplement) set that somewhat exhaustively sets out references among the writings of the Fathers to the Bible. Biblindex makes this information available for query:

This site already allows simple interrogation in a corpus of about 400,000 biblical references, from the volumes of Biblia Patristica, CNRS Editions, 1975-2000, and unpublished archives of the Center for Patristics Analysis and Documentation (CADP).

As Kevin notes, the search function is somewhat byzantine. Read the instructions to figure out how things work, it doesn't work like you might think. But it makes a wealth of hard-to-find material available, with a little work. You should bookmark this site.

Christmas Goodie #3: Collation and Evaluation of OT Apocrypha Translations. The hat-tip goes to Mark Hoffman of Biblical Studies and Technological Tools for this one. This originated in a posting to the Biblicalist yahoo group. There is a cool chart, some XML, and a spreadsheet. Check it out, there is some cool and useful information here.