Typographica (cool typography-related blog) has a posting about the benefits of owning/perusing The Manual of Linotype Typography.

Hear, hear. I agree. I've seen and perused in-depth a copy of this book, and it is astounding. In a design rut? Page through this guy to get inspired. Sure, some would say that the look is dated (the manual is from the 1920s/1930s) but there are good things going on in this book. Drop the over-thick page borders and dated colors, but look at the spacing, sizes, and font selection. And some of the sample text used is simply priceless.

The Typographica article has several links to sample pages.

If you want to get really classically inspired, you could also poke through Alan Bartram's Five hundred years of book design.

Yesterday I picked up a post on B-Greek about the new NA27/NET Diglot from The Biblical Studies Foundation. Check out the photo. This looks exactly like the classic NA27/RSV English diglot, only instead of the RSV it has the NET translation, and instead of the English apparatus it has the oh-so-useful NET text-critical notes.

Thinking about this (yeah, I'm gonna buy one) I was thinking about the usefulness of the NA27 apparatus to the average Greek dude (or dudette, as the case may be). The apparatus is unapproachable for most because it is hopelessly cryptic unless one has diligently taught himself the language of the apparatus. If one desires to use the apparatus, he dooms himself to looking up MSS in the table in the back. And even then, not much info on the MSS are given. The date/century is helpful, but do I really care about what library the MSS is in currently? I'd rather know more about the provenance, not the current location.

Anyway, there are two primary classes of cited MSS for each major portion of the NT (gospels, acts, paulines, catholic epistles, and the apocalypse). These are the “Consistently Cited Witnesses” and the “Frequently Cited Witnesses”. The primary and most important are the “Consistently Cited Witnesses” as all variants of these MSS are cited for the given range (book/portion). No citation means the MSS either agrees or is missing the reading in question. These consitently cited witnesses are, for larger sections, selected on a book-by-book basis.

I think the most useful and innovative thing that the GBS could do with the NA27 would be to devise a running footer for each two-page spread that lists the consistently cited uncial witnesses for the current book with a short bit of info about each. Not much info — there isn't much room left on the page. But they may be able to squeeze the sigla and century/date if they stretch the list in one or two lines across the two-page spread. It would be great if the uncial data from the witness/abbreviation pamphlet could be used. This way folks would at least get familiar with the sigla for the consistently cited witnesses. Some may object because this focuses on the date, which may or may not be misleading text-critical information. I say it's better than the bupkes that's there now, and it sure beats flipping to the back to look things up. It gets people actually starting to use the information in the apparatus on a regular basis because the barrier to entry is much lower.

Or, one could just use the electronic version ... :)

I've been reading further in 2 Clement (see previous post) and I've noticed further usage of the “double” metaphor used earlier.

For instance, I earlier cited 2Cl 10.5's use of “double penalty”, regarding those who teach improperly and those who follow the improper teachers.

I've run across a few more. Note the citation link looks up Lightfoot's English, which is a little KJV-ish. Ehrman's recent edition reads much better.

• 2Cl 15.1: Those who heed the homilist (the one giving the sermon) save themselves and the homilist.
• 2Cl 19.1: Again, “... so that you may save yourselves and the one who is your reader.”

Please note I'm not examining 2 Clement (or the other documents in the Apostolic Fathers corpus) as if they are Scripture. My interest is in seeing how they applied the NT Scriptures they had -- scattered collections of documents, no formal “canon” as of the writing of 2 Clement.

I find this whole “save/punish themselves and their hearers/readers” motif interesting by itself, but moreso as it is also used in 1Ti 4.16. I'll be keeping my eyes open in the rest of the Apostolic Fathers corpus for this now.

Does anyone have any other citations of this sort of language — Biblical or otherwise — from, say, NT times through 250 AD or so?

I love coffee. Not that fru-fru, all-fancied-up stuff (iced frappa-whatever) but the black gold that is coffee. No cream, no sugar, just the java.

The best coffee I've ever had, in recent memory, is a blend called Panama la Florentina, which is available at Starbucks.

It is only available this time of year. I so enjoyed it last year, I drank it almost exclusively at home for the time it was available. I'm almost afraid to start drinking it again.

Be warned, though: The coffee is excellent when you make it with a French Press; but it loses something when you use a drip machine.

If you've just arrived here from Hypotyposeis, thanks for droppin' by. You're interested in the post immediately below this one: Apostolic Fathers Lookup Tool.

I can sense there will be some questions, so I'll try to head them off:

1. Mr. (Dr.?) Carlson indicated that I am a “programmer for a Bible software company”. I do work for a Bible software company, dealing with text conversions and whatnot — writing code to create electronic resources from existing data in print and such. I'm not a formal “programmer”; I don't work on the interface or search engine code at all. I leave that to others. And no, please don't forward resource suggestions my way; I'll lose them. But do please send them to our standard address.

2. If you're looking for the inside scoop on Bible software and stuff, you should look elsewhere. Like Rubén Gómez' Bible Software Review. Or Bob Pritchett's blog. I don't plan on posting about Bible software here.

3. Have fun with the Apostolic Fathers Lookup tool. I wrote it for my own relatively narrow needs, but hopefully y'all will find it useful.

Cheers!

I spent Saturday night and Sunday afternoon hacking out a quick little tool to help in looking up references to the Apostolic Fathers, in Greek and English. It's all done on the server, so it should work in both IE and FireFox. At least, it seems to work fine on both platforms in my scant testing.

As I study the Pastoral Epistles, I plan on citing the Apostolic Fathers frequently and even building cross-reference indexes between the PE and the Apostolic Fathers. When that happens, I want some way to allow users to click on a reference and see the relevant text.

That, and I find the material interesting, as you can tell from previous quotations and interaction with them on this blog.

With that, here is some information on my little tool. I don't really have a name for it yet beyond Apostolic Fathers Lookup. Obviously I'm a programmer* and not a marketer.

Lookup Methods

Form-Based

I've got a lookup form up on my home page. It should be rather self explanatory. I'd imagine that this would be the least convienent way to use the tool, though.

URL-Based

The lookup currently supports two variables:

• af: This is the reference you want to look up. It's just a string. It consists of the document name (several abbreviations are supported), chapter reference, a colon or full-stop to indicate the chapter/verse break, and the verse reference (or range). Verses are optional, you could feed it only the document name and chapter.
• lang: This is the language of the target text. Currently only 'en' (English) and 'el' (Greek) are supported. If no language is specified, the default is English. In some sections Greek text is lacking (e.g. Polycarp 12). In these situations, Latin is supplied instead of Greek.

Essentially, you're using an URL to specify a reference and language to look up. The ASP page takes in this information and serves back the proper reference in the specified language.

So if one wanted to look up 2 Clement 3.1-2, he would do the following:

• http://www.supakoo.com/rick/af.asp?af=2+Clement 3.1-2

This would open a page with the desired text in English. If Greek is preferred, simply add the language:

• http://www.supakoo.com/rick/af.asp?af=2+Clement 3.1-2&lang=el

Bookmarklets

Are you familiar with bookmarklets? These are easy ways to put short programs in your browser's Links menu. Drag the link hotspot and drop it on your Links toolbar. Then, to use it (well ... at least for the below Bookmarklets) simply highlight the reference on the web page you're reading then push the Bookmarklet button. The text will be looked up automatically. If nothing is highlighted, a text box will pop up where you can type in the reference.

You may drag the below links to your links toolbar if you'd like to experiment in looking up citations in this way.

• English AF Lookup
• Greek AF Lookup

I know these work on IE 6, I haven't tried FireFox. More information on Bookmarklets is available at Bookmarklets.com.

Other Methods

Many blogging engines allow the author to enter macros. The software I use (dasBlog) calls them content filters. They're ways to mark something in the text and then run a short transform on what you marked on the server, before it is served to the user. For instance, I have a content filter that allows me to enter $esv (1Ti 3:15-17). My content filter then changes this into a link that will hit the online ESV so readers of my blog can click on Bible references to read as I cite them.

Actually, this is a secondary reason I wrote this little lookup tool, but it's the primary reason I did it when I did it (it seemed like it would be fun to write). I figured the tool would make it easy to add links to blog posts so readers can easily look things up, or make it easy for me to look things up and then copy/paste them directly into the body of the blog post as I want to. YMMV.

Contents

The following documents are available through this lookup tool:

• First Clement
• Second Clement
• Ignatius to the Ephesians
• Ignatius to the Magnesians
• Ignatius to the Trallians
• Ignatius to the Romans
• Ignatius to the Philadelphians
• Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans
• Ignatius to Polycarp
• Polycarp to the Philippians
• Didache
• Epistle of Barnabas
• Martyrdom of Polycarp
• Epistle to Diognetus

Shepherd of Hermas

The Shepherd of Hermas is not organized as nicely as the rest of the documents contained within the Apostolic Fathers corpus. Everything else is structured by the standard book/chapter/verse structure. However, Hermas is not. One would need either several ugly hacks or a hard-to-use naming system in order to use Hermas in the current structure. If/when I support it, I want to do it properly. So, Hermas is not included, and it may never be. The reasons are purely technical, don't read too much into what I think about Hermas due to its lack of inclusion in this tool.

Prologues

Some books have short prologues of either a sentence or paragraph. These are now chapter 0 of the respective books. So, if you're looking for the prologue to 1 Clement, you want to look up 1Cl 0 or 1Cl 0.1.

Abbreviations

Several abbreviations are supported. See the names XML file for a full list. Yeah, this is a bit geeky, but you should be able to make sense of it. If I'm missing any obvious ones, feel free to email me so I can add them. The email link is at the bottom of the right-hand column.

Encoding

Underneath, everything is in XML and UTF-8. The Greek has been normalized according to form KC normalization. This simply means that where possible, the Greek assumes that fonts have combined characters. So, instead of an alpha, followed by a smooth breathing mark; there is one character — alpha with smooth breathing mark. My preferred Greek font is Gentium; so I've set that as primary. Alternates are Palatino Linotype, then Arial Unicode MS. English and Latin text both use Palatino Linotype, and Latin is italicised.

Out-Of-Range requests

Book names, chapters, and verses are validated. You won't crash anything if you send invalid data, and you'll get a message suggesting where you made your mistake. Note that if invalid verses are specified, one still gets data back, but each verse without data has a short message instead.

Text Editions

As is the case with so many useful older books these days, I found the texts served up by this lookup tool on the internet. I actually retrieved them last year (2003). They had their genesis amongst BibleWorks users who started with the CCAT edition of Lightfoot's Apostolic Fathers.** (Please note that these files are not being used for commercial use, so I'm well within the CCAT guidelines and, as I recall, the preferences of the BibleWorks folks who apparently did some editing on the files.) The files contained references to James M. Darlack (English and Greek), Richard Allen Stauch (Greek), and Ricardo Román (Greek). They should be thanked for their work (thanks, guys!). The files are internally dated as having last been edited in June of 2003.

The English is that of Lightfoot/Harmer, but the Greek is a little confusing. I'd assumed the Greek was that of Lightfoot/Harmer as well, but it isn't. I've checked certain spots of the Greek against the Lightfoot/Harmer volume and noted differences that lead me to believe the text is more reflective of Kirsopp Lake's Greek. I suppose it could have started with the edition of Lake from the Oxford Text Archive and folks added accents and breathings (no small task). Note that CCEL also has an edition of Lake, but it appears to be from a completely different source. I guess I'm saying that I don't really know where the Greek text came from, but I'm guessing it reflects Lake's edition more than any other.

Usage / Citation

Please note that this particular implementation isn't intended for scholarly rigor. If you're citing the Apostolic Fathers in a paper or something, by all means, verify with a printed edition. Or, better, purchase a modern edition (both Holmes' edition and Ehrman's edition are excellent) or check them out from your library and use them. This lookup tool is rather intended to help one quickly look up citations to the Apostolic Fathers in Greek or English as they need them when browsing the web, blogs, newsgroups, etc.

File Availablility

The files are XML with UTF8 encoding. I have one file per chapter. If for some reason you're interested in them, please contact me.

* Well, not really a programmer, but that's the easiest way to describe what it is that I do for a living.

** This is kind of awkward as I am employed by Logos Bible Software. My personal use of these files should not be construed as commercial interest in them by my employer. My use is purely expedient — I wanted to do this, and these were the easiest public domain files with accents and breathing marks that I could transform into something I could use in this context.

Sometimes, when you read things, they hit you. Here's 1Ti 4:16 (ESV, Greek is UBS4/NA27):

I thought of this during lunch today while reading 2 Clement 10.5 (Ehrman's edition, Greek from Lake's edition):

The interesting item, of course, is the “double reward” of 1Ti 4:16, saving one's self and one's hearers; compared with the posited “double penalty” of 2Cl 10.5, dooming one's self and one's hearers.

Those of us who teach have a responsibility to teach correct doctrine (one of the major focuses of the Pastoral Epistles). It is easy, for me anyhow, to get wrapped up in the material and forget about the primary responsibility. I need to do better at that.

A blog I read rather regularly, ChicagoBoyz, has a post that links to some very cool cycling photos from years gone by. There are 90 photos, some are very cool:

Even if you aren't into cycling (I'm not) the pictures are fun to browse through.