Eli, I submit. You have won. Nothing in my list comes close to Happy Clucking Holidays. Nothing. (Here's the Rhapsody playlist).

I listened to the cluck-o-riffic version of “Carol of the Bells” and couldn't stop simultaneously laughing and despising myself for laughing at the sheer horridity of the sounds emanating from the speakers. Then I listened to the cluck-tastic edition of “Ode to Joy” — Beethoven would enter into anaphalactic shock if he could hear it, but he'd be laughing convulsively all the way.

Mr. Evans, I defer to your Horrible-Christmas-Music-finding greatness. Your skills of scraping the depths of Rhapsody's music vault are unparalleled by mere mortals such as myself.

You, sir, have won.

(pardon me while I wipe the drool off of my keyboard)

Ok. I'm ready now.

I was browsing around earlier today, and I checked up on a project I hadn't checked into for awhile. It is the Biblical Manuscripts Project. Here's a brief description from the site:

The Biblical Manuscripts Project (http://purl.org/BibleMSS) is making high quality images and transcriptions of important Bible manuscripts and early printed editions freely available through the Internet. Development is conducted by biblical scholars at the Religion and Technology Center.

If you're into textual criticism (particularly of the New Testament) then get out your drool-wiping towel, you'll need to wipe the drool off of your keyboard too after visiting this site. Need to see an image of Sinaticus? They've got page images of Tischendorf's pseudo-facsimile. How 'bout Codex Bezae? You know, images of the actual manuscript? No problem.

But those resources have been there for awhile. Since the last time I visited the site, it appears that someone has gone through the Duke Papyrus archive and also the “Pinax Project” at Oxford and made an index of some of the NT papyri at each site. Now that's cool.

For the stuff at Oxford, you'll go to the main site. Click on The Papyri. Click on the ill-conceived Click here link to pull up the search menu. Now, see the ID on the Religion and Technology site (left column of the table)? Use that to search for the “Papyrus ID” at Pinax. The tough work has been done for you.

Remember folks, browse safely. Keep the drool to a minimum, and clean up frequently to avoid electric shock. The life you save may be your own.

First, after long last, I've updated my blogrolls. See the column on the right. I'm pretty conservative with my aggregator these days; these really are (pretty much) the blogs that I read on a regular basis.

Second, I needed an excuse to post to this: Luthers lavatory thrills experts. No, it's not a joke. It is an article from BBC Online, posted near the end of October of this year. I came across it a few days ago. Here's the lead paragraph:

Archaeologists in Germany say they may have found a lavatory where Martin Luther launched the Reformation of the Christian church in the 16th Century.

There's an etching of the good doctor with the caption “Martin Luther was candid about his constipation.” True, but still — it makes me laugh when I read it. The story goes on for awhile. Another gem:

The scholar suffered from constipation and spent many hours in contemplation on the toilet seat.

You can tell that whoever wrote this article had fun with it. Maybe too much fun.

Time for some updates.

1. I mentioned last week that I was “Going Analog” in my quiet time. The past week has been refreshing and instructive, based primarily on Martin Culy's I, II, III John: A Handbook on the Greek Text. I give Culy's work a hearty recommendation. You should pick it up if you're going to be doing anything in the Johannines any time soon. I'm through 1Jn 2.6 and I've already decided that after I'm through the Johannine epistles, I'll be moving on to Acts using Culy/Parsons' Acts: A Handbook on the Greek Text.

2. Regarding my Pastorals Study: After a long, hard slog I've got a (very) rough draft of notes/comments on 1Ti 2. Struggling to get through 1Ti 2.11-15 was tough but worth it. I can't explain how fulfilling it is to simply work through a text without relying on commentaries and come to an informed opinion of what's going on. There may be apsects of my thinking that will change when I get to the point of evaluating other commentaries/writers, but the important bit is that I'll be able to interact with them, I won't be simply taking them at their word. That's the refreshing part. I'll be going through the work again to revise it and clean it up before moving on to chapter 3, which should (hopefully) go a bit faster.

Lastly, a big, hearty “thank you!” to the folks at Bibbia Blog for mentioning my Pastorals Study and including me on their blogroll! The blog is completely in Italian, but you can view it in rough English using Google's Translate feature. As James Tauber mentions, it's always a bit flattering when you find someone who links to your work. Thanks to those who do this for ricoblog. I do appreciate it.

I've been playing around with Greek text this weekend. This is going to seem a bit geeky (a bit?) but I need to give some background.

I was talking with Bob Pritchett a few weeks back. For some reason, the subject of automatic language recognition came up. Apparently one of the methods used involves compiling all consecutive three-character combinations as they appear in a given text (so, “I drove.” would have the strings 'I d', ' dr', 'dro', 'rov', 'ove', 've.') and then examining the occurrences to known frequencies of three-letter combinations in known texts in the language in question. Apparently the success rate is fairly high for an automated procedure.

After thinking about it for awhile, I became curious about combinations of words and authorship or author style. For the Pastoral Epistles, many studies have been done examining word frequencies of the Pastoral Epistles and comparing them to so-called “genuine” Paulines, the Apostolic Fathers, and other things. P.N. Harrison did the definitive work in this area analyzing the Pastoral Epistles in 1922 or so (The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles, see my Bibliography).  Donald Guthrie responded to Harrison's work in a monograph published in 1956. But this all involved word frequencies. To my knowledge, nobody has really thought about phrase frequencies (NOTE: see Update III below). It would've been tough to do in the past, but with available electronic texts (see both James Tauber's site and Dr. Maurice Robinson's ByzTxt.com site (nb: byztxt.com no longer exists and now links to indecent and rude material)— I prefer Tauber's data as it has casing, breathing marks, accents and lexemes), high-power processors and some programming skill it seems like these sorts of things are coming into the realm of possibility.

So, I spent today writing some javascript (run via the Windows scripting host) to process James Tauber's MorphGNT data. Keeping track of all the possible combos takes a lot of memory and processing power, so for now I'm limiting myself to the Pastoral Epistles. I compared the three-word combinations on the basis of the lexeme (or “dictionary” form) not on the inflections. Each individual listing does have the actual inflected phrase provided seperately so that one can see exactly what the match is.

The outcome? Of 3269 possible three-word combinations of adjacent words in the Pastoral Epistles, there are 55 that occur more than once. Some of them are meaningful (e.g. πιστὸς ὁ λόγος, “Faithful is the word”), others aren't. Who knows if this is significant; I'll need to get data from other books and devise a methodology to compare before I'm able to even think about conclusions.

After generating the data (I munged it into XML, of course) I whipped out a quick stylesheet to render the concordance as HTML so I could post it as it seems like the sort of thing that might be handy for some folks. So, without further adeiu:

A Concordance of Three-Word Phrases in the Pastoral Epistles

There are some problems/caveats mentioned in introductory note; please read it over. Also, for some reason I've not yet figured out, Firefox doesn't like my CSS stylesheet but IE does. So it'll look better in IE, at least for now.

If you have any ideas or feedback on the data, on the idea of examining phrase frequencies, suggestions for methodology once the data is compiled, or anything else to do with this I'm very interested to hear from you. Please feel free to drop a comment, post about it in your blog & trackback here, or just drop me an email.

Update: I noticed another small bug; it seems I didn't clear my phrase cache at the end of each book. So the phrase μεθ' ὑμῶν Παῦλος really doesn't occur; μεθ' ὑμῶν is at the end of one book, Παῦλος is at the start of another. Whoops.

Update II: Thanks for the clarification on the trigram stuff, Bob. (Now corrected above.) I remember that now that you say it. I think it's obvious that I was thinking about adjacent words since about the time you told me about the concept.

Update III: Stephen Carlson of Hypotyposeis fame links to me with a recent blog post. Apparently he did some similar work 9-10 years ago, and has had his results posted for awhile in the form of a short article (complete with ASCII art!): Authorial Style in the New Testament. I'll have to go over his stuff and see if I can grok it, but I greatly appreciate the pointer — thanks!

Update IV: More background on previous phrase studies. I checked my copy of Harrison's book (it's been awhile since I read it) and note his appendices from pp. 166-178 list phrases held in common between the Pastorals and other groups of books ('genuine' Paulines, Petrines, 1 Clement). He discusses them from pp. 87-93, though it is in his typical dismissive style. And the method isn't nearly as systematic as his examination of words.

You know you've been waiting for it. Here's how it works.

1. You send me your Rhapsody play list with 15 songs. Just use the “send” button from within the Rhapsody app. If there are more than 15 tracks, I just take the first 15 and drop the rest. Submit your playlist by noon, Pacific Time.
   1. You could instead put your top 15 in a blog entry on your page, and I'll just add a link in this entry to your page.
   2. Unless you send me raw HTML (do a view|source for example) I'll format your stuff like mine (only without the comments).
2. I'll update this blog entry with the lists as the day goes on.
3. Use the Poll in the right column to vote. I've guessed on the entrants; if I'm wrong I'll amend the list later.

All lists received (or links to the lists) are listed below.

Update (2004-12-05): Now, if you search Google for horrible christmas music ... guess who tops the list? Here's evidence:

Links:

1. Eli Evans Truly Horrible Christmas Songs, Final Playlist. Also be sure to check out the other lists he created leading up to the final crap-tastic categorization of holiday hokiness.

List 1: Rico's 15 Most Horrible Christmas Songs

• "Kids" - Kenny Rogers — Kenny needs to stick with gamblers, cowards of the county, and fried chicken. This song typifies all that is bad about “celebrity” Christmas-style specials. You might say it isn't that bad, but then realize: This is serious!
• "Surfin' Santa" - Lord Douglas Byron — There are so many surfer-style Christmas songs to choose from, it is hard to narrow it down to just one.
• "I'm Giving Santa A Pickachu This Christmas" - Pokemon-2.B.A. Master — If this needs to be explained, perhaps you shouldn't be reading this list.
• "Merry Christmas To All" - Bro Leroy Upshaw and the New National Travelers — I'm sure Bro Leroy's Christmas message is heartfelt and sincere, but that doesn't mean that I don't wince when I hear it.
• "Last Christmas" - The Tamlins — Reggae Christmas. Oh yeah. Here's a hint: If your lyric sheet calls for a “breathy whisper” ... save yourself some dignity and just don't do the song.
• "Minnie And Santa" - Cyndi Lauper — I think Cyndi needs to look up Captain Lou Albano again for some career advice. This song is just bad.
• "'Tis The Season (Deck The Halls)" - Yellowman — More Reggae Christmas. Any excuse for a party, I guess. But I could celebrate a bit better if I'd never heard this song. I think it will haunt me for awhile.
• "Holly Jolly Christmas" - Cindy Robinson — I'm sure Ms. Robinson is a very nice woman. Really. But this recording has all the hallmarks of being bad.
• "Santa Claus is Ska'ing To Town" - The Granville Williams Orchestra — Ska has never really been at the top of my list for Christmas music genre. This song pretty much explains why.
• "Old Time Christmas" - The Brothers Figaro Orchestra — For those of you who have plumbed the depths of horrible Rhapsody tunes before (Lorena Burnett, anyone? How 'bout Brother Leroy?), you know that “Orchard Music Group” is a suspect publisher. Well, this song is on “The Orchard holiday sampler 2003”. Need I say more?
• "(I Was) Drunk (On Christmas)" - Winechuggers — Pitiful, yes. “I drown the yule-tide blues with liquid cheer”. Now them's lyrics, folks. The single acoustic guitar and twangy voices complete the picture.
• "Joyful Time" - Bobby Deitch — I don't know who Bobby Deitch is, but the intro of this song makes me think of one thing: Homer Simpson singing “Under the sea ... ” chomping shrimp and other tasty sea creatures whilst swimming and singing “ ... there'll be no accusations, just friendly crustaceans, Under the seeeaaaaa!”
• "White Christmas" - The Whispers — Somewhere, Bing Crosby is rolling in his grave. Honorable mention goes for the Whispers' song “Funky Christmas”, but I had to cut it.
• "I Fixed It up With Jesus (This Holiday)" - Keith "Wonderboy" Johnson — Complete with spoken-word intro! Note to self: Stay far away from anyone calling themselves “Wonderboy”. Though the jazzed-up organ in the background is all right.
• "X-Mas Time Baby" - T-Shep — Mmmmmmm ... Casio keyboard. Words slurred together. If you can make it to the end of the song, you're a better man than I am. This is bad on so many different levels. I'm sure there's an audience for this somewhere, but I'm not it.

Or Play the whole list, if you think you stand it. I await your vote.

Another book I've started to work through (though I'll be working through this much less diligently than others) is Richard Young's Intermediate New Testament Greek: A Linguistic and Exegetical Approach.

At least, I decided to read the introduction to see what his book was all about. And it confirmed my suspicions: Language is difficult.

Young doesn't shy away from the task, his intro brings up issues that need resolution. We know so much intuitively in our native language. Even reading on the page, we can discern things like tone. In acquired language, these things are very difficult. It's not enough to have perfect understanding of vocabulary, morphology and syntax. As I've been seeing in the very short time I've been working through 1John, there are other factors to consider. For instance, consider the following contrived example:

“The stove is hot.”

Analyzing it by itself, it is a simple declarative sentence. However, give the same sentence some context:

“Watch out, Johnny!” he said to his four-year-old son. “The stove is hot.”

Here it is still a declarative sentence, but really it's a prohibition or a command. He means, “Don't touch the stove, Johnny!”, though that's not what is actually said.

Even if we run through each word of the sentence and determine its morphological and syntactic qualities (somewhat naively, as I'm likely to do with an acquired language), we could still be a ways off from understanding what is actually being communicated.

Young breaks this stuff down. He talks about implicit and explicit information that can be garnered from the text and context. He talks about skewing, which is “non-correspondence between form and meaning” and the need to discern and account for it. He offers the following example:

Also, when Jesus said that Lazarus sleeps, He did not mean that Lazarus went to bed, but that he died (John 11.11). The words and grammar of such expressions cannot be interpreted literally, for they involve a skewing between form and meaning. (p. 4)

Young then goes on to talk about “Surface Structure” and “Deep Structure”. But, I digress.

The main point is that learning the intricacies of an acquired language is a difficult thing. It requires one to simply immerse oneself in a language, and just try to slog through it. The more one tries, the easier it gets. With some background, one then can read grammars and say, “oh, yeah, that makes sense!” instead of “what the heck is a dative of instrument?!”. Right now, I tend more toward the latter than the former, but my flashes of insight are becoming more frequent — and that's good.

This means, of course, that I still have a lot of work ahead of me. But that's ok. It wouldn't be as fun any other way.

As mentioned previously, one of the books I'm slogging through is Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation: A History.

I came across the following in the first chapter of the book. MacCulloch is running through the 11th-15th centuries noting the development of the church, specifically mentioning things that may have an effect on later development (read: the Reformation). He writes:

The Lollards [Wyclif's followers] can hardly be blamed for not enjoying Luther's access to printing, for that revolution in information technology was yet to arrive in Europe in their days of open activity, but they did fail (unlike Luther and the Protestants) to gain a significant foothold among the Church's leading popular communicators, the friars — and it seems they also missed the secret weapon of the sixteenth-century Reformation, popular music and hymn writing. (p. 35, italics mine)

I'd never quite looked at it that way before, particularly the bit about hymns and popular music, but it certainly makes sense. During the reformation times (Luther posted his 95 Theses on Oct. 31, 1517) virtually all forms of media were absorbed in the topic. Popular speakers (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and others) preached directly to people about Reformation principles. Their writings and the writings of their followers were swiftly printed and found a ready audience. And the word was spread musically as well. I'll surely remember this the next time I sing Luther's A Mighty Fortress is Our God. The message of the reformers was being communicated by almost every available means.

One could make similar generalizations about the Great Awakening. Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys preached constantly to immense audiences. Their written works were devoured. And we all know of Charles Wesley's prolific hymn writing.

We're going to have to do the same thing to make it happen again. If there is to be anything of similar scope happen in the future, it will have to be across the most popular media of the day. For us, this means TV (network and cable, not just whatever is on PAX); that means radio (air and satellite); that means iPods and other “personal music devices”; that means web sites, blogs, and newsgroups. And not just talk (or preaching), but musically too.

It's a tall order. Especially in the area of music. So much of what I hear when I happen to brave Christian radio is ... er ... unchallenging. We don't need more praise songs that make the singer feel good about what he's singing (some of these songs are fine, but admit it — many are terrible); we need songs that clearly reflect the teaching of Scripture and challenge one to a deeper walk with God and deeper study of His Word (which is the primary method, along with prayer and fellowship, that we have of getting to know Him). We need songs that praise God, not songs that make us feel good first and offer some sort of non-specific praise second. We don't need to sing “Lord we praise you” or “Lord we lift your name” ad infinitum; we need to sing why we're praising Him and “lifting” His name (whatever “lifting” means in that context). We need Scripture-steeped poets writing lyrics that will become the hymns and praise songs of tomorrow.

I could go on, but I've started to ramble and need to think about this stuff a bit more. But this task begins with each of us, individually and personally. We need to focus on the Word of God and steep ourselves in His wisdom. We need to study His Word, personally and corporately (“corporately” meaning both small-group Bible study and the typical larger-group preaching/teaching). We need to be able to give compelling accounts of why we are Christians when folks ask us (1Pe 3.13-17). We need to use our gifts (Ro 12; 1Co 12) to glorify Him. And we need to do much better at prayer. Ok, at least I need to be much better in my own life in these areas; y'all can evaluate your own lives in these areas and come to your own conclusions.

Yeah, I'm still rambling. I'll stop now, but the original thought — about how the Reformation had the advantage of the printing press and the “secret weapon” of hymns and popular music is still a provocative thought. Mull it over some over the next few days; let me know if you come to any further insight or conclusion.