Folks —

I'm taking off on a short holiday to see my folks who winter in Arizona (hi Mom & Dad!). The only internet access I'll have will be via AOL on a Win98 laptop with dialup — which means I probably won't be posting.

But I will be reading. I'm bringing two books with me (apart from the Loeb Apostolic Fathers, which always comes in handy when writing):

• The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch. I'm about 2/3 of the way through it, hope to finish it or at least get close.
• And finally: History of New Testament Lexicography by John Lee. I've been champing at the bit to get into this book, but I've held off. This is going to be my primary reading.

Between these books, hanging out with my folks, playing some golf and working on my Pastorals stuff, it should be a good time away.

Folks --

I've posted a sample draft of my notes/writing on 1Ti 3.1-7 over at PastoralEpistles.com.

If you are interested and have time to peruse it, I'd appreciate any comments. You can email comments to pe | pastoralepistles | com, or you can use the comment thread on this post.

I'm interested in any feedback, positive or negative. If you think it sucks eggs, please tell me why. If you think it is the grooviest thing since sliced bread, please tell me why. I'm particularly interested if you're a pastor or preacher who prepares sermons with regularity -- is the sort of stuff in the sample draft helpful to you? Why or why not?

Thanks in advance. Again, please feel free to leave comments if you've at least perused the PDF file.

Update: I forgot to mention -- I've assumed Pauline authorship and have stated no rationale for this in the document (as of yet). I'll concede that the PE use some different words that aren't found elsewhere in the NT, but much of the language and content of the PE, to me, sounds like Paul. Even P.N. Harrison's edition of the Greek of the PE makes this point, though he used the info to posit a "dedicated Paulinist" as the author.

So, I've chosen to go with Paul. I realize there are debates here and that many in the scholarly community take non-Pauline authorship for granted. I don't think it is that easy to determine, especially with samples as small as the epistles. If that is an impediment to your reading of the document, I apologize for it -- but I really think it is the best way to approach the problem, so that's what I've done.

Yes, I spelled that "Salomon" (like the ski equipment maker) because that's the way it is spelled in the title of the NETS (New English Translation of the Septuagint) edition.

The NETS Provisional translation page has been updated, and the PDF of the Psalms of Salomon (Solomon) is now available.

I was looking up a citation in NETS Leviticus (19.33-34, if you must know) so I thought I'd check and see if anything new was on the site.

I've blogged about this in the past. If you use the LXX at all in your studies ... you should check it out.

I mentioned back at the end of November that I was "Going Analog" in my morning devotions and would be using Martin Culy's I, II, III John: A Handbook on the Greek Text as my primary reading/study. I had two other posts on the book:

• A few updates
• Mood in First John

Yesterday morning, I worked through the last paragraph of 3 John, so that means I'm done with the book. My schedule to work through was 2-4 verses every weekday morning, and it took just over two months to get through.

I'm a fan of this book, it has helped me in understanding some things about Greek. If you are in the situation where you had Greek a few years back and are still semi-functional — meaning you know the alphabet and can deduce lexical forms of words from their inflected forms, thus look them up in a lexicon — then Culy's book might be a good thing to pick up and start to get back into it.

I will be starting to use Culy & Parsons on Acts tomorrow.

Highly recommended. And it's only $14.00 at Amazon right now.

Hey — thanks for reading ricoblog!

I wanted to make a quick announcement for regular ricoblog readers:

With the advent of PastoralEpistles.com I'll probably be spending more of my energies over there than over here. So posting to this blog will slow down a bit, especially since a fair portion of what I posted on in the past involved the Pastoral Epistles in some way. But I do want to keep ricoblog going too, I just don't think I'll be able to keep the pace up on two blogs and keep my employer happy (not to mention my own sanity, though some would say that's long gone).

Unless I can tie it into the Pastoral Epistles somehow, blogging on the Apostolic Fathers at sporadic intervals will continue happening here (yes, I know, it's been awhile since I posted on The Epistle to Diognetus ... ). As will blogging about whatever else strikes my fancy. Heck, this might even end up making ricoblog even more eclectic ...

Hi folks.

I think I've got the RSS Feed at PastoralEpistles.com up and running.

Please let me know if you run into any problems.

I'd like to thank folks for mentioning and publicizing PastoralEpistles.com on their blogs and on email lists. It's always neat when an idea of your own gets an entusiastic reception. So, thanks to those who posted links for me. I do appreciate it.

Regarding an RSS feed: That's next on the to-do list. I'd thought I might get to it next weekend, but based on the response received today, I may end up trying to whip one up on Monday night. I'll post information here if I'm able to get that done.

Thanks again to Hypotyposeis, the NT Gateway Weblog, the Biblical Theology weblog, a few email lists and whomever else posted announcements and links.

Over the past few weekends, I've been spending my time working on yet another little side project: PastoralEpistles.com.

The site is a bit of a mutt. It is part blog, part wiki, and part something else that I'm not sure how to describe. What it allows me to do is to post information about the Pastoral Epistles in a few different formats:

• Blog-style: So, the posts I've been making here that touch on the Pastorals will probably move over to the Pastoral Epistles.com blog.
• Bibliography-style: One thing I really want to do is develop an annotated bibliography for the Pastoral Epistles. And not just books, but journal articles and web sites too. This will probably be the primary type of content, at least in the short term, for the site.
• Articles: I may write longer articles, or post sample PDF files of the stuff I'm writing as I work my way through the Pastorals.
• Site Documents: There's a certain amount of site overhead and communication that needs to go on.

The setup is extensible so I can create new "post types" by popping a new XML file in the right spot on the server. Rather than typing in HTML, the syntax is based on some very simple wiki-style codes. I can add different codes and such fairly easily. (I do still need to support dumping in raw HTML and ignoring it, though ... )

I'm sure James Tauber is thinking right now, "Gee, sounds like Leonardo." It may be. But writing the code is the fun part, isn't it? And why should someone else have all the fun?

The site still has a decent amount of work left to be done. Consider the current incarnation a beta. I haven't written the component that generates an RSS file yet, and there are some management tools I've yet to write, plus a few other things. I hope to get to the RSS file bit next weekend. I also don't have any support for comments (I still haven't decided if I want to support comments). But the mechanics of posting and browsing are supported, so I figured I'd make it live and get some folks banging on it so I can see what I haven't anticipated and what I need to fix.

Please check it out. Poke around. Click on stuff. I'm interested to know what you think about it. I've viewed the site in FireFox, IE 6.0, and Opera (all on WinXP) and it looks fine, so it should fly just about anywhere, I'd think. It looks the worst in IE (the login and password boxes not lining up is the problem; they do in other browsers. I'll have to work on that).

The login, BTW, is for "authors" to post links. If you're interested in being an author for some reason, contact me at: articles | pastoralepistles | com. Point me to stuff you've written online and plead your case.

Also, if you know of sites that I should include in the URL Bibliography, please drop a line to me at: articles | pastoralepistles | com. I'm guessing you'll know how to munge that into an email address.

Update: James Tauber writes in the comments:

It's also made me wonder if you, me and Zach Hubert should put together some kind of hosted site where people get a blog and a bunch of collaborative tools suited specifically to serious biblical study.

As for me: It sounds interesting. I've already learned a few lessons in writing the code for PastoralEpistles.com, and I'm sure I'll learn many more before things in the weeks to come. I'll warn you all, though -- I'm more of a data hound than an actual, bona-fide programmer, but it could at least be fun to talk about. If Zach chimes in and thinks it's a good idea, perhaps James can drop us both an email with some more details of what he's thinking?

Tech Geeks: It's all server-side JScript that munges/writes XML for posts and views of posts. This is the thing that I wrote the Beta Code to Unicode converter for a few weeks back. It lets me key the Greek in according to Greek Beta Code in the wiki-syntax, but it munges it into normalized unicode for the display. For the record, I'm not interested in releasing the code to the public. It's a big byzantine ball o' spaghetti-fied crud that nobody but me should be penalized with having to grok.