Loren Rosson (The Busybody) has posted the Biblical Studies Carnival IV, his leisurely jaunt through biblioblogdom's March posts. Loren even saw fit to mention a few of my own posts amongst the scads of bibliobloggin' he was able to summarise so nicely.

Excellent, Loren. Thanks for keeping us all informed and pointing out a few new blogs too!

I just received word that my paper proposal for the 2006 SBL meeting in Washington DC was accepted. Here's the preliminary abstract as submitted.

Program Unit: Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics

Paper Title: Word Groups, Head Terms and Modifiers in the Pastoral Epistles: Insight for Questions of Style?

OpenText.org have completed a preliminary syntactic analysis of the Greek New Testament. One level of their analysis is the Word Group level. A word group is a group of words that consists of, at minimum, a head term. It also contains any terms that modify the head term and additionally specifies the type of modification as that of definer, qualifier, relator or specifier.

Heretofore, stylistic analysis has been largely bound to the word level, tracking criteria such as word usage and morphology. The OpenText.org Word Group analysis allows for stylistic analysis of the corpus at a different level. Does head term and modifier usage offer any insight for comparative studies of the Pastoral Epistles and the generally accepted Paulines? This paper will examine word group usage data for both the accepted Paulines and the Pastoral Epistles, and will offer preliminary comparisons between the results where results may offer insight for questions of style.

Some of the work (OK, most of the work) I have yet to do; so I don't have too much to offer in the way of juicy tidbits. The basic thought is that since there is now a corpus available that is syntactically annotated, are there things within such an annotated corpus that would offer insight when examining a text for issues of style? I have a few things I want to check out. The paper will (hopefully) offer some ideas of what sorts of things can be now be aggregated, and which of those might be helpful. Or it could be a bust, and I'll conclude that quantifying style, even with syntactic data, is a near impossible task. We'll see.

Note that the setup of the Biblical Language and Linguistics section is a little different than most sessions; I will have 10 minutes of time to present in which I will summarise the paper, but will be available for 30 minutes of "open discussion" time after the presentation. The open discussion is somewhat informal; presenters break to different corners of the room, and anyone who wants to talk further with a presenter then mills about, pursuing further the things they're interested in.

Should be a fun time. Hope to see you all there.

Update (2006-03-31): Stephen C. Carlson (Hypotyposeis) informs us that he'll present two papers in DC, one in the Synoptics section and one in New Testament Textual Criticism section. They both sound fun; hopefully I have no conflicts and will be able to attend Stephen's sessions.

Update (2006-03-31): Mark Goodacre (NT Gateway Weblog) posts news of a paper he'll present on Paul and Galatians. He (and Stephen C. Carlson as well, I might add) note several other bibliobloggers who have posted notes about accepted papers, including Jim Davila (PaleoJudaica), Michael Bird (Euangelion), and Adam Kotsko (The Weblog, with which I'm not familiar). Add in Sean the Baptist (sorry, Sean, can't locate your full name on the blog) to round out the group. Anyone else?

The regional meeting of the Pacific Northwest AAR/SBL and ASOR is the first weekend in May (May 5-7) in Spokane, WA at Gonzaga University. I'm strongly considering attending.

I'm curious to know if there are any readers of ricoblog who will be at the meeting and who might like to meet up. If I attend, I'll be available to meet and chat with folks about all sorts of stuff, like:

• NT/Hellenistic Greek (in general, or specific things, your choice)
• Greek Syntactic Databases and their use in Logos Bible Software (see the Logos Blog for more info)
• Pastoral Epistles (yay!)
• Whatever else you think might be fun to talk about.

Zap me an email (use address at sidebar) if you'll be there and want to meet to chat a bit.

Helen-Ann Hartley links to a report from the BBC about a Dutchman who is building a replica of Noah's Ark.

Cool!

The BBC story has a link to a website for the project, ArkVanNoach.com. It consists of a video in Dutch (which appears to be what most of the article is based on). I don't understand Dutch (though I understood when the reporter asked, "What does your wife think of all this?") but the video was cool. That is one massive vessel.

Speaking as a fellow boatbuilder (yes, I've built my own wooden boat, from scratch) I can only say that the ark project is massive. It took me a few years in my spare time to build my 18 foot sea kayak. I can't even begin to imagine the issues one would have to deal with to build a replica of Noah's ark.

Jim Davila's blog PaleoJudaica turns three today.

Congratulations, Jim! Thanks for the work that keeps PaleoJudaica interesting, informative and witty. Of course, in my limited experience with Jim, he's been interesting, informative and witty too.

Stop by his roundup of PaleoJudaica's previous year and check out a few of the posts he highlights. Then get it in your aggregator if for some reason you haven't done that yet.

Stop what you're doing and head to the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog and read the interview with Dan Wallace. And read the comments too.

There's even a section in there on the faith/scholarship issue.

Upon perusing upcoming releases noted in Publishers Weekly, I noticed a title that Thomas Nelson is set to release (Amazon says Aug. 8, 2006) by Darrell Bock: The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the Truth Behind Alternative Christianities.

There isn't much information on Thomas Nelson's web site. They simply say:

In an easy-to-understand writing style, best-selling author and New Testament expert Darrell Bock helps you examine the claims about missing "secret" gospels and other early forms of Christianity. Bock presents samples of extra-biblical materials and compares them to biblical texts, enabling you to make your own judgments.

Sounds like it could be a response to Bart Ehrman's Lost Scriptures and Lost Christianities volumes from Oxford.

Does anyone know anything else about this upcoming volume from Bock?

Chris Weimer of the Thoughts on Antiquity blog notes that a facsimile of A (02) is online. These are scans of the British Library edition from the late 1800's.

Cheers and kudos to the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts for hosting it.

The scans reflect Alexandrinus for the New Testament and also the Clementine epistles, which is awesome.

Now ... can someone come up with a reference-to-graphic index so it's easy to find passages? All I can tell at this point is that the Clementine epistles start with 137a since 136b looks to be the end of John's apocalypse.

On that last page of the Apocalypse (see it here) if you zoom and look at the text in the line beginning with ΜΑΡΤΥΡΩ, you'll see an example of a variant inserted interlinearly. Alexandrinus has ΟΘΣ (with lunate sigma and abbreviation overline on the last two letters, of course) and then has ἐπ’ αὐτὸν (at least that's how NA27 renders the hard-to-read minuscule addition, it looks like it might be in the dative in the MS?) above and to the right, an obvious later (much later) insertion.

The NA27 text has ὁ θεὸς ἐπ’ αὐτὸν with start and end variant markers around the whole phrase, indicating that different MSS have different things here. Since we can actually see Alexandrinus, that means we can now examine the apparatus and see how the apparatus works and renders the information that Alexandrinus conveys.

The NA27 apparatus has the following; note I'm using '01' for aleph/Sinaiticus:

3 4 1 2 01 051^s. 2030. (2050). 2377 M^A; Ambr Apr | 1 2 A*
Nestle, E., Nestle, E., Aland, K., Aland, B., & Universität Münster. Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung. (1993, c1979). Novum Testamentum Graece. At head of title: Nestle-Aland. (27. Aufl., rev.) (680). Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelstiftung.

The apparatus is here communicating that uncials 01 and 051, along with some minuscules, the Byzantine 'A' tradition in Revelation, along with patristic evidence from Ambrose and Apringius Pacensis witness a reading of the same four words in a different order: ἐπ’ αὐτὸν ὁ θεὸς. Alternately, Alexandrinus is alone among MSS cited in Revelation in its reading of just the first two words, ὁ θεὸς. The asterisk after the A notes that the text does have an addition by a corrector, but the addition is not represented. Because we've seen the MS itself, we know the addition largely conforms to the text of NA27.

Fun stuff, no?