Browsing around, I came across the Coptic Language entry on the Wikipedia. If you are confused by the Coptic dialects and subdialects that are cited in the UBS and NA apparatuses with versional evidence, the article gives some brief info that should help clarify.

Note also the article on the Coptic Alphabet.

This is all doubly cool because I'd been looking for some brief information on Old Nubian after seeing references to Nubian in some stuff Metzger had written. Who'd've thunk that the Wikipedia would have an article on that too?

Update (2006-04-06): Stephen C. Carlson with some Coptic-related Gospel o' Judas bloggin'. Note he points at a PDF file that is a transcription of the Coptic that is the Gospel of Judas. And the English is available too.

Update II (2006-04-07): If you're interested in typing Coptic in Unicode, then the Logos Coptic Keyboard is for you. (alternately, try here for Greek, Hebrew, Syriac and Coptic keyboards!) Note that this is considered beta software, though it uses standard Windows keyboard stuff. Also -- if  you have any suggestions as to a good, non-ornamental unicode Coptic font, please leave some suggestions (with URLs if available) in the comments. Thanks!

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?