Just thinking out loud here. The following are the adscriptions in the Pastoral Epistles:

1Ti 1.2: To Timothy, my true child in the faith

2Ti 1.2: To Timothy, my beloved child

Titus 1.4: To Titus, my true child in a common faith

Paul is bolstering the rep of the recipient to those who hear the letter. "I'm writing to Timothy (you know, the one whom I consider my son?) ... "

I'm wondering if there is some allusion here to the parable of the wicked tenants (Mk 12.1-12 || Mt 21.33-46 || Lu 20.9-19), specifically Mk 12.6 || Mt 21.37 || Lu 20.13:

He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.' (Mk 12.6)

Does Paul's specification of Timothy (and Titus) as his true/beloved son have similar force, the sort of "Timothy (and Titus) represent me and my interests" vibe of the parable?

Just thinkin' out loud. I have some other thoughts on prescipts in the Pastorals that I need to mull over a bit before posting them.

The Logos Bible Software Blog announced the Logos Bible Software/Society of Biblical Literature Technology Paper Awards. Here's the scoop:

Logos Bible Software and the Society of Biblical Literature announce two sets of awards for papers that creatively use technology in exploring questions of grammar and syntax in biblical studies: one focusing on the Hebrew Bible, the other on the Greek New Testament. The contests are open to all those engaged in the study of those disciplines, and prizes will be awarded in both areas for student and faculty/professional categories. A total of twelve awards will be given.

These are serious prizes, but they'll require serious work. The deadline is May 1, 2007 with award notification during 2007 International SBL in Austria. More details on the Technology Paper Awards page at Logos.com.

Note -- Logos and SBL employees are not eligible. That means I can't submit a paper (drats!)

Update (2006-09-28): Check out the page on the SBL's site which also is the home of the URL http://www.sblawards.com. Also note mention of the prize in the SBL Forum. And the press release reproduced on Logos' web site. We're really interested to see what sorts of topics folks delve into and how they use the annotation(s)!

Just some random thoughts here based on the paper I'm wrapping up for the SBL meeting.

How does one go about quantifying and measuring style? Style seems to be a very organic thing, hard to pin down. Efforts to quantify it normally fail, on the whole, because there are no real rules to follow.

Some detect style based on word usage patterns (common or infrequent words). Others look into other grammatical features such as morphology. Still others look at sentence lengths and sentence length distribution. Some have posited authorship traits dealing with the part-of-speech of the last word in a sentence.

A trend of some sort is noticed, that trend is tested against a larger corpus, data on the trend is analyzed, and that analysis becomes the basis of some posited rule or even conclusions about authorship of a document.

The bottom line is that trends do not a rule make. Correlation does not prove causation. But that isn't to say trends aren't useful. It only means we need to consider an expanding amount of such trends in evaluation of style. (Note well: I didn't say authorship, I said style.)

Also, I think that, at least as regards the Pauline epistles and perhaps the New Testament, stylistic studies have unfortunately been conflated with authorship studies. That is, the goal seems to be to isolate an author's style for purposes of authorship attribution—not necessarily to better understand the document content and structure so as to better comprehend the document(s) in question.

Why is this? Why can't style be examined outside of the bounds of the authorship question?

Why can't we be content to analyze what is being communicated and how it is being communicated; why do we (myself included!) get bound in the larger and likely unresolvable authorship question?

This just came through the internal company mail, though it is also up on the Logos Jobs Page. It is for a Full-time Web Developer. Must relocate to Bellingham, no telecommute/remote employment options.

See the Logos jobs page for further requirements/etc.

(Don't forget that we're looking for a Chinese Marketing Manager as well!)

I noted earlier that I'd received a copy of Klauck's Ancient Letters and the New Testament. I've been reading the first few chapters and have to say that I've been enjoying it.

The first chapter, Foundations—Two Letters of Apion and Two Letters of the "Elder", uses the well-known examples of letters from one Apion (BGU II 423 and BGU II 632, Greek and English provided) to his family. These were used to identify and discuss epistle structure and standard letter components. After this, Klauck uses 2 and 3 John (in parallel!) as source material and identifies components and details structure. The exercise at the end of the chapter is, essentially, "do the same thing for Philemon". Thankfully, Klauck has answers in the back so one can do the work and compare. One is not left hanging when doing exercises.

The second chapter, Practical Realities—Paper and Postal System, gets into how letters were written and delivered. Good background stuff that folks don't normally think about, but it is good to know.

When I'm able to get through a few more chapters, I'll by all means let y'all know. But for now I'm very impressed with the book and quite happy to have it available as a resource. If you're teaching a class on epistles or epistolography, I'd say this is pretty much a no-brainer for students to have, particularly with the added exercises.

More info, of course, is on the Baylor Press web site.

PJ Williams at the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog notes an email he received offering a complementary copy of Ehrman's upcoming book The Lost Gospel of Judas: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed from Oxford University Press (OUP).

I received the same email too. And I've only ever interacted with Ehrman's stuff on this blog, so they must've searched around a bit to find folks.

I blogged about Ehrman primarily in a post called Bart Ehrman has "Jumped the Shark", lamenting his slide toward sensationalism at that time evidenced in his essay in the Gospel of Judas book from National Geographic.

I can't pass up a free book on a topic I'm interested in (development of early Christianity, along with Greek and Coptic) so I've responded to the offer with a request for the book. I'll let y'all know what I think if/when I receive the book.

Also note that PJ Williams mentions a forthcoming book on Gospel of Judas by ETC's own Simon Gathercole noting it will have " plenty of philological learning as well as sound judgement on the subject". Now that's a book I hope Oxford promos and wants to offer me a complementary copy of!

Side note: The post on Ehrman jumping the shark has a humorous comment from one purporting to be Dr. Ehrman. If that really was Dr. E, I note that you'll be in Seattle on Oct. 9. If you're able to slide up to Bellingham (just under two hours freeway drive north on I-5) I'll fire up the BBQ. Have your people call my people.

Baylor Press are publishing Han-Josef Klauck's Ancient Letters and the New Testament: A Guide to Context and Exegesis. The book is in their Fall 2006 catalogue. It is a translation and complete revision of Klauck's 1998 volume Die antike Briefliteratur und das Neue Testament: Ein Lehrund Arbeitsbuch.

Here is the publisher's blurb from the Baylor Press web site:

This volume places the New Testament letters squarely in the middle of all the important letter corpora of antiquity. Chapters cover the basic letter formula, papyrus and postal delivery, non-literary and diplomatic correspondence, Greek and Latin literary letters, epistolary theory, letters in early Judaism, and all the letters of the New Testament. Part I of each chapter surveys each corpus, followed by detailed exegetical examples in Part II. Comprehensive bibliographies and 54 exercises with answers suit this guide to student and scholar alike.

• Comprehensive, detailed, essential reading
• A major book by a leading expert
• Perfect for all students of the New Testament

Through a fortunate twist of fate, this intrepid blogger has secured a copy of the book before release. I'll be reading through it and blogging a bit along the way.

I can tell you this much right now: It looks very good. One great feature is the end-of-chapter exercises. That, and the preface starts out with a quote from Alice in Wonderland. How cool is that?

Update I: I've blogged a bit about the first two chapters: Klauck on Epistolography Part I.

Update II: Klauck's Ancient Letters, Part II is now up.

Update III: Part III is up as well.

Since the ETS program book is out, and the SBL program book has been out for awhile, I thought I should note when I'm presenting at both of these conferences.

ETS 2006: Thursday Morning, Nov. 16; the New Testament session in the 'Slate' room, from 11:00-11:40.

Subjects and Predicates and Complements, Oh My! Searching the New Testament with Sensitivity to Syntax

Logos Bible Software have implemented an edition of the OpenText.org Syntactically Annotated Greek New Testament. One facet of OpenText.org's work isolates clause boundaries. Within each clause, subjects, predicators, complements and adjuncts are identified. This enables searching of the Greek New Testament with sensitivity to clause-level criteria. This advance raises certain questions: How should syntactic annotation be used? What sorts of things can be searched for?

This paper examines different sorts of searches that can be pursued from the starting point of a word. Questions like "When is [word] used as a subject?" or "What verbs are used when [word] is a subject?" will be examined and discussed.

SBL 2006: Sunday Afternoon, Nov. 19; Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics session in room 204C-CC, from 4:00-6:30. My paper is the second paper and starts around 4:10. The format of the session is four 10-minute papers followed by 30 minutes of informal discussion. So drop by and see me, and do ask me questions.

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

The OpenText.org group 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 tracking criteria such as word usage and morphology along with perhaps sentence length. The OpenText.org Word Group analysis allows for stylistic analysis of the corpus at a different level. Does modifier usage offer any insight for comparative studies of the Pastoral Epistles and the generally accepted Paulines? This paper will examine modifier usage data for both the epistles traditionally attributed to Paul and will offer preliminary comparisons between the results where results may offer insight for questions of style.

More SBL 2006: There are two additional meetings that I will be involved with.

Saturday, Nov. 18; 4:00-6:30 PM. AM18-107 (p. 246 in SBL program book). Logos Bible Software Syntactically Tagged Databases of the Hebrew Bible: Overview and Training Seminar. See program book for more details.

Monday, Nov. 20; 4:00-6:30 PM. AM20-101 (p. 256 in SBL program book). Logos Bible Software Syntactically-Tagged Databases of the Greek New Testament: Overview and Training Seminar. See program book for more details.

I will of course be much more involved with the Greek session on Monday than the Hebrew session on Saturday. But come to either/both; we'd love to see you there and talk about syntax!

Update (2006-09-18): In the comments, Paul asks if I'll make the papers available to the general public. Thanks for asking, Paul. The answer is "Yes!". This will likely be before the conference. Also note that for the SBL session, anyway, the paper will be much longer than 10 minutes will allow so my presentation there will actually be a summary. The ETS paper will be less of a summary, but since I can't bring myself to simply read pages, the paper there will reflect the content but be more appropriately presented (using a projector, powerpoint and perhaps even screen-captured video where necessary).