Chris Brady (Targuman) notes an article in Christianity Today regarding a C.S. Lewis story called The Dark Tower (amazon.com). The authorship of this story has been disputed, but the CT article has the skinny on whether or not the work is authentic Lewis.

Why mention it? Because stylometric analysis plays a role in the story -- but perhaps not the role you think.

I discuss this in more detail over on PastoralEpistles.com. Do check it out!

A lot of little miscellaneous things to note:

First, check out Biblical Studies Carnival XIV at Chris Weimer's blog, Thoughts on Antiquity. Go ahead, do it now. He even links to a few different articles here at ricoblog.

Second, over at Hypotyposeis, Andrew Criddle blogs on the last two chapters of Diognetus. The Epistle to Diognetus is a neat (and late) addition to the corpus known as the Apostolic Fathers. Check it out. I've blogged on Diognetus before; you can get more info here and an index to the first 10 posts in the series in the middle of this post.  If you're generally interested in the Apostolic Fathers, and specifically interested in Polycarp and the Epistle to Diognetus, they you might want to look at a post where I blog about Charles Hill's book, From the Lost Teaching of Polycarp.

Third, Chris Tilling (Chrisendom) posts a short (500 word) review of Larry Hurtado's How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? (amazon.com) Do check it out.

Update (2007-02-04): I forgot to point to Michael Bird's post on finding time to write. The lesson: you won't do it if you don't make the time for it. So if it is important, make the time for it. 

At the recent ETS meeting in Washington DC, I availed myself of the opportunity to purchase cheap books. One book I purchased was an ESV Bible, as a Christmas present for my sweet wife Amy.

In sifting through the myriad of possible formats and covers, I made a mistake. I got the right Bible, with the right layout, and the right cover, but I neglected to ensure that the text had the words of Christ in red.

I only realized this after Christmas, after my lovely wife opened the package and kindly asked, "Hey, why aren't the words of Christ in red?"

Thankfully the great folks at Good News/Crossway took the exchange no problemo. Today we received the replacement from them. They were a pleasure to work with. Thanks for your excellent and understanding staff!

Just received my copy of Chrys Caragounis' The Development of Greek and the New Testament: Morphology, Syntax, Phonology, and Textual Transmission (amazon.com). Yee-haw! Ordered it at SBL to get the super-duper discount.

Actually, it's probably been at the office a few days; I've been on a two-week holiday and just got back to the office this afternoon.

I don't know that I'll dig into Caragounis' tome right away; this one seems more like a slow simmer of a read than a blitz and I have some blitzin' to do for a few papers.

Here's the blurb, though:

Languages inevitably evolve, and our understanding of texts from particular times and places must be illuminated by an awareness of changes and continuities in linguistic usage over time. The Development of Greek and the New Testament explores the relationship between the developing Greek language and the body of writings in Greek that make up the New Testament, arguing that the history of Greek is vitally important to New Testament interpretation. Caragounis provides a wealth of historical information not otherwise readily available to students of New Testament Greek. Extensive tables, indices, and bibliographies aid further study. An essential resource for advanced students of New Testament Greek, this unique work is highly valuable for all Hellenists, Byzantinists, and students of Greek patristics.

Over the past few days, I've been reading Michael Hoey's Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language (amazon.com) and it has been very thought-provoking. My friend Randall Tan pointed me to the book and has invited me to work with him on a paper based on sections of Hoey's book for the upcoming International SBL meeting in Vienna. Here's the abstract of the paper, which has been accepted for presentation in the "Hellenistic Greek Language and Linguistics" section:

In his provocative study, Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language (amazon.com) (Routledge, 2005), Michael Hoey argues for a new theory of the lexicon. Hoey's claim is that words and sequences of words that we learn are cumulatively loaded with the contexts and co-texts in which we encountered them and that grammar is the result of our recognition of recurrent features in this "lexical priming." In effect, his theory reverses the roles of lexis and grammar, proposing that "lexis is complexly and systematically structured and that grammar is an outcome of this lexical structure" (1).

In this paper, one of Hoey’s specific claims will be examined: “When a word is polysemous, the collocations, semantic associations and colligations of one sense of the word differ from those of its other senses” (13). Specific words and word groups (including sequences of words involving controversial genitive constructions) in the Greek New Testament will be explored with corpus linguistic techniques, using newly available syntactically-tagged Greek New Testament databases (i.e., the online OpenText.org annotation and the Logos implementation of OpenText.org as well as the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament). The dual goal is to verify the extent to which Hoey’s claim can be substantiated and to propose new avenues to adjudicate interpretational controversies.

Hoey's book is not about Hellenistic Greek, all of his examples are based on a 98 million word corpus composed largely of material from the Guardian Newspaper from 1991-1994. So this means you need to understand some basic grammar and not be afraid of linguistic terminology. However, Hoey writes well and the book is approachable by, I'd guess, just about anyone with an interest in grammar and linguistics. You don't have to have much linguistic background to really get into what Hoey is proposing.

Chris Tilling finally hits chapter 7 in his series on Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Yay!

Chapter 7 is the one that discusses the "Plural to Singular Narrative Device". I've been digging around with this 'device' to see if it is used in the NT outside of Bauckham's listed instances (21 in Mark, 2 in Luke). As a matter of fact, I'm writing a paper for the 2007 NW Regional ETS meeting on one potential instance, Acts 18.19-21.

I've been intrigued by this device since I read about it and have done some poking around the NT. I present the paper on Feb. 24, I'll likely post a version of it here after the conference.

I can never remember if the words "Marcan" and "Lucan" are spelled with 'c' or 'k'.

Thankfully, for situations like this, there is GoogleFight.

Fight 1: Markan vs. Marcan.
Results: 755,000 to 3,520,000. "Marcan" wins!

Fight 2: Lukan vs. Lucan.
Results: 267,000 to 1,960,000. "Lucan" wins!

Even though I just started the book on Sunday, I finished it this morning. I have the week off so I've been spending some time reading, amongst other things.

I can heartily recommend Paul and First Century Letter Writing (amazon.com). Richards does a great job focusing studies of the mechanics of writing letters in the first century and applying what we know about Paul from his own letters.

Readers of ricoblog know that in the past I blogged about and recommended Hans-Jozef Klauck's Ancient Letters and the New Testament (amazon.com) as an introduction to epistolography. I still stand by that, Klauk's book is a good general introduction to epistolography (not just NT, but epistolography in general). I'd recommend Paul and First Century Letter Writing (amazon.com) over Klauck because Richards is less technical and more directly applicable to NT epistles, particularly those of Paul. I'd go so far as to say that if you teach a course on Paul's epistles, you'd do well to consider requiring Paul and First Century Letter Writing (amazon.com) as a text so the students can get a grasp of how Paul might've actually gone about composing his letters.

Here's the brief TOC of Paul and First Century Letter Writing (amazon.com):

Introduction
1: A Modern, Western Paul
2: Paul as a First-Century Letter Writer
3: The Tools of a Letter Writer
4: Secretaries in the First Century World
5: Paul's Use of a Secretary
6: Identifying Inserted Material
7: Weaving Together a Letter
8: Classifying Paul's Letters
9: Analyzing Paul's Writing Style
10: Preparing a Letter for Dispatch
11: Dispatching the Letter
12: Paul's Letter Carriers
13: Paul's Use of His Letter Carriers
14: Collecting Paul's Letters
15: Inspiration and First-Century Letter Writing
Conclusion

Again, this book is heartily recommended.

Next book in my queue: Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language (amazon.com) by Michael Hoey. This was recommended to me by my friend Randall Tan; we'll be writing a paper applying some of Hoey's concepts to NT Greek for International SBL in Vienna (though I won't be able to attend the conference). I'm sure I'll blog a bit about that as I read it. Dunno if I'll get through it as fast as this last one, though.