I just finished working through EpBarn 10. There is some strange stuff in there as regards basic understanding of anatomy (of rabbits) and reproductive systems (of hyenas and weasels).

Why bring this up? It makes me wonder how much stuff we miss in our reading of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament because, simply, we view such things differently than they did. Here is EpBarn 10.6-8, with some comments interspersed:

(6) Furthermore, “You shall not eat the hare.” Why? Do not become, he means, one who corrupts boys, or even resemble such people, because the hare grows another opening every year, and thus has as many orifices as it is years old. (EpBarn 10.6, Holmes)

First, note that two different words for "hare" are used in the same verse. Basically (caution, this may not be family-friendly) Barnabas says that for each year the rabbit lives, it grows a new anus. The Greek word is ἀφόδευσις, BDAG "anus of hares", this being the only citation in BDAG's source corpora. On the word, BDAG provides the helpful parenthetical note "Pliny, NH 8, 81, 218 Archelaus auctor est, quot sint corporis cavernae ad excrementa lepori, totidem annos esse aetatis=according to Archelaus the number of apertures for a hare’s excrements equals the years of its lifespan." I'll let you guess what "one who corrupts boys" might be meaning (hint: BDAG glosses the word as "pederast"). Barnabas draws a parallel between the uncleanliness of the rabbit and pederasts. In the same way you don't eat rabbits, avoid pederasts (associating the hare's defecational peculiarities with its uncleanliness as some justification for the statement). But how much of that would make any sense without a good lexicon? I don't know. I don't even know what Kirsopp Lake was thinking when he translated the latter portion of the verse "Because thou shalt not, he means, become a corruptor of the young, or become like such men; for the rabbit multiplies during every year its retirements by the way; for it has as many burrow-holes as it lives years" unless he was just trying to be diplomatic and appeal to the Victorian sensibilities of the era. Lake is less convoluted, but some portion of the analogy is lost.

(7) Again, “Neither shall you eat the hyena.” Do not become, he means, an adulterer or a seducer, or even resemble such people. Why? Because this animal changes its nature from year to year, and becomes male one time and female another. (8) But he also hated the weasel, and with good reason. Do not become, he means, like those men who, we hear, with immoral intent do things with the mouth that are forbidden, nor associate with those immoral women who do things with the mouth that are forbidden. For this animal conceives through its mouth. (EpBarn 10.7-8, Holmes, emphasis mine)

So, hyena are unclean because they actually change sex (φύσις) from male to female each year (καὶ ποτὲ μὲν ἄρρεν, ποτὲ δὲ θῆλυ γίνεται)? I've seen hyena in the wild (and took some pictures, one is below, more here) when I was in South Africa. They seem pretty normal to me:

My point in writing all of this isn't to berate the anatomical and biological understanding of the author of EpBarn. These sorts of understandings seem to be foundational for him, and assumed to be understood by his initial readership. But they are clearly not the way we today look at such things.

What sorts of things are we missing because our understanding in such areas is much different than that of the ancients? One potential item may be the discussion in 1Co 11. See an older post on Michael Heiser's blog, scroll down to the last item in the "required reading" portion of the post; you may be interested in some of the subsequent posts (here and here) discussing this sort of thing.

Apart from simply investing oneself in the primary and secondary (and tertiary) source material ("read, read, read"), what are some other ways that we today can become more aware of such blind spots that have a propensity to affect our understanding and therefore interpretation of these texts we hold so dear?

I've mentioned the upcoming Bible Technologies Conference and the paper I plan on presenting there (also info here). I've recently realized that I've got a little more than two months to get the durn thing written.

I also realized that Kenny spent 124 pages talking about Stylometry in the New Testament; I'm giving a paper that is allotted perhaps 30 minutes (some portion of which is intended for questions) for a corpus that is roughly four times the size of the New Testament.

In other words, I'm realizing that I'll have to give a very high level overview with perhaps some glimpses at deeper-level data. Chances are I'll follow most of Kenny's lead, which means:

• Rough overview of distribution of major parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, etc.)
• Rough overview of most common words and their distribution/frequency
• Perhaps some further look at things like conjunctions and articles

Kenny then used portions of his data in the evaluation of certain textual issues, mostly geared toward authorship (Luke/Acts, John/epistles/Revelation, Paulines). I'll have to determine an issue to examine further using the data pulled together, but I have some constraints:

• No examination of JEDP, whatsoever.
• No examination of authorship, whatsoever.
• No examination of translational theory, whatsoever.

Given these constraints, are there stylistic issues in the LXX that you would suggest I use for my example case study?

My own thoughts have to do with genre (say, look at stuff having to do with narrative versus stuff having to do with poetry to see if there are any sorts of things that seem to be indicative of one or the other). But I'm interested in what you might think or suggest. For an idea of the criteria/features I'm tracking, see this post.

Please feel free to leave a comment with your suggestion(s), or drop me an email (textgeek at gmail dot com). Thanks!

From Epp and Fee's Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism (amazon.com), chapter 5, "The Twentieth Century Interlude in New Testament Textual Criticism", (emphasis mine):

One response to the fact that our popular critical texts are still so close to that of WH might be that the kind of text arrived at by them and supported so widely by subsequent criticism is in fact and without question the best attainable NT text; yet every textual critic knows that this similarity of text indicates, rather, that we have made little progress in textual theory since Westcott-Hort; that we simply do not know how to make a definitive determination as to what the best text is; that we do not have a clear picture of the transmission and alteration of the text in the first few centuries; and, accordingly, that the Westcott-Hort kind of text has maintained its dominant position largely by default. Günther Zuntz enforces the point in a slightly different way when he says that “the agreement between our modern editions does not mean that we have recovered the original text. It is due to the simple fact that their editors … follow one narrow section of the evidence, namely, the non-Western Old Uncials”.
Epp, E. J., & Fee, G. D. (1993). Studies in the theory and method of New Testament textual criticism (amazon.com) (87). Grand Rapids, MI.: Eerdmans.

The quote from Zuntz is from a book that's been on my Amazon.com wishlist for awhile, but I haven't yet obtained: The Text of the Epistles: A Disquisition Upon the Corpus Paulinum: The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy 1946 (amazon.com). Yet another reason to think about buying it, I guess (I've seen it in footnotes a couple times in the past weeks).

I just installed the New Testament Textual Criticism Collection (6 Volumes) available from my employer, Logos Bible Software.

I'm stoked about this collection. There are six books, two of which (the first two listed) I'm particularly looking forward to:

• Eldon J. Epp and Gordon D. Fee, Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism (amazon.com). Eerdmans, 1993.
• Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research (amazon.com). Eerdmans, 1995.
• Mark Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem: A Way through the Maze (amazon.com). T&T Clark, 2001
• David Alan Black, New Testament Textual Criticism: A Concise Guide (amazon.com). Baker Academic, 1994.
• Keith Elliot and Ian Moir. Manuscripts and the Text of the New Testament (amazon.com). T&T Clark, 1995.
• Jack Finegan, Encountering the New Testament Manuscripts (amazon.com). Eerdmans, 1974.

I've had my eye on the Eerdmans titles for a long time, just never ponied up the dough for them. It'll be good to finally read some of the essays in those books, as well as consider the others (particularly Goodacre's).

Many thanks to Eric Sowell of Archaic Christianity for making available his in-progress work, A Reader's Version of the Protoevangelium of James.

You won't find a translation in Eric's work; should you need one to check yourself against, try CCEL's edition. Though you should really try to fight through it by yourself first.

On helps to get you reading Greek, I think so-called "Reader's Editions" are good things. I also think diglots are good, and I think that if you want to gain more reading facility you should read stuff that isn't the New Testament. On that note, I am also finding the present volumes immensely helpful:

• Michael Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations (amazon.com) (Third Edition). Baker Academic. This is a diglot and the translation is good without being too idiomatic. Very helpful in working through text you may not be familiar with. The Gentium font is used, so it is very readable.
• Andrew E. Bernhard, Other Early Christian Gospels: A Critical Edition of the Surviving Greek Manuscripts (amazon.com). Continuum. Included here are transcriptions ("Critical Editions" and "Student's Greek Texts"; the student texts have normalized spelling and no apparatus) and translations of existing Greek sources for non-Canonical gospels. As such, the vocabulary is usually familiar enough but different enough to make you work. The included translations also help with providing a source to check your reading against. And there are Greek word indexes for each included document, but they're in the back so they are there, but not too handy.

I'd recommend both of them. If you're looking to increase your skill with Greek in 2009, these are good places to start. You also might want to try Rodney Whitacre's A Patristic Greek Reader (amazon.com).

Another little item that might be helpful is my "Phrasal Interlinear" of the Didache. It is a (mostly) phrase-by-phrase interlinear, not the typical word-by-word interlinear.

Also, a hint that has helped me recently: Don't read these things with translation as your primary goal. Read the words of the Greek text as phrases/clauses; don't try to translate word-for-word as you go. If you go by word, you'll end up stuck in a code/decode approach that is more about substituting word glosses and less about understanding the Greek text. Read a phrase or clause, and accept that you don't understand something. Many times, the bit that is confusing will make sense as the whole phrase or clause is unveiled—it gives you the context you need to make an educated guess on that unknown word or parsing. Reading is for understanding, not for parsing and gloss-lookup-ing on a word-by-word basis to piece together an incoherent jumble of Englished Greek.

Update (2009-01-04): Thanks to Tommy Wasserman (Evangelical Textual Criticism) for reminding us about the online critical edition of the Protevangelium:

And there is also an online mini critical edition to the Protevangelium Jacobi, including introduction to the manuscripts, etc., released last year by two doctoral students in Birmingham: http://www.sd-editions.com/protevangel/

Another comment, this one from me: Is it "protoevangelium" (which Eric uses in his title) or "protevangelium" (which is more familiar to me, and which the online critical edition uses)? Or does it matter?

Steve Runge of NTDiscourse.org is Biblioblogs.com's Blogger of the Month for January 2009.

Learn about Steve's background and influences, and get to know more about him. He is a genuinely great guy that I'm happy and privileged to call my friend.

Also check out Steve's post about his blogging plans for 2009.

This may cause you to ask — what might Rick's 2009 blogging plans be? I'll be honest and say I don't really know. Perhaps something about my 2009 BibleTech paper once I dig back into it. I have a few non-blogging projects I need to wrap up; after that we'll see what sort of opportunities come about; particularly once I formalize any proposals for this year's academic conferences (ETS and SBL).

It's Christmas Eve. I don't know about you, but here in Bellingham we have at least 2 feet of snow on the ground, which is very unusual for this time of year. And it's still snowing; we got 4-6" more overnight—with more on the way, according to the weather-dude. I get to shovel my driveway for the fourth time in a week! The Christmas Eve service at our church has been canceled. Mail delivery is off-and-on (so much for that "neither snow nor sleet nor hail" bit). We're hoping the garbage truck makes it to pick up our garbage today. And I've been working from home (thanks, Logos!) since last week Friday. This will be the first real white Christmas, with lots of snow, that I can ever recall experiencing.

I wanted to wish a Merry Christmas to all who read ricoblog, and express my gratitude as well. I know my posting has been sporadic this year; hopefully the posts that I've made have been interesting and thought-provoking in some way.

I've come across a few unique tools and charts that I wanted to make sure all you folks out there in TV-land knew about. I find them incredibly interesting and think that you might too.

So enjoy these goodies, and Merry Christmas!

Christmas Goodie #1: What's in Your Bible? An interactive Canon Comparison Chart.  This is from Bible Study Magazine (which is published by Logos), put together my my friend and colleague (in that order), Vincent Setterholm. You're likely aware that most protestant bodies accept 66 books in the Biblical canon, and that there are "apocryphal" or "deuterocanonical" books that are accepted into other traditions' canons. But did you know that the Ethiopian canon (the widest canon) has both a "broad" and "narrow" canon, and that the broad canon includes stuff like purported letters of Peter to Clement? Check the chart out to get a glimpse of the sorts of things going on in the canons of other traditions.

Christmas Goodie #2: Biblindex: Index of Biblical Quotations and Allusions in Early Christian Literature. This as well is very awesome, hat-tip to Kevin P. Edgecomb at Biblicalia. I've mentioned Biblia Patrisica on this blog before; it is a 7 volume (plus one supplement) set that somewhat exhaustively sets out references among the writings of the Fathers to the Bible. Biblindex makes this information available for query:

This site already allows simple interrogation in a corpus of about 400,000 biblical references, from the volumes of Biblia Patristica, CNRS Editions, 1975-2000, and unpublished archives of the Center for Patristics Analysis and Documentation (CADP).

As Kevin notes, the search function is somewhat byzantine. Read the instructions to figure out how things work, it doesn't work like you might think. But it makes a wealth of hard-to-find material available, with a little work. You should bookmark this site.

Christmas Goodie #3: Collation and Evaluation of OT Apocrypha Translations. The hat-tip goes to Mark Hoffman of Biblical Studies and Technological Tools for this one. This originated in a posting to the Biblicalist yahoo group. There is a cool chart, some XML, and a spreadsheet. Check it out, there is some cool and useful information here.