From his recent book Josephus, Judea, and Christian Origins: Methods and Categories (amazon.com) (and thanks to Hendrickson Academic for the review copy!). In his article “Josephus as Authority for First Century Judea”, Mason works over the practice of attempting to discern/locate underlying sources used by Josephus:

Since Josephus’s literary art demonstrably involves changes of narrative voice, complexity of character development, calculated repetition of charged language, variation of diction, and diversionary excursus, it seems impossible to devise criteria based on such phenomena for extracting sources. Attempting such recovery would require a sort of literary Heimlich maneuver, performed on someone who has long since digested the item being sought. The result is likely to be neither appealing nor useful. (Mason 38)

Now that’s a great word picture! I just started reading the book, and the first essay (which the above quote comes from) is excellent. Looking forward to the balance of them.

I read an article on ABCNews.com this morning titled “Parenting Blogs May Be Held Liable for Product Reviews”. The article is a brief examination of “Mommy Blogs” that involve a blogger receiving free products and then blogging about personal experience with said products. For companies, the idea is that personal recommendations and word-of-mouth carries more weight with potential customers than traditional advertising.

And that’s true, word-of-mouth normally does have a better effect; and I can see that blogs can be a good method for advertising. The concern, apparently, is that folks who receive free products for review are perceived as more likely to give glowing false testimonials in the hopes of keeping the gravy train alive than they are to give incisive, critical reviews pointing out the bad things in the product. Picking up in the middle of the article:

"But the concern is about those instances when [testimonials] are delivered and it is not made obvious that it's an advertisement for a company."

Whether these revisions, should they happen, will affect particular bloggers will depend on their relationship to the company whose product they're promoting, Cleland said. If a blogger reviews items in return for payment or free products, they may be held liable because the bloggers, unbeknown to their audiences, could be seen as shills for the companies.

"It would only affect bloggers who are paid to write reviews but the sticky issue that is raised is what happens if a product is given for free," Cleland said. "That's something we're going to have to address."

The bold part is the sticky wicket. I say this as one who has received several books from different publishers (Hendrickson, Eerdmans, Oxford, Baylor and perhaps others) at no charge for the purpose of reading them and then blogging my thoughts.

I have no idea what all of this means (will they want to tax books received for review as income?) but I do see that it is time to clearly state my own policy/ideas when it comes to reviewing books on this blog. Here they are in no specific order:

• I am under no obligation to give a positive review. I’ll tell you what I think about the book, positive or negative. Indeed, I’ve done that already (I was very negative on Ehrman’s gospel of Judas book, which Oxford asked me to review). But I’m mostly positive because … well … many times I’m able to request books or at least refuse books if I’m not interested in them. For example, I don’t plan on ever reading any more of Ehrman’s popular literature because it is ill-conceived and poorly argued (though well written) drivel. I have no time for it.
• I will disclaim in each post that reviews a book if the book was provided free of charge. That way you know the situation and don’t have to wonder. There are some books that I buy personally and also review; if that’s the case I’ll let you know that too.
• If I have an review or mention of a product from Logos Bible Software, I will disclaim that I am an employee, and that any comments/opinions are my own and not that of my employer. Indeed, I already have a blanket disclaimer for the site that says as much, and that is linked to every post ever made on this blog.

I think that’s it. I don’t want a lot of rules for this sort of thing, but I do want you to know that I’ll let you know what I think about what I read, be it good or bad, whatever the source of the book.

I’d like to know what you think about this stuff. Use the comments to have a discussion, or if you’re a blogger please interact with me via your own blog, and link back here. Send me an email (text geek at gmail dot com) with your link and I’ll provide whatever links I can at the bottom of this post to keep the thread going.

If there is some sort of concise code of conduct for book reviews that we “bibliobloggers” (or “biblicabloggers”) can devise and agree to, I’m all for it. I think that will help us and also help any publishers we may individually work with so we’re all on the same page when it comes to book reviews.

Thanks!

It’s that time: the most recent Mohr-Siebeck catalog arrived in the post* the other day.  So time for some old-school, true-to-the-name “biblio-blogging”!

If I had unlimited income, and unlimited reading time, I could be very interested in the following:

Nicholas de Lange, Julia G. Krivoruchko, and Cameron Boyd-Taylor, eds., Jewish Reception of Greek Bible Versions: Studies in Their Use in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. (Series: Texts and Studies in Medieval and early Modern Judaism, 23)

Jonathan Marshall, Jesus, Patrons and Benefactors: Roman Palestine and the Gospel of Luke.

Susan E. Docherty, The Use of the Old Testament in Hebrews: A Case Study in Early Jewish Bible Interpretation.

Volker Rabens, The Holy Spirit and Ethics in Paul: Transformation and Empowering for Religious-Ethical Life.

In other Mohr-Siebeck news: Apparently they’ve got a lot of stuff on Google Books, and you can search Mohr books via Google book search on Mohr’s (newly redesigned!) home page. Right column, look for ubiquitous Google icon.

* Whenever stuff from Europe comes by mail, I feel like I need to say “post” instead of “mail”.

Here’s the paper I presented at BibleTech:2009:

Stylometry and the Septuagint: Applying Anthony Kenny’s Stylometric Study to the LXX

In 1986, Anthony Kenny wrote a book called A Stylometric Study of the New Testament which gives details for compiling and comparing book-by-book stylometric statistics for the Greek New Testament given a morphologically tagged corpus. This exploratory study proposes to apply Kenny's method to the LXX, using the Logos Bible Software LXX Morphology, to analyze style.

While Kenny's primary application of his method was in the area of authorship studies, this paper is more interested in the general style of the LXX, and not at all interested in authorship theories or assigning a 'hand' to different passages. For better or worse, this paper treats the LXX as a corpus, and has little interest in its relationship with the underlying Hebrew text.

Once the analysis has been detailed, some points of interest (known only when the analysis is complete as the nature of the study is exploratory) will be further explored. Areas in which the work could be further developed will also be reviewed.

If you actually read it, and then actually have feedback, then please let me know what you think.

In a nutshell, after looking at book-level and chapter-level distributions of part of speech, case/number/gender, tense/voice/mood; I have a worked example of future tense in Leviticus (and then in the Pentateuch). My conclusion: In the Pentateuch, anyway, future tense verbs appear in concentrated groups. The application is when you read or work through these works, then, you should pay attention to the clustering of the future tense to determine what is going on (law-giving, prophetic stuff, whatever). And, if you run across an isolated instance of the future tense, you should pay double attention to that because it is not normal.

At some point in the future, the audio from the talk will be on the BibleTech website.

It's Saturday, day 2 of BibleTech:2009. My paper (Stylometry and the LXX) is on at 3:00 this afternoon (Room 1 if you're here). I'll post the actual paper later (probably Sunday).

Yesterday was excellent. Intelligent people doing some pretty awesome stuff. The highlights:

• Steve Runge on annotating the Greek NT with higher-than-word-level markup
• Ellen Frankel on the Tagged Torah
• Mike Aubrey on SIL's FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx)
• Sean Boisen on semantic information and the Bible

The best parts, though, are the in-between times. At BibleTech, the meals are included, so you can get in conversation with folks who you run into (everyone here is doing impressive stuff, not just the people presenting) and learn more about their projects.

Gotta go before the laptop battery dies.

Here she is, helping Mommy make cookies (of which I was the prime beneficiary!)

And again:

How cute is that? And the cookies were incredibly yummy, thank you very much.

BibleTech:2009 starts tomorrow (Friday) AM, and I’m ready. My paper is written, I have a reading copy (yes, I’ll be reading it) and I have PowerPoint ready to go too. My presentation is Saturday afternoon from 3:00-3:45 in Room 1. The title of the paper is “Stylometry in the Septuagint: Applying Anthony Kenny’s Stylometric Study to the LXX”. I’ll post a copy of the paper to may academic papers page sometime after the conference. Check the schedule page for more info.

Some folks will be live-blogging the conference, others will be twittering to their heart’s content, I’m sure, but I won’t be doing any of that. Perhaps a post on Friday evening sometime, but maybe not even that. Or maybe a post on Sunday after the whole thing is done; we’ll see.

Looking forward to it! If you’ll be there, make sure to catch up with me during a meal — I’d love to talk more about you with whatever sorts of Bible-techie stuff you’re working on or considering!

We’ve been working on Books.Logos.com for a long time, and a beta form of the site has finally been made live. Here’s the text from the site:

We have more than 8,000 classic works from seminary libraries, and we're still scanning more. During the beta period you can search and view all of the books for free.

Use the search box in the upper left to search the entire library. When you've selected a book, you can use the search box on the right side to search within just that book.

Use author:Wilkinson to find all the books by Wilkinson, or title:canon to find books with "canon" in the title. You can even search for Bible references!

Books are still being uploaded to the server; there’s a whole lot of data and it takes awhile. One of the best features of the site is the ability to search by Bible reference (try that, Google). Just type your ref in the search box and hit enter. No special code, it’ll figure out if it is a Bible reference.

The default display is black and white images (they’re smaller and faster), but you may need to view color images for some books or scripts. There’s a little icon by the page indicator to switch to color.

One particular favorite that I’ve run across is Edward William Grinfield’s Scholia Hellenistica in Novum Testamentum: Philone ed Josepho Patribus Apostolicis allisq. Ecclesiae Antiquae Scriptoribus Necnon Libris Apocryphis Maxime Depromta. Huh? It indexes cross references between the NT and several non-NT books (Philo, Josephus, Fathers). Pretty cool.

Check it out, remember it is still in development, and make sure to leave some feedback at the specified email address (books@logos.com).