The NA27 apparatus lists the following contents for P99 (dated as “ca. 400”, currently held in the Chester Beatty Library). I’ve given the references in an English-based system (though I still use “.” for a chapter/verse separator, instead of “:”, because I’m lazy and don’t like to hit the shift key unless I really have to), translated from the German system in the printed NA27 apparatus appendix.

Ro 1.1; 2Co 1.3-6; 1.6-17; 1.20-24; 2.1-9; 2.9-5.13; 5.13-6.3; 6.3-8.13; 8.14-22; 9.2-11.8; 11.9-23; 11.26-13.11; Gal 1.4-11; 1.18-6.15; 1.14-2.4; 2.5-3.19; 3.19-4.9; Eph 1.4-2.21; 1.22(?); 3.8-6.24

I have two questions, actually.

First, what’s up with Galatians? Why the large range covering most of the book (1.18-6.15) followed by subranges amounting to 1.14-4.9? Is this content duplicated in the papyrus? I’ve searched online for other contents listings of P99 only to see the same exact list duplicated in numerous locations. I’m confused as to what the duplication might be indicating—or if it is a typo of some sort (it feels like a book name is missing, but Galatians and Ephesians are in canonical order, so it can’t be that … I don’t think).

Second, what’s up with Ephesians? Why is “1.22(?)” appended? Is it that it occurs out of order after 2.21?

Just trying to get a handle on what’s listed in this particular entry and why. P99 is not in Comfort & Barrett (too late for them, apparently) so I can’t check there; it is also not in Tischendorf because, well, Tischendorf is just far too early. Other ranges in the NA27 appendix do not have overlapping ranges (well, not up through P99 nor through the uncials). Poking through the site for the Chester Beatty Library was a dead end as well (though I’d love to be proved wrong).

If you have any help for me, I’m all ears.

If you’ve been following my series on Translating Second Timothy over at PastoralEpistles.com, you know that I’ve made it through the epistle. (In less than three months, not bad, huh?)

I’ve gathered all of the posts into one PDF file. Grab it if you’re interested. If you have further interest in the material (specifically in distributing it or publishing it in some way) please contact me for further information.

• SecondTimothyTranslationAndNotes.pdf (402.15 KB)

I’m very interested in any feedback you may have. Feel free to email me at rick at pastoral epistles dot com with any comments, encouragement, criticism or flat-out disagreement.

Somehow I’ve managed to have two blogs in the April Biblioblog Top 50 at the same time. ricoblog is at #39 (a 21-place drop from March, but hey … only had three posts this month). But the real surprise is the group blog I administer and write for, PastoralEpistles.com at #37.

The real star, however, must be Brian Fulthorp at συνεσταυρομαι, who at #38 is sandwiched between ricoblog and PastoralEpistles.com. Talk about a place of prominence!

Thanks to all who read and link to the blogs, I do appreciate it.

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.