Hone Your Craft as a Biblical Scholar
IBR has a new research group on “Linguistics and the Biblical Text.”
HT: William Ross, Mike Aubrey
The University of London’s Department of History provides an open list of “justifications. addenda, and corrigenda” for A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian (Harrassowitz, 1999).
HT: AWOL
Mike Aubrey points to a full set of video recordings of lectures from the recent SEBTS conference on linguistics and NT Greek. I’ve included this playlist below as well. The “hamburger” button in the upper left-hand corner will expand the playlist contents with a list of speakers and their topics.
Larry Hurtado reviews Michael Dormandy’s recent TC essay, “How the Books Became the Bible: The Evidence for Canon Formation From Work-Combination in Manuscripts.”
Mike Aubrey is “rethinking transitivity and the Greek perfect.”
The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity provides a database that is
making readily accessible and searchable as much as possible of the early evidence for the cult of Christian saints (up to around AD 700), with key texts presented in their original language, all with English translation and brief contextual commentary.
Work on the project was set to conclude 31 December 2018 with some minor work continuing into this year.
HT: AWOL
Mike Aubrey has provided an excerpt from an essay of his in Linguistics & Biblical Exegesis (Lexham, 2016). The excerpt strives carefully to work out a middle ground that is neither wholly on the side of theological lexica nor on that of James Barr’s critique of them.
Instead, Mike suggests,
If the failure of theological dictionaries was the assumption that words and concepts are identical, then the failure of the structuralist semantics that dominated the field when James Barr wrote his critique was the assumption that words and concepts are dramatically different. If words mean anything at all, then there must be a substantive relationship between them and the concepts (both associative and denotative) they evoke mentally.
Particularly if language is indeed the medium and horizon of human hermeneutic experience (e.g., H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 401–514), then the question of theological (or other conceptual) lexicography would still seem to be quite appropriate to ask, albeit perhaps in a chastened fashion in the continuing wake of Barr’s critique.
For the balance of Mike’s reflections, see his original post.
According to the volume’s blurb, the principal editors, Dirk Jongkind and Peter Williams, have
taken a rigorously philological approach to reevaluating the standard text—reexamining spelling and paragraph decisions as well as allowing more recent discoveries related to scribal habits to inform editorial decisions.
Meanwhile, the principal editors have begun a blog about the edition. According to the blog’s initial post, future posts
will explore what such method means in practice at the hand of examples, and also probe the boundaries of such approach. However, in practice the emphasis on scribal behaviour implies that if, in the past, exegetical and theological arguments have been used to address a particular variant unit, we happily ignore these arguments if there is also a perfectly adequate transcriptional explanation.
HT: Dirk Jongkind, Mike Aubrey
