Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
I’m just pottering around the blog, looking at this and that. I’ve been checking some of the blogroll links. The Egyptian State Information Service have changed their URL, I see.
Grey and rainy here, but the Luxor Travel Tips site tells us that it is 33C in Luxor today!!! I am so envious.
This blog has been running for two or three years now (I can’t remember when). In that time I have written 2,340 posts, which have attracted 6,866 comments, and … 215,300 spam comments!! That is, an average of 100 spams per post.
Every morning I get a few of them in my inbox, which the spam filter has allowed through, and I have to go off to this site and manually remove them. That takes time … minutes of my life stolen.
Yet time is all we have. We each have a fixed amount of it. We sell it for money, in order to live, hoping to make something of the rest of our days. To steal time is to steal life. Some of my contemporaries at school had much less than they thought, and have already passed on. How much time each of us has left is something that none of us can know.
100 spam comments, every time I post… that is a sobering amount of trouble, of lost time and nuisance.
I hesitate to ask government to deal with this problem. Undoubtedly, eventually, access to the web will be controlled. Only the registered will be allowed on. That day will not be a good one for freedom, of course. Will the spammer force us all to acquiesce in allowing weaselly politicans control of the web?
Yet even then spam will continue. It will continue to arrive, this time from those big businesses with enough links to government to be allowed on the list as being “reputable”. This is the reason why junk mail pops through our letter boxes every day. No-one wants it, yet still it comes.
Perhaps we can endure the spammer, and his theft of our lives, then, if there is really no solution.
UPDATE: It seems that I started blogging on 30th July 2006, at Thoughts on Antiquity (at neonostalgia.com, now seemingly defunct), and began this blog on 9th August 2009.
I’ve been working on placing Theodoret’s commentary on Romans on the web for a while. I OCR’d it in Abbyy Finereader 11, and I finished proofing the OCR in Finereader before Easter.
Today I tried exporting the text to HTML. It has rather a lot of italics in it, so imagine my fury when I discovered that exporting “formatted” text had lost all the italics! A bit of experimentation revealed that the same happened when saving “formatted” text as .RTF. Only saving “exact text” retained the italics. And you don’t want all the crud that comes with that.
I imagine that it’s just a bug; but it is a frustrating one. I really do not want to reitalicise some 100 pages.
Another annoyance was that Finereader now attempts to work out where footnotes are involved, and create its own numeration. In Word this is fine, as inserting and renumbering footnotes is trivial. In HTML, however, it simply creates work that has to be undone.
Finereader does excellent OCR. But I wish they would spend some time getting the product user-tested, really I do.
Today I found myself wondering just what the early Christians would have to say on various controverted passages in Scripture, passages where modern issues cause us to look urgently at the text. If Theodoret’s Commentary on Romans is any guide, not much: but I would like to know, all the same.
This naturally caused me to think about the Inter-Varsity Press series, the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. These take the catena approach to commentary, as is natural and sensible.
The volumes in this series are rather pricey, I recall, which is unfortunate. This material ought to be online, surely? It is slightly sad to read the following comment in the introduction to the series:
We have chosen and ordered these selections primarily for a general lay reading audience of nonprofessionals who study the Bible regularly and who earnestly wish to have classic Christian observations on the text readily available to them.[1]
Yes, but how will this audience ever access the product? My only access to any of it vanished with Library.nu.
Now I was wondering just how the volumes were assembled. We all know that the catenas have not been critically edited, and even accessing them is not a trivial matter. There is some discussion of this in the general introduction (PDF) to the series, which appears to be in the Genesis I-II volume:
[We] identified these classic comments by performing global searches of the Greek and Latin patristic corpus. They have searched for these texts in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) digitalized Greek database, the Cetedoc edition of the Latin texts of Corpus Christianorum from the Centre de traitement electronique des documents (Universit. catholique de Louvain), the Chadwyck-Healey Patrologia Latina Database (Migne) and the Packard Humanities Institute Latin databases. We have also utilized the CD-ROM searchable version of the Early Church Fathers, of which the Drew University project was an early co-sponsor along with the Electronic Bible Society. …
Having searched Latin and Greek databases, we then solicited from our Coptic, Syriac and Armenian editorial experts selections from these bodies of literature, seeking a fitting balance from all available exegetical traditions of ancient Christianity within our time frame. To all these we added the material we could find already in English translation. …
[We] supplied to each volume editor a substantial read-out [=print-out] of Greek and Latin glosses, explanations, observations and comments on each verse or pericope of Scripture text. …
TLG and Cetedoc are referenced more often than Migne or other printed Greek or Latin sources for these reasons: (1) the texts are more quickly and easily accessed digitally in a single location; (2) the texts are more reliable and in a better critical edition; (3) we believe that in the future these digital texts will be far more widely accessed both by novices and specialists; (4) short selections can be easily downloaded; and (5) the context of each text can be investigated by the interested reader.[2]
Note that the searches were carried out by computer specialists, rather than scholars. The editors also say that only a fraction of the material assembled was used, as is natural.
I think we may be fairly confident, therefore, that ancient catena material was not used.
It’s still a good project. Would that I could access it!!
Via Paleojudaica.com: The Jerusalem Post reports that a team of Jordanians has translated the Talmud into Arabic.
A think tank on Middle East affairs in Jordan has for the first time published a translation of the Babylonian Talmud in Arabic.
Middle East Studies Center based in Amman produced the 20-volume work, which took six years to complete and is the labor of 95 translators, language experts and editors.
The center’s director Jawad Ahmad refused to speak about the project with The Jerusalem Post and a member of the staff said that Ahmad would not speak with the Israeli press.
The remainder of the JP article consists of Israelis darkly speculating on those evil Moslems and their wicked intentions, in a manner that would not be tolerated if it was Moslems speculating about evil Jews. Isn’t identity politics, or “politically correct poker”, fun!! The fun bit is working out who is allowed to criticise who. But onwards!
On the Talmud Blog, I find more details. But I also learn that it is on sale for $750. That is sad, for how many Arabs can afford that? Let us hope that it becomes accessible more generally online.
Jim Davila comments on the announcement:
I agree that there are precedents that raise potential concerns, and the petty refusal of the center to speak with Israeli journalists is not encouraging. I have discussed the problem of “Talmud libel” here and links. But all that said, Talmud libel depends on selective quotation out of context, and indeed quotations from made-up, spurious sources. To translate the whole Talmud for the purpose of Talmud libel would not only be ridiculous overkill, it would be counterproductive, since it would allow readers to evaluate quotations in context and verify sources. So I think there is good reason to give this translation the benefit of the doubt and not to assume bad motives on the part of the translators. Assuming it has been done accurately, I think the translation of the entire Talmud into Arabic is a welcome development and I hope it is widely read.
This is sound thinking, although I can’t say that I care about thought-crime (and interesting that a term, “Talmud libel”, has already been invented to try to stifle use of the Talmud for anti-Jewish polemic). Let the Moslems hate the Jews, if they wish, or vice versa. I agree entirely that a complete translation must dispose of out-of-context quotation, and, in general, should be welcome.
That said, I don’t see how use of mistaken information works, even from the anti-Jewish point of view. This may be politically naive of me, but let’s explore the idea a bit.
Say that the Jews are truly the scum of the earth intent on screwing over the rest of the world. This is, I believe, a popular view throughout history wherever Jewish people have lived, so clearly it cannot be true but must be a conspiracy, probably by the Jews, or the bankers, or the freemasons, or someone. But if it is true, then surely that view does not need to be advanced using forged sources? The truth would be a better weapon! And if the Jews are not quite that bad, and buy their round when asked, then none of us need forged unhistorical claims polluting the web and our minds. We’d all rather have the facts, surely?
But what if the Talmud does contain “Wrong Thinking”? Well, since I don’t feel any need to tell people what to think, I have to say that I don’t care if the Talmud is indeed stuffed to the brim with Jewish racially motivated hatred of everyone else. What business is it of ours? Why shouldn’t it be? Each race and nation believes that it is the best — although of course only the English are correct here –, and that the rest are just foreigners who are daft or malicious or shifty or Welsh or whatever. Understanding that, and making allowances for national pride, is what we all used to do. It used to be called “tolerance”, and it has become a very rare thing.
Quite why the Jews of that period should not write a book for purposes of self-identification I do not know. A Byzantine Jew of the 6th century AD who had been threatened and forced to pay money by one of Justinian’s tax-gatherers because he was a Jew has every right, surely, to sit down and compose something vitriolic about “Christians”, if he wishes. Wouldn’t we, in his shoes?
Live and let live, and let us crucify the zealots who demand the right to silence others. With blunt nails.
I have, just this instant, come across an example of how the NIV is being corrupted deliberately, for politically correct reasons, in order to deceive. It nearly caught me out, as I was doing a bible study.
I was asked to do something on St. Paul and leadership of women (why me?!). So I looked up 1 Corinthians 11:34 in the bible gateway.
34 Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. 35 If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.
OK, that’s fair enough. But then I noticed something relevant to my bible study of the place of women in a congregation:
26 What then shall we say, brothers and sisters? When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation.
And that clarifies the subject, and is relevant to my subject: that “sisters” are taking part in the service, speaking and giving instruction, revelation, etc.
At this point a warning bell went off, and I went to consult my old printed NIV. And I find … that “and sisters” is a modern interpolation! It isn’t there in the Greek, which simply reads “adelphoi”, and which would never be translated any other way but “brothers” except through special pleading. Verse 26, on this highly controversial subject, does NOT contain a relevant statement. Yet I could have taught on this, to a congregation who knew no better, something that is actually not in the bible.
This is not trivial. This is deliberate corruption of the scriptures, on a subject where the world is demanding that Christians follow its dogma. I confess that I am furious. The people who will be receiving this teaching are under every kind of moral pressure. We should be able to rely on our bible translations!!!
Let us pray that God will vindicate his judgement on those who have chosen to do this evil, who have chosen to corrupt the word of life and to poison it with material designed to mislead and disarm Christians faced with urgent temptation by the evil one. May these wicked men endure every evil that can befall a man; for they have chosen to pour contempt on the Holy Spirit.