In his Philo of Alexandria Blog, Torrey Seland points to an online version of Alfred Rahlfs Septuagint (just the text, no critical apparatus), which is displayed in parallel columns alongside different French and English translations (mostly Brenton, but some KJV and RSV as well). The Unicode Greek font is very nice, and the interface easy to use.

I have added a new review article to Bible Software Review, entitled A Comparison of Accordance 6.2 Against the Baseline in H. Van Dyke Parunak’s Review. The review alluded to, of course, is his Windows Software for Bible Study, JETS 46/3 (September 2003) 465-95, which can be downloaded here.

Back in February 2004 I requested permission to reproduce the article online, but have not even heard back from JETS. I’m sorry for our readers, but it will be worth your while to download the PDF and print it.

Notice that this is not a review of Accordance 6.2 as such. It is meant to be read alongside Parunak’s article, so that you can see at a glance one of the “missing columns” that the author could not include originally. Enjoy!

Further to my previous post on the subject, the two events I mentioned are moving forward. Tim Bulkeley is “organising a session with a series of short presentations and panel discussion around the topic ‘How does an electronic communication environment change the way we do biblical studies?’” to be presented at the seventh conference of the Association Internationale Bible et Informatique (Leuven, Belgium, 23-24 July 2004). For a list of participants and subjects, see here.

As for Joe Fleener, this is what he’s written about the forthcoming Professor’s Forum on Exegetical Software in Classroom Instruction, to be held at Calvary Baptist Theological Seminary (Lansdale, PA, 9 July, 2004):

With the growth and development of electronic tools (such as BibleWorks, Accordance, Logos, etc.) professors are rethinking pedagogy.

- How do we make use of these “new” tools in the classroom?
- How can these “new” tools help me prepare for teaching?
- How can we instruct our students so that these “new” tools are a help and not a hindrance to their language development?

Calvary Baptist Theological Seminary will be hosting a one day “Professor’s Forum” to discuss many of these questions. Please join us for a time of networking and focused discussion centered on this very important topic.

More information is found here or in this PDF flyer.

My offer to host a similar online event still stands, but I think we are all too busy right now, so it would probably be better to get some feedback on these meetings first, and then see if we can arrange something. BTW, apparently, there is a similar seminar being planned for next SBL annual meeting later this year. I’ll let you know more about it if/when I get more information.

I guess I should have explained better that this blog now offers an RSS feed (as well as the original Atom
feed). If you use a news aggregator you can paste the url http://feeds.feedburner.com/BibleSoftwareReviewWeblog and you’re done. Thanks to Sean Boisen for explaining the process in more detail. Incidentally, Feedburner offers compatibility with many other standards and formats. I believe you can even read this blog on a cell phone!

I have been making frequent use of Gospel synopses lately, and looking at the different electronic versions available. Most Bible software packages include a number of them, with the added plus that one can view the biblical texts in different versions and even languages. This is very convenient and highly flexible. However, with the release of the long-waited critical apparatus found in Nestle-Aland’s 27th edition of the Novum Testamentum Graece later this year (see more info here), a whole new set of possibilities opens up.

Mark Goodacre, on page 101 of his book The Synoptic Problem. A Way Through the Maze. London-New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001, writes the following:

Perhaps, one day, someone will invent an electronic synopsis that enables one to view not just critical texts of Matthew, Mark and Luke in parallel but also different texts of each of the Gospel, layered on top of one another.

That day may be closer than we think. Mark’s words appear in the context of the relevance of Markan Priority for text-critical studies of the Synoptic Gospels, and he mentions specifically one example, found in Mark 1:41 (the story of the Leper), where Codex Bezae (D) shows a most striking reading. Now, as critical apparatuses become available in electronic format, I hope we’ll be able to take advantage of that fact and go at least one or two steps further. Ideally, I’d like to be able to reconstruct each one of the main witnesses (uncials, papyri and so on), and display them in parallel columns. This would be extremely useful for text-critical issues (of which, I must say, I’m very fond of). In other words, one should be able to search for all the variant readings of any of the witnesses consistently cited in the Gospels, say B (03), for example, and build a whole B – Vaticanus – column alongside the standard critical text, Textus Receptus, Alexandrinus or whatever. These readings would have to be inserted at the appropriate point in the text, while the rest would read the same as the base text. This would match exactly the table that appears after Mark Goodacre’s quote above (in Greek, of course!) What I am envisioning here in abstract terms (i.e., with no reference to any future incarnation of the critical apparatus) may require a little extra tagging and some programming, but it would be a fantastic tool. For years, we were all eager to have digital apparatuses, but not just for the sake of reading them on-screen (which is okay, but not enough, IMO). We wanted to do things with it that we cannot currently do at all (or which would require an inordinate amount of time and effort). It seems to me that electronic-based resources must have some added-value features over its printed counterparts, and thus change the way we approach our study and exegesis of the texts.

I hope Bible software companies who happen to license the apparatus will think about some creative ways to work with it along these lines. I’m not hundred percent sure what Mark was hinting at in his book back in 2001 is the same I’ve tried to explain now briefly, but it surely sounds very similar to me. So, that would make two of us! Anyone else?>