NT Gateway Weblog

Sorry there's been so little blogging lately. The academic life, or my academic life at least, tends to throw up extraordinarily busy periods every now and then and this has been one of them. And now the blog is taking a complete break until early July. I look forward to seeing you again then and catching up on all those comments promised "in due course".

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Sadly, there has been no sign of any of Felix Just's web pages on the internet for the last couple of weeks. Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, Loyola Marymount University are just showing "File Not Found" notices on all his material, homepage, E.N.T.E.R., his Johannine studies pages and so on. I have tried getting in touch with Felix but have not heard anything and I know that others have too. Let's hope that the sites come back soon, and that all is well with Felix. In the mean time, everything still seems to be accessible from the Wayback Machine, who last updated their record on 4 June 2004:

Felix Just, S. J.: Homepage

Johannine Literature Web

Electronic Educational New Testament Resources

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I sometimes wonder if it is worth my while posting these here since I'm sure most of my readers will receive the email alerts, but it may be that it provides a prompt to click through to a review of interest, so here they are anyway, and reformatted a little from the email message SBL send out. These are those listed under the New Testament heading:

Braxton, Brad R.
No Longer Slaves: Galatians and the African American Experience
Reviewed by Thomas B. Slater

Cignelli, L. and R. Pierri
Sintassi di greco biblico (LXX e NT): Quaderno 1.A: Le Concordanze
Reviewed by Dirk Jongkind

Dawes, Gregory W.
The Historical Jesus Question: The Challenge of History to Religious Authority
Reviewed by Susan Lochrie Graham

Geyer, Douglas W.
Fear, Anomaly, and Uncertainty in the Gospel of Mark
Reviewed by Daniel C. Claire

Griffith, Terry
Keep Yourselves from Idols: A New Look at 1 John
Reviewed by Jan G. Van Der Watt

Horsley, Richard A. and Neil Asher Silberman
The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World
Reviewed by Tobias Nicklas

Olbricht, Thomas H. and Jerry L. Sumney, eds.
Paul and Pathos
Reviewed by Ronald F. Hock

Park, Eung Chun
Either Jew or Gentile: Paul's Unfolding Theology of Inclusivity
Reviewed by James Miller

Via, Dan O.
What Is New Testament Theology?
Reviewed by Jan G. Van Der Watt

Wright, N. T.
The Resurrection of the Son of God
Reviewed by Michael R. Licona

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In Bible Software Review Weblog, Rubén Gómez noted that he now had an RSS feed available via Feedburner. It puzzled me a little at first since I've been reading Bible Software Review Weblog in the Bloglines aggregator for some time. I then noticed that Blogos commended Rubén for this addition, noting that he would remove him from his "Sites I Wish Supported RSS" list. So I looked on that list, and there was the NT Gateway Weblog on the list too! In my ignorance, I had not realised that the Atom feed provided by blogger, was not adequate for everyone's needs and for every aggregator. So I have followed Rubén's lead and have subscribed to the amazing Feedburner, which takes an Atom feed and transforms it into a Feed that everyone can enjoy -- and lots more too. So if you need an RSS feed for this blog, here's the URL:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NTGatewayWeblog

And I've added a little icon on the left too so which also provides this URL for the site feed. Thanks to all concerned for (inadvertently) alerting me to this useful resource.

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In a useful post on Bible Software Review Weblog, Rubén Gómez asks about the future of electronic synopses of the Gospels, quoting a little section of my The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze (London & New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001) and commenting:

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!)

Yes, this is just the kind of thing I was referring to. In fact, I have often discussed the possibility of creating an electronic synopsis of the Gospels with my colleague here in Birmingham, Prof. David Parker, who is particularly interested in this from the text-critical side. You can see him beginning to think along these lines in his Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). We have also been discussing this with Catherine Smith, a post graduate student here in Birmingham. What we are interested in is the possibility of producing a synopsis that could be genuinely interactive, i.e. in which the user chooses which parallels to view and how to view them, i.e. whether to place Matthew, Mark or Luke in the middle. We also feel that a good electronic synopsis would enable one to choose which texts to view alongside which texts, whether Vaticanus, Bezae, Sinaiticus or whatever. It's something that could really open up study of the Synoptic Problem, textual criticsm and New Testament studies in general.

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AKMA asks "Does anyone actually use gmail for anything? So far, I don’t, really." Yes, I think it's pretty good. The 1,000 mb. of storage is obviously the real attraction, but I like their labelling idea; and its search facility is, as you'd expect, excellent. So I'm pretty sold on it, I must admit.

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This article in yesterday's Observer reports on the rising problem of plagiarism of internet resources in university students' work:

Universities declare war on the copycat exam cheats
Mark Townsend and Mark Hudson

A sophisticated cheat detection system is being considered by 140 universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, as new research reveals that more than 90,000 students regularly plagiarise essays.

All major universities are planning to introduce software to catch cheats in an attempt to protect the credibility of degree qualifications. Many lecturers are concerned by a growing market on the internet offering students customised essays for sale.

It is something we've seen on the rise here in Birmingham too and I cannot help thinking that some colleagues are better at spotting offenders than others. One of the things that I find encouraging about the current article is that it will help to target students who are going to the sites offering customised essays for sale. It's actually pretty straightforward to spot blatant interent plagiarism if you are at all familiar with internet resources, and Google regularly lends a helping hand, but my own major concern is with these sites that sell their services because these are more difficult to track.

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