Phil Gons

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Dan Wallace Starts a Blog

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Daniel B. WallaceIf you’ve studied New Testament Greek, you know who Daniel Wallace is (not to be confused with the author, angler, and alligator wrestler, the rheumatologist, or the Star Wars geek). His Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (also available from Logos Bible Software) is an essential resource for intermediate Greek students. Not only does it provide an excellent overview of the grammar and syntax of the Greek NT, but it also offers some fresh perspectives on difficult passages. I don’t always agree with Wallace’s exegesis, but I find his views helpful and thought provoking.

Wallace has contributed online through the Pen and Parchment blog and the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts blog, but now he has his own blog, which you can find at DanielBWallace.com. I’d encourage you to check it out and subscribe to the RSS feed (or if RSS still mystifies you, sign up for the email or bookmark the site).

How to Use Greek and Hebrew in Blog Posts

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Greek Manuscript

If you use Greek and Hebrew in your blog posts, here’s a tip that will help you make it look good and give you the ability to make changes across your entire site in just a few seconds. There are two main things you need to do.

Step 1: Add Styles to Your Style Sheet

The first thing you need to do is find your style sheet. Your style sheet is the global control for how your site looks—text, colors, images, and more. If you’re familiar with creating styles in a word processing program like Microsoft Word, then you already understand the concept. You create and define a style, apply it to various units of text, and then when you edit that style in your style sheet, all of the text tagged with the style is instantly updated.

Find Your Style Sheet

If you use the self-hosted version of WordPress, you can find your style sheet in the admin panel by going to Appearance > Editor. Your style sheet is most likely named style.css. Click on it to load it, and then scroll to the bottom to add your new styles.1 You can access your style sheet via FTP2 by going to /public_html/wp-content/themes/{your-theme-name}/style.css. I typically use Dreamweaver to open and edit my style sheet. Other blogging platforms should be pretty similar.

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  1. Some themes provide you with a secondary style sheet for adding your custom styles so you don’t lose them when you upgrade your theme. In these cases, you might be looking for a custom.css file instead. [↩]
  2. FileZilla is a good free FTP client for Windows. [↩]

Long Strings of Genitives in the Greek NT

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The last two Sunday mornings at church I’ve seen some lengthy strings of genitives. Last week was 1 Timothy 6:14, and this week was James 2:1. I remembered seeing some even longer ones in the past, so I thought I’d do a quick search and see what I would come up with.

This was pretty easy to do with the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament. I simply called for a genitive word and asked for it to be repeated x number of times. I refined the number to give me hits I was looking for. (Download the query if you want, and put it in your My Documents\Libronix DLS\SyntaxQueries folder.)

The award for longest string of genitives goes without contest to Luke, who in Luke 3:23–38 strings together a massive 153 genitives.

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Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek by Constantine R. Campbell

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About two months ago, I happened to catch a Zondervan blog post that mentioned that they were giving away 20 review copies of Constantine Campbell’s Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek. I enjoy studying Greek, needed to learn more about the verbal aspect theory, and like free books, so I sent off my email and managed to snag a copy.

I got a friendly email yesterday reminding me that I still needed to write my review and mentioning the week-long series of blog posts on verbal aspect from the book’s author next week at the Zondervan Koinonia blog. It appears that I’m not alone as I’ve seen several other reviews coming out today.

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“When I’m stumped . . . I go to Henry Alford.”

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Dan Phillips, who blogs at Biblical Christianity and Pyromaniacs, emailed me about a month ago and asked me about making Henry Alford’s The Greek Testament: With a Critically Revised Text; a Digest of Various Readings; Marginal References to Verbal and Idiomatic Usage; Prolegomena; and a Critical and Exegetical Commentary available for Libronix. In that email he told me that “John Piper names it as the one he always consults.” Recently I asked him if he knew the source for Piper’s statement. He didn’t, but said he’d do some hunting. He asked his blog readers for help, and it was Pilgrim Mommy to the rescue.

I think it might be . . . during the Q&A at the end of Piper’s talk on John Owen.

I just listened to the end of Piper’s biographical lecture on Owen, and here’s what he says in the Q&A in response to a question about commentaries that he finds helpful:

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James Tauber’s Graded Greek Reader

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At BibleTech:2008 James Tauber of MorphGNT.org gave the opening presentation in Room 1, “MorphGNT and the Building of Linguistic Databases for New Testament Greek,” during which he shared a little bit about his work on a graded Greek reader. Unfortunately, he ran out of time and had to rush through his material. The MP3 audio is available at the BibleTech Conference website. He discusses the graded reader at the tale end of his presentation (50:15–55:30).

He argues for a more inductive approach to learning Greek, and suggested that word frequency is not the best choice for the order in which students should learn new words. Students should first learn the words that occur together most frequently, allowing them to read a broader base of the Greek New Testament earlier on. He also suggests learning the inflected forms first, and then learning the lemmas and other deductive categories later.

The biblical text would be a combination of Greek and English words (following Greek word order) that would take into consideration the vocabulary that the students have learned. As they learn more, the English words would become Greek words. This approach allows students to dive in just about anywhere in the Greek New Testament without the clunkiness of multiple levels of text that you get with interlinears.

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Fonts Supporting Polytonic Unicode Greek

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Greek ManuscriptRod Decker, Professor of Greek and New Testament at Baptist Bible Seminary, Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, recently blogged about how new Vista fonts Cambria, Calibri, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, and Corbel unfortunately do not support polytonic Unicode Greek. Be sure to check out the PDF where he evaluates them.

In a comment, I noted that another new Vista font, Segoe UI, does support polytonic Unicode Greek. I also mentioned some nice polytonic Unicode Greek fonts that come with Adobe’s Creative Suite: “Arno Pro (serif), Garamond Premr Pro (serif), and Hypatia Sans Pro (sans serif)—a free gift downloadable after registering the product.” Decker responded and asked if I would post a PDF with samples, so that’s what I’m doing.

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David Instone-Brewer Reviews SESB 2

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sesb.jpgDavid Instone-Brewer (also here and here), the Technical Officer and Senior Research Fellow in Rabbinics and the New Testament at Tyndale House, has posted his review of version 2 of the Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible (SESB).

Here are some selections from his section “Overall Usefulness: much better than paper”:

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