Blogs as academically useful things...
I'm not sure how big the readership out there is, but this is a call for interaction if you are able. I am wondering how useful people think blogs are or would be for contemporary interaction with the biblical texts, and for my purposes I am thinking mostly on a grammatical level (interpretative and theological moves would indoubtedly come into play, but I'm not coming to that point quite yet).
For instance, would it be something of value if I went through Acts 17, copied footnotes from BDF/Wallace/Robertson/etc on significant features of the text, tried to explain uses of genitive, pariticiples, etc. and put this into a blog post on Acts 17. So if you were looking at Acts 17 and curious about some of its features you could call up that blog and get some more information on it.
Commentaries widely differ in their philosophy. Some of them deal with portions of the text in their original language, but I find very few that answer grammatical relationships that I want answered. I guess they either assume I know the answer and so they let it pass OR I assume they don't know the answer and that's why they let it go.
I know resources like B-Greek exist and it is helpul to search out help there, but in order to get what you want, you have to do a lot of searching. What I'm looking for is a way to bring together grammatical commentary on passages into one place and I'm wondering if a blog would be a proper form.
Obviously even if this were something I did, my "answers" would no doubt err. There might be some question whether this is really an "objective genitive" or something else. Or maybe someone thinks the force of verbal aspect is best brought out another way. A blog could sort of provide for this kind of dialogue (not very well, I'll admit). One could also provide hyperlinks to sub-discussions on specific features of the text....
Anybody have any thoughts on this matter? Is there interest in developing such a thing?
For instance, would it be something of value if I went through Acts 17, copied footnotes from BDF/Wallace/Robertson/etc on significant features of the text, tried to explain uses of genitive, pariticiples, etc. and put this into a blog post on Acts 17. So if you were looking at Acts 17 and curious about some of its features you could call up that blog and get some more information on it.
Commentaries widely differ in their philosophy. Some of them deal with portions of the text in their original language, but I find very few that answer grammatical relationships that I want answered. I guess they either assume I know the answer and so they let it pass OR I assume they don't know the answer and that's why they let it go.
I know resources like B-Greek exist and it is helpul to search out help there, but in order to get what you want, you have to do a lot of searching. What I'm looking for is a way to bring together grammatical commentary on passages into one place and I'm wondering if a blog would be a proper form.
Obviously even if this were something I did, my "answers" would no doubt err. There might be some question whether this is really an "objective genitive" or something else. Or maybe someone thinks the force of verbal aspect is best brought out another way. A blog could sort of provide for this kind of dialogue (not very well, I'll admit). One could also provide hyperlinks to sub-discussions on specific features of the text....
Anybody have any thoughts on this matter? Is there interest in developing such a thing?
posted by Michael Hanel at 11:09 AM
6 Comments:
I think that the blog format holds a tremendous amount of potential. Michael Pahl, for instance, is creating a "blogentary" on 1 Thessalonians on his blog, "the stuff of earth." Others have put together book-specific blogs as well. I have been running the James the Just blog - on all things Jacobean - including research on my thesis and notes from a Sunday School class I am teaching on James. I know that there is at least one blog dedicated to the Gospel of Matthew and another few on Revelation (Cafe Apocalypsis & Revelation is Real). Blogs can also serve as a place to aggregate links to reliable resourses for the study of a particular book or topic. For instance, I have pulled together links to images of the Epistle of James in various ancient manuscripts in previous blog posts.
Definitely a good idea. I have certainly been following a few mentioned by jdarlack, and others.
If you happened to be commenting on something I was working on I might as well.
I think it's a jolly good idea! I often note that God gives great wisdom and understanding to people who don't write commentaries - this sort of thing would be excellent at sharing that wisdom.
From I purely selfish point of view, such a blog would really help me. I've never yet had any formal training in Greek/Hebrew. All that I've learnt I have learnt on my own. Something like this would be a good spur to keep me going and a good areana in which to broaden and deeper my knowledge.
In sum, go right ahead!
A blog can end up being fairly unpredictable, with people comments, people commenting on the comments, etc. The whole thing can be very unstructured, making in hard to distinguish useful information from the chaff. A better idea may be a Wiki (along the lines of Wikipedia), where you try to build up a structured commentary which others can add to or modify, in a structured way. This would give a solid commentary, rather than random comments.
- Ewan MacLeod
I think the wiki is a good idea-with reservations, Ewan. I'm not particularly familiar with all the ins and outs of wikis, but am I correct in thinking that anyone can change what someone else has written? Haven't there been "wiki" wars, where someone writes something about a large company, and then another person (in the company) changes it, so that it is more "favorable"? Would such a grammatical wiki-commentary eventually be subject to the Colbert Report's "wikiality"?
I think this is a wonderful idea. I serve as a missionary in a non-English speaking country and there are very few scholarly references available in the local language. I have longed for the day when a type of "exegetical synopsis" would be available that would bring together the best of the standard references and commentaries, especially in the area of grammar and syntax. Perhaps that could then be the basis of a translation into the local language, making available a gleaning of the grammatical and syntactical treatments of the reference works not available to those who do not speak English.
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