New Module ~ Canons of the Council of Orange

Interesting fact of the day. There was not one Church council held at Orange, there were two. Up until the other day, I didn't know there were any. But here's a little bit about the Council held there in 529:

The Council of Orange was an outgrowth of the controversy between Augustine and Pelagius. This controversy had to do with degree to which a human being is responsible for his or her own salvation, and the role of the grace of God in bringing about salvation. The Pelagians held that human beings are born in a state of innocence, i.e., that there is no such thing as a sinful nature or original sin.

As a result of this view, they held that a state of sinless perfection was achievable in this life. The Council of Orange dealt with the Semi-Pelagian doctrine that the human race, though fallen and possessed of a sinful nature, is still "good" enough to able to lay hold of the grace of God through an act of unredeemed human will. The Council held to Augustine's view and repudiated Pelagius. The following canons greatly influenced the Reformed doctrine of Total Depravity.

Or if you want to read the canons of this council, now you can download a module with them in BibleWorks, thanks to richardsugg.

DOWNLOAD! ~ Unzip the files in the subfolder of BibleWorks 7 called "databases"

New Modules - Old Hebrew Grammar Series

I would be remiss if I neglected to mention that since the last major updating there has been not one, two, or even three new Hebrew grammar modules made available by Pasquale. Quite frankly I didn't even know that so many existed. All of these are out of print and copyright editions (so they are rather old), but nevertheless, they still might be useful to specialists in the field or else to those who simply like to see how others explain certain grammatical features. They are all modules of images of each page of the real book (so searching and copying and pasting is not really an option with them), which may downgrade their value. But then again, you're not going to be paying anything for them, so why are you complaining?

FUN USER CHALLENGE HERE:
However, to increase their value, Pasquale has added a special feature to these files. Can you tell me what it is and how it is helpful? If anyone can figure it out, they will get the spotlight in the next blog post.

So here are the goods: (follow along with the series on the BibleWorks forums)

• Introductory Hebrew grammar : Hebrew syntax by Andrew Bruce Davidson - Pasquale Amicarelli
• Hebrew Grammar by Alexander Meyrowitz - Pasquale Amicarelli
• Manual of Hebrew grammar by Josephus David Wijnkoop - Pasquale Amicarelli
• A grammar of the Hebrew language by Himan Hurwitz - Pasquale Amicarelli

New Module - Von Soden's Apparatus

Another module by Pasquale, this work includes Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments by Hermann Freiherr von Soden, images of the pages of the real book arranged in order of the New Testament.

• The electronic edition of von Soden's Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments pages 102-289 used by permission of Clint Yale
• Table 1 - it came from L.Vaganay - An introduction to New Testament textual criticism - pag 156 - Cambridge University Press 1991
• Von Soden images used by permission of www.csntm.org - Center For The Study Of New Testament Manuscripts

It can be used in tandem with the Tischendorf Critical Appartatus that is already in BibleWorks 7.

DOWNLOAD! 170 MB file!

Creating Bibleworks Modules from Word or HTML

A BibleWorks user has offered more help on teaching other users how to made more user (HTML-based) modules for BibleWorks:

Creating Bibleworks Modules from Word or HTML

1. Format the webpage in Word. Make sure you use styles (heading 1, heading 2, etc). These will become your table of contents.
2. Use msword2chm to convert the Word document to compiled help. You can get msword2chm for free here.
3. Extract the chm using 7-zip, available here.
4. Use tidy to clean up the HTML. Tidy is available here:
1. From a DOS prompt, run the following command (just copy and paste to the DOS prompt)
2. for %f in (*.htm) do tidy –i –u –w 999999 –m %f
3. This will tidy all the htm files at once
5. Add the necessary javascript to each html file with the addBwJs.pl (DOWNLOAD file here!). You must have Perl installed for this to work. Perl can be downloaded from here.
1. Run addBwJs.pl in the directory with the htm files. They will all be edited automatically.
6. From the sampleHTMLHelp.zip file (c:\Program Files\Bibleworks 7\sampleHTMLHelp.zip), copy the files bw.js, mymodule.chd and mymodule-books.txt to the htm directory.
7. Use Bibleworks to tag the htm files
1. Tools | Build Module Index
2. Base Directory: Directory containing the htm files
3. Bookfile name: mymodule-books.txt
4. Base name: Name of the module
5. Click Build and Tag.
8. Use HTML Help Workshop to recompile the HTML. When you create a new project, note that you will already have the HTML files, the index, and the Table of Contents.
9. Edit mymodule.chd as directed in Bibleworks documentation
10. Copy *.chm, *.chd, and *.sdx to the databases directory and restart Bibleworks.

NOTE: Be sure to DOWNLOAD this file if you use his process as it is needed in step #5.

New Modules Iliad and Odyssey Commentaries

The best just got better. In addition to being the only place to get a morphological text of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, now you can use some of the old school commentaries to help you read along in the Homeric texts.

First is a 3-for-1 commentary set which includes the following commentaries

1. Allen Rogers Benner [1903], Selections from Homer's Iliad, with an introduction, notes, a short Homeric grammar, and a vocabulary.
2. Walter Leaf [1900], The Iliad, edited, with apparatus criticus, prolegomena, notes, and appendices.
3. Thomas D. Seymour [1891], Homer's Iliad, Books I-III and Homer's Iliad, Books IV-V.

The second commentary set is for the Odyssey and it includes only one commentary, but it is, nevertheless, a good one:

• W. Walter Merry; James Riddell; D. B. Monro [1886], Homer's Odyssey.

Both commentaries function quite similarly and, while being usefully run in BibleWorks, they run as stand-alone HTML help files as well. In order to use the files profitably in BibleWorks, unzip the contents of both to the C:\Program Files\BibleWorks 7\databases folder. The next time you run BibleWorks they will show up under the Resources menu under a category called "Classics Resources."

Happy Reading!!

DOWNLOAD Iliad Commentaries!

DOWNLOAD Odyssey Commentary!

Update: Dead link fixed.

New Module: Last Twelve Verses of Mark by John Burgon

NOTE: FILE UPDATED BELOW ON 9/11/2007

For those who are interested in textual criticism, it is hard to imagine not being unaware of the various controversies over the ending of the Gospel of Mark. John Burgon wrote a book on that very controversy way back in 1871 and it has remained a very influential book on that topic. Burgon sets out to show that the ending of Mark can be shown to be reliable based on extant manuscripts of the Bible. If you're interested in how text critics do their work, sit down with Burgon and you get a feel for some of the issues involved in the process.

BibleWorks user Scott Jones gracious provided this text which he manufactured digitally. He holds copyright on the digital text as such and so any other uses of this text outside of its present form will require his permission. You can contact him via the email address provided in the Burgon BibleWorks module. Scott graciously thanks Ewan MacLeod and Willem Swanepoel for their help in converting the e-text into BibleWorks friendly format.

DOWNLOAD!

Updates: Keil & Delitzsch / Calvin Commentaries

Willem Swanepoel has posted updated commentaries by Keil & Delitzsch and Calvin (see previous posts 1, 2, 3 /forum thread). Willem states about the update:

Keil and Delitzsch now include the additional pages mentioned by Adelphos (introductory chapters to the books of Moses, the Prophets etc.). You may need to install the attached fonts to get these pages to display the Greek and Hebrew correctly.

The updated Calvin's Commentaries simply corrects a few minor errors.

Download updates here:

• Calvin Commentaries Update
• Keil and Delitzsch Update
• Keil and Delitzsch Fonts Update

Many thanks to Willem for his work and maintenance on these modules and his willingness to share them freely.

Calvin's Commentary Update

Willem Swanepoel has just completed an update to Calvin's Commentaries, which now include Calvin's comments on the Old and New Testament as well as the Apocrypha.

If you have previously downloaded the Calvin's OT commentaries, delete those files before restarting BibleWorks later.

DOWNLOAD (22 MB!!)

Calvin's Old Testament Commentary

Attie Bogaards has made available Calvin's commentary on the Old Testament. (See here, and here.) This module was made by Willem Swanepoel of Krugersdorp, South Africa. He provides the following notes in the title page:

The source of this implementation was the Online Bible version, the use of which Mr. Larry Pierce kindly agreed to. The Online Bible version was chosen because of the relative easy with which the information could be extracted and converted to HTML, and because it was essentially the only version for which I could obtain permission to use it for BibleWorks.

This version does, however, differ somewhat from the original commentary in some respects:

1. Calvin commented on the last four books of Moses and on the first three Gospels in the form of a harmony. Online Bible deviated from the sequence of the commentary by reverting to the sequence of the Bible. This Bible sequence has been retained in the BibleWorks version. The Online Bible notes showing the original sequence were also retained in the text, and are hyper-linked.
2. Footnotes in Online Bible are given after the commentary on each verse or range of verses. This format was also retained. To keep additional editing of the text to a minimum, the footnotes were not hyperlinked. It is therefore unfortunately necessary to scroll down to the footnotes when required. Hyperlinking the footnotes would more than double the effort of an already very lengthy task.

I trust that this commentary will add to the value of your BibleWorks library.

Please report any errors to the e-mail address below.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Willem Swanepoel

I have uploaded the revised files to the BibleWorks blog for download. If you have already downloaded the earlier version of Calvin's Old Testament commentary, then be sure to check the forum discussion of the module for information on how to update your files. An alternative would be to delete the old files and replace them with the files linked below.

Many thanks to Willem & Attie.

Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD Calvin's Old Testament Commentary
Update:
DOWNLOAD Calvin's complete commentary on the OT, NT and Apocrypha
DOWNLOAD necessary fonts!

Smyth, Greek Grammar

In what is the first of a few updates, I am happy to release the first edition of Smyth's Greek Grammar. This is a pretty monumental release because of the size and quality of the work. For a long time, this work has only been available digitally as a PDF on Textkit's website or on Perseus, but the dependability of Perseus has been more questionable as of late, which makes that version less useful. I saw long ago that George Somsel began a project to digitalize Smyth on CCEL, but it seems like that has long since stopped. I have grabbed his first couple of pages since I did not have these in my HTML version. I also included at the end an index for Smyth to various works which are found within the text. This is a valuable list, but I have not yet got around to making the links work for it. Kudos to the Greek Geek for those references.

So what works and what doesn't in this release?
You can use this to let me know yourself what is or isn't working, but here are some of the things I know of:

• Most of the links should work that do not contain letters in them. So a link that says "cross 832" should work, but link "823 a" probably doesn't. The fix is fairly simple, i just need to add a "_" to the links (and finish adding anchors where they do not exist)

• Page numbers have anchors and they are the primary means for getting around on the left-hand pane. (But I only have the table of contents for Part One and Part Three up)

• Part Two on Inflection and especially Part Four on Syntax will be slow to load because they are very large HTML files. In the future I will try to chop up these files into smaller bites so they load faster.

• I have not read the entire text so I don't know if there are any major typos or text issues. There are bound to be some since the file is large.

If you notice anything else you can let me know. As of right now though the problem isn't that I haven't found the mistakes, it's that I haven't had the time to fix them. So if you want to help out cleaning up any of the files, please let me know! Meanwhile, enjoy what does work about these files.

DOWNLOAD!

Update: Goodwin's Grammar

New to Goodwin's Greek Grammar is added functionality to make it more useful as a reference text.

Now when you have it loaded in BibleWorks it will offer links in the Resource Summary Window based on over 20 syntactical categories like the cases, moods, pronouns which will instantly jump you to the relevant portions of Goodwin's Grammar.

Take a look for instance at John 16:1. When I mouse over the word ὑμῖν, Goodwin now provides instant links to the following syntactic categories which pertain to this word: Pronouns, Personal Pronouns, and Dative Case.



Then clicking on one of these will automatically load the Goodwin Grammar to the appropriate spot. Neat huh?

To get this feature you could redownload the entire Goodwin grammar, but that isn't especially recommended since it's over 20MB. Instead, just download this short goodwingr.chd, save it in your subdirectory of BibleWorks called "databases" (overwriting the old file), restart BibleWorks and you will have the new special features.

DOWNLOAD entire Grammar!

DOWNLOAD goodwingr.chd!

New Module - Reformation Confessions

Now available a module which includes various Reformation related confessions including:

• Luther's 95 Theses
• Augsburg Confession of 1530
• Heidelberg Confession
• The Canons of Dort
• Westminster Confession of Faith
• Waldensian Confession
• Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy

DOWNLOAD!

New Module - An Elementary Latin Dictionary, Charlton Lewis

A few blog entries ago I hinted that there would be some new fun tools for Latinists in BibleWorks. Well here is the first, a real treat for Latinists/Classicists: the release of a high class Latin lexicon for use in BibleWorks!

This lexicon is built as HTML module which means that it can be used as a stand-alone, outside of BibleWorks. Initially, it loads a little slowly because it is such a large database, but once you begin using it, it navigates very quickly and is quite responsive. In some ways it can be quicker to use this lexicon than the paper kind!

In BibleWorks, you can load the file via the Resources menu, and within that under Latin Resources.

While BibleWorks currently does not yet have lemmatized Latin databases and I have also not yet released any lemmatized Latin databases (although hopefully someday...), the current functionality of the lexicon is a bit limited. However, if you stick around for a few more blog posts, I'll show you how, with the availability of a lemmatized Latin database, the functionality of this lexicon will be virtually seamless!

(once again, thank Pasquale (who is now my favorite Italian, my regrets to the Pope, but he's not really Italian anyway and as a Lutheran, my papal respect can only go so far anyway....) for his amazing work which makes resources like this freely available to others.)


DOWNLOAD! 13MB

New Module - Revised Common Lectionary

Thanks to the impetus of Mark Hoffman and Pasquale's HTML work, there is a new module out of the Revised Common Lectionary.

I will point you to Mark's blog for the original announcement.

DOWNLOAD!

New Module - Goodwin, A Greek Grammar

The latest offering is one that has long been available on TextKit and CCEL. I had always been hoping to find a text/HTML version of it online somewhere, but I haven't yet. Nevertheless, the page images are still valuable and so now we are pleased to release Goodwin's Greek Grammar for use in BibleWorks 7! Sure it's not as good as the real thing, but the price is right isn't it??

This is what the blurb in TextKit had to say:

Goodwin's Greek Grammar stands with Hadley's Greek Grammar as one of the most widely used and longest running Greek Grammars in America. The grammar has gone through many editions and reprints for over 130 years, with the last major edition appearing in 1930.

Goodwin first earned academic recognition for his Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb which was first published in 1865. Five years later in 1870 he created the first edition of Greek Grammar which was a brief 235 page textbook called Elementary Greek Grammar. In 1879 the grammar was later revised to 393 page edition and renamed to A Greek Grammar. In 1892, Goodwin revised his grammar yet again to the 451 page edition entitled, A Greek Grammar Revised and Enlarged. It is the 'revised and enlarged' edition which was in widespread use and it is this edition that is available for download. The next major edition, the Goodwin and Gulick edition, occurred 38 years later in 1930 and was largely rewritten by Charles Gulick. The Goodwin and Gulick edition can be purchased new to this day.It should be made absolutely clear that Goodwin's Greek Grammar is what is known as a reference grammar and it is not intended for beginners. Historically, students used this grammar in conjunction with a reader by the same publisher. The reader would provide notes and references back to the grammar for further help and clarification. See Goodwin's First Four Book's of Xenophon's Anabasis as an example.

Goodwin's Greek Grammar use as a reference grammar for the modern student is now largely replaced by Smyth's massive and highly praised 800 page Greek Grammar which was first published in 1920. Still, for intermediates Goodwin offers more succinct discussions and for all learners an additional perspective is at times very helpful. Part IV, Syntax, should prove to be especially helpful for today's learners and is well worth exploration.

DOWNLOAD! 23 MB!

New Module - Plumley's Introductory Coptic Grammar

Just hours after a user on the BibleWorks user forums wondered if it would be possible to convert J. Martin Plumley's Introductory Coptic Grammar from HTML to a BibleWorks user-module, Pasquale showed that it could be done and came through with such speed that it makes me look like a turtle. I still have like ten other things I'm trying to do, but haven't finished and before I could even look at the files, he finished compiling and converting it. So now you are the beneficiaries!

The zip file contains the grammar itself and fonts. The fonts need to be installed to Windows (by moving them to the \fonts\ directory of Windows. The grammar files can be placed in the \databases\ subdirectory of BibleWorks 7.

DOWNLOAD!

Update: Bible Geocoding Maps Module

Ever seen one of those commercials where the guy is on the plane and he's talking to the person next to him about how much money he saved on his hotel or some other thing and he's all proud of himself for getting a great deal. Well then the next person tells him how much he paid for the same thing and instantly the man is torn apart because he realizes he paid far more than the other person.

Well today is not one of those days. Today is an update to a wonderful Bible Atlas/Dictionary Combination project. It's not only a Bible dictionary, it's also an atlas, it's also a way to walk through the physical lands of the Scriptures.


DOWNLOAD! 54MB!!
(unzip file into c:\Program Files\BibleWorks 7\databases\)

NOTE: This module will require both an Internet connection and Google Earth to work effectively.

New Module - Keil and Delitzsch OT Commentary

I'm not sure this new module really needs much of an introduction. Love it or hate it, the Keil and Delitzsch Old Testament Commentary is a classic in conservative scholarship. This is not a commentary in the style of Matthew Henry or even the Popular Commentary posted on the blog earlier. This is a technical and critical look at the Hebrew Bible with all of the insight of a past age ready to speak. This one is a must for anyone in the exegetical field, even if you don't agree with Keil and Delitzsch, they will make you think.

DOWNLOAD (14 MB!)

This version was put together by the good efforts of Mr. Willem Swanepoel of Krugersdorp, South Africa and we thank him for allowing other users to benefit from his work!

New Module - Bible Geocoding Maps

Another wonderful release by Pasquale for BibleWorks 7 users is the addition of files which were initially provided on the web by Bible Geocoding website. The files are used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution License.

While you're at it, check out the entirety of the Bible Geocoding website and, BibleWorks user, Mark Hoffman's blog in which he discusses some of the map bonuses for Google Earth.

DOWNLOAD! (36MB!)

New Modules - Nadal's Gospel Illustrations and Doré Bible Gallery

Two new unique additions to the BibleWorks 7 free user add-on modules involve illustrations of the Gospel stories. They are interesting because of their antiquity (although some would say a few hundred years wouldn't quite qualify as antiquity), and also because they show that just as a written commentary can be an interpreter of the Bible, so also pictures and all forms of art can also interpret the Bible and arguably reach even more people. A picture is worth a thousand words, well then these additions should equal a few sizable tomes.

Jerome Nadal's Evangelicae Historiae Imagines ("Illustrations of the Gospel Stories") date from 1593-1595. This is a collection of 153 engravings meant for use in prayer and meditation of the Gospel stories. Nadal is a historical figure some may not be familiar with but he was one of the ten founding members of the Society of Jesus (or the Jesuits). The pictures are tagged to the Bible verses which they are depicting and each picture is scene which is explained by Latin captioning below. While it's always nice to know what the Latin is saying, if you are reading along with the English (or your preferred language), you'll probably be able to figure out what the Latin is saying since these pictures are a visual interpretation of the narrative of the text. If you are interesting in learning more about it, see this website.

The Doré Bible Gallery is another module which covers a number of different scenes in the Bible. These date from the 1860's. While the author of the pictures may be less famous, no doubt you will recognize a few of these pictures because they are widely used or imitated. For more on the Doré Bible Gallery, see this website.


DOWNLOAD Nadal's Gospel Illustrations! 25 MB


DOWNLOAD Doré Bible Gallery! 43 MB

(By the way, lest you think my hand was responsible for these great modules, both of them were put together by Pasquale Amicarelli. Our continued thanks to him for putting together these files and sharing them with us!)