Put up a file on the treatment of the Greek in John 6:44 in my old debate notes.
Excerpt:
When I looked up that passage and compared what I wrote with the Greek text, my response was to ask, “What the heck was I thinking? That analysis is unsupportable! That translation is horrendous! I would never accept something like that from one of my Greek students. Was I severely sleep deprived when I wrote that or something?”
Looks like they may have spotted a planet in the process of forming, and the way it is forming may cause some revision in the understanding of how planets normally form.
Okay, you know how horrendously long some URLs get? Like this one:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=jimmyakincom-20&path=tg/detail/-/1888992050
You find yourself wanting to share what’s on the other end of such links with people (e.g,. in an e-mail), but the fact that this is such a bulky, high fiber link makes it prohibitively difficult to do so. What can you do?
Use TinyURL! Yes, that’s right, with TinyURL you can take a monstrously long link and turn it into a handy, dandy “my size” link, like this one:
This powerful petite will take you to exactly the same place as the bulky, high fiber link, but without all the hassle (try it!). Now you can be proud to put attractive links like this in your e-mails, on your web pages, among your personal notes–in place of those unsightly, prolix URLs that used to cause you so much frustration, worry, and embarrassment.
How do you get TinyURLs for the pages you want to link?
It’s simple, just copy the bloated link you want to put on an instant diet, go to TinyURL.com, paste it into the box at the top of the page, press the button, and bingo! You have a TinyURL to share with the world!
IT”S FREE!
To help you remember this new, must-use service, put TinyURL.com in your bookmarks or links bar.
AND THAT’S NOT ALL!
If you are a user of the excellent, open-source browswer Mozilla, get the TinyURL Creator plug-in, which lets you create TinyURLs without ever leaving the page you want to link!
Yes, now that TinyURL has been invented, the world is truly a better place.
Okay, you know how horrendously long some URLs get? Like this one:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=jimmyakincom-20&path=tg/detail/-/1888992050
You find yourself wanting to share what’s on the other end of such links with people (e.g,. in an e-mail), but the fact that this is such a bulky, high fiber link makes it prohibitively difficult to do so. What can you do?
Use TinyURL! Yes, that’s right, with TinyURL you can take a monstrously long link and turn it into a handy, dandy “my size” link, like this one:
This powerful petite will take you to exactly the same place as the bulky, high fiber link, but without all the hassle (try it!). Now you can be proud to put attractive links like this in your e-mails, on your web pages, among your personal notes–in place of those unsightly, prolix URLs that used to cause you so much frustration, worry, and embarrassment.
How do you get TinyURLs for the pages you want to link?
It’s simple, just copy the bloated link you want to put on an instant diet, go to TinyURL.com, paste it into the box at the top of the page, press the button, and bingo! You have a TinyURL to share with the world!
IT”S FREE!
To help you remember this new, must-use service, put TinyURL.com in your bookmarks or links bar.
AND THAT’S NOT ALL!
If you are a user of the excellent, open-source browswer Mozilla, get the TinyURL Creator plug-in, which lets you create TinyURLs without ever leaving the page you want to link!
Yes, now that TinyURL has been invented, the world is truly a better place.
Really! No kidding! I’m not making this up! An actual, real-word instance of a proverbial “Man Bites Dog” story!
Excerpt:
BEND, Ore. – A man suspected of assaulting his girlfriend set two fires and bit a dog on the head as he tried to escape from police, the authorities said. . . .
“He was given several opportunities to come out of the pipe and he basically signaled with his middle finger,” Stone said.
A police dog named Amor was sent in to retrieve Sernett and bit the suspect in the leg.
Sernett responded by lifting the dog off the ground and biting him on the head, Stone said.
Really! No kidding! I’m not making this up! An actual, real-word instance of a proverbial “Man Bites Dog” story!
Excerpt:
BEND, Ore. – A man suspected of assaulting his girlfriend set two fires and bit a dog on the head as he tried to escape from police, the authorities said. . . .
“He was given several opportunities to come out of the pipe and he basically signaled with his middle finger,” Stone said.
A police dog named Amor was sent in to retrieve Sernett and bit the suspect in the leg.
Sernett responded by lifting the dog off the ground and biting him on the head, Stone said.
I don’t know if anybody out there gets the cable network TVLand (a spinoff of Nick at Night). I suspect that I am one of about six people who do get it.
Well, if you’re one of the lucky six, this weekend they’re having an Addams Family marathon. That show is SO cool.
As a boy I loved it, though I could seldom catch it in syndication. I infinitely preferred it to The Munsters, which struck me as a gaudy, less creative knockoff of The Addams Family. In the years since, I’ve decided that I *do* like The Munsters, but The Addams Family still has a kind of sophistication and subtlety that the Munsters didn’t.
The Munsters were all established types of monsters: Hermann was a Frankenstein monster, Lily and Granpa were vampires, and Eddie was a werewolf. Then there was Cousin Marilyn, the drop-dead gorgeous ugly duckling of the family.
The Addamses, by contrast, defy categorization. Morticia is vaguely Vampira-like, but she isn’t a vampire. Lurch is vaguely Frankenstein monster-ish, but he isn’t a Frankenstein monster. Gomez and the children aren’t monstrous in appearance at all, and Uncle Fester, Cousin Itt, and Thing defy classification. The only Addams that approximates an established stereotype is Grandmama, who is a hag.
The humor on The Addams Family also is more subtle than that on The Munsters. The writers didn’t go for as many predictable jokes. Thus, for example, in one episode this weekend Morticia offered a visitor to the house a dish of brazed giraffe whereas Lily Munster might have offered a wolfsbane casserole or something. Brazed giraffe is odd and exotic without being predictable and invoking a cliche.
That seems to be the main difference between the two oddball families (both of whom got their serieses in the same year: 1964). The Munsters are a fun romp through established monster motifs (mostly derivative of the 1930s and ’40s Universal monster movies), while The Addams Family is a quirky, understated, never-quite-predictable look at a family from The Twilight Zone.
One thing both shows have going for them is wicked cool main title sequences. The Munsters’ theme has those hard-driving (for 1964) electric guitars and saxophones, while The Addams Family has the lively harpsichord and finger snapping.
Both families also are functional, despite their oddballness. The family members care about each other, the mother and father in each are in love, and everbody has a kind of quirky zest for life. Gomez Addams (played by John Astin, father of Sean Astin or “Samwise Gamgee” from The Lord of the Rings movies) in particular seems to be thoroughly enjoying life with a passion that sometimes borders on mania.
When I was a boy, one of my favorite aunts (who reminds me of a non-spooky, Texas-accented version of Morticia, if that makes any sense) once compared my sense of humor to that of Charles Addams, the cartoonist on whose work the series is based. Maybe that’s why I like the show so much.
Now if they’d just put it out on DVD. It only ran two seasons, so it wouldn’t take much work to put the whole thing out. Just two, one-season volumes. Since TVLand has started releasing DVD sets of the shows it broadcasts, maybe it’ll put this one out. If so, I’ll get my copies pronto!
A reader writes:
Jimmy, I noticed that there are no books concerning the Septuagint. Do you know of any interlinear versions? While it’s use will naturally bring up the issue of canonicity with non-catholics, wouldn’t it be usefull in establishing contextual usages? An example that comes to mind was when I was trying to establish the usage of Trogos in John 6 as literal to a friend of mine. I found only two other occurances in the N.T. external to John 6. I gave up on the only online version I found when I realized it was universally translated every word for “eat” as Estheo. (I don’t know greek but as an engineer I recognized enough of the letters to get suspicius when the letters were spelling Phegos.)
Putting together an interlinear is a very difficult thing, and they don’t sell that great to begin with. I am not aware of anybody who has put together a Septuagint interlinear in book form. Normally it is either published with straight Greek text or as a diaglot (i.e., a work with two languages on the same page or on facing pages, but not woven together line by line in interlinear fashion). Here’s an example of a Septuagint-English diaglot.
There’s also an NIV Hebrew-Greek-English triglot Old Testament that Amazon has available from their used bookstore contacts.
Though there is no print interlinear of the Septuagint, there is one available in .pdf form, which you can get from www.ApostolicBible.com. It can be ordered on CD-Rom for sixty bucks or downloaded it for forty three. Here’s a peek inside it:
Now, you may notice that there’s something odd here. The words in the English lines are not strictly lined up under the corresponding Greek words. In Gen. 1:1, for example, the Greek line has “epoiesen h theos,” which in literal word order is “[he] made the God” (putting the verb before its subject) but which the English line has rendered idiomatically as “God made.” The same thing happens in 1:3 with “God said.”
This is not standard practice for an interlinear, and since I can’t find adequate online statements about who made this interlinear, what their agenda was, and how rigorous they were in doing it, there may be imperfections or biases in the thing, so fair warning.
Another way to accomplish the same effect (and which would be far better than buying the Septuagint in .pdf form) would be to use Bible software, opening a Septuagint window and linking it to an English window with corresponding words highlighted.
It sounds like, though, that what you’re after may not require a Septuagint at all (interlinear or otherwise). If you want to do primary source research, you would need the text of the Septuagint–for it is quite useful in fleshing out our knowledge of how words were used–but there’s probably a much simpler way to get the info that you’re after. A good Greek dictionary will tie together not only word usages from the Greek NT and the Septuagint but also from extra-biblical sources, and it’s *much* easier (and more reliable) to figure out a dictionary entry than to do your own primary source research. A professional Greek scholar might need to do the latter, but for a normal person’s purposes, a good dictionary is the way to go.
Though there are more detailed dictionaries available, the Abbott-Smith lexicon is a fairly simple one to use that includes data from the Septuagint, extra-biblical sources, and the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Old Testament. Little Kittel would be a step up in detail from Abbott-Smith, but it isn’t comprehensive and you have to be careful with it since the authors of the work it’s based on had an agenda (they were trying to write a theological encyclopedia disguised as a Greek dictionary). It still can be useful; you just have to be careful. There are also more detailed dictionaries, but they’re probably more than what you’re looking for.
If you need an English-Hebrew/Greek dictionary (i.e., one organized by English word order) so you can see what different words are translated as a particular English term, a good basic one is Vine’s Expository Dictionary. It’s not exhaustive (and the scholarship is a bit out of date), but it’s a place to begin. Bible software also frequently can perform this function.
P.S. The verb you’re after in John 6 is trogo, not trogos.
A reader writes:
Jimmy, I noticed that there are no books concerning the Septuagint. Do you know of any interlinear versions? While it’s use will naturally bring up the issue of canonicity with non-catholics, wouldn’t it be usefull in establishing contextual usages? An example that comes to mind was when I was trying to establish the usage of Trogos in John 6 as literal to a friend of mine. I found only two other occurances in the N.T. external to John 6. I gave up on the only online version I found when I realized it was universally translated every word for “eat” as Estheo. (I don’t know greek but as an engineer I recognized enough of the letters to get suspicius when the letters were spelling Phegos.)
Putting together an interlinear is a very difficult thing, and they don’t sell that great to begin with. I am not aware of anybody who has put together a Septuagint interlinear in book form. Normally it is either published with straight Greek text or as a diaglot (i.e., a work with two languages on the same page or on facing pages, but not woven together line by line in interlinear fashion). Here’s an example of a Septuagint-English diaglot.
There’s also an NIV Hebrew-Greek-English triglot Old Testament that Amazon has available from their used bookstore contacts.
Though there is no print interlinear of the Septuagint, there is one available in .pdf form, which you can get from www.ApostolicBible.com. It can be ordered on CD-Rom for sixty bucks or downloaded it for forty three. Here’s a peek inside it:
Now, you may notice that there’s something odd here. The words in the English lines are not strictly lined up under the corresponding Greek words. In Gen. 1:1, for example, the Greek line has “epoiesen h theos,” which in literal word order is “[he] made the God” (putting the verb before its subject) but which the English line has rendered idiomatically as “God made.” The same thing happens in 1:3 with “God said.”
This is not standard practice for an interlinear, and since I can’t find adequate online statements about who made this interlinear, what their agenda was, and how rigorous they were in doing it, there may be imperfections or biases in the thing, so fair warning.
Another way to accomplish the same effect (and which would be far better than buying the Septuagint in .pdf form) would be to use Bible software, opening a Septuagint window and linking it to an English window with corresponding words highlighted.
It sounds like, though, that what you’re after may not require a Septuagint at all (interlinear or otherwise). If you want to do primary source research, you would need the text of the Septuagint–for it is quite useful in fleshing out our knowledge of how words were used–but there’s probably a much simpler way to get the info that you’re after. A good Greek dictionary will tie together not only word usages from the Greek NT and the Septuagint but also from extra-biblical sources, and it’s *much* easier (and more reliable) to figure out a dictionary entry than to do your own primary source research. A professional Greek scholar might need to do the latter, but for a normal person’s purposes, a good dictionary is the way to go.
Though there are more detailed dictionaries available, the Abbott-Smith lexicon is a fairly simple one to use that includes data from the Septuagint, extra-biblical sources, and the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Old Testament. Little Kittel would be a step up in detail from Abbott-Smith, but it isn’t comprehensive and you have to be careful with it since the authors of the work it’s based on had an agenda (they were trying to write a theological encyclopedia disguised as a Greek dictionary). It still can be useful; you just have to be careful. There are also more detailed dictionaries, but they’re probably more than what you’re looking for.
If you need an English-Hebrew/Greek dictionary (i.e., one organized by English word order) so you can see what different words are translated as a particular English term, a good basic one is Vine’s Expository Dictionary. It’s not exhaustive (and the scholarship is a bit out of date), but it’s a place to begin. Bible software also frequently can perform this function.
P.S. The verb you’re after in John 6 is trogo, not trogos.
Yesterday I did a phone interview with a reporter from CNN. She wasn’t clear, but I got the impression that it was essentially a pre-interview to decide if they want to do a real interview with me. What was clear is that they are doing a story on the denial of Communion to supporters of abortion and homosexuality. If they decide to use me for it, they’ll let me know. Should happen in the next few days if it does. I’ll let y’all know.