• Digital Bible media should be similar to the traditional reading experience. I think the success of devices like the Nook, Kindle, iPad, or Android tablets is due in part to the fact that they kind of feel as if one is reading a book. Both the form factor and the page metaphor are roughly similar. The biggest problem has been citation when the concept of page numbering gets lost. The Bible comes with a handy book, chapter, verse system, but it’s a system that has been criticized for imposing a structure on the text that isn’t necessarily there. Considering that the digital device you hold in your hand is not just a Bible but capable of holding a host of Bible versions, and there is a clear advantage for digital.
• Digital Bible media should emulate the engaged reading experience. I have a few Bibles sitting on my shelves from my younger days that are rather extensively marked up with margin notes and highlights. I was so familiar with those Bibles, that I knew on what part of the page to look for a specific text. If digital Bibles are going to succeed, they will need to have a similar capability.
  Most Bible software and apps have been working toward this end by providing bookmarking, highlighting, and notetaking. The advantage for digital here is that I won’t lose all my annotations once I move to a new Bible or version.
• Digital Bible media should transform and revolutionize the overall reading experience. You, Tim, had the foresight long ago to start thinking about what this might mean with the hypertext Amos project. The Glo Bible is another recent, more popular-oriented attempt. Beyond just linking to dictionaries and graphics and sound files, I am imagining that someday we will be able to make Bible reading a dynamic and nearly immersive experience. This is happening already with other interactive books (here are some examples), and eventually the Bible will receive simliar innovative treatment. This approach should hopefully go a long way to making Bible reading appealing, even compelling.

Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg are holding a Blog Tour on Religion and Media, in this post Mark Vitalis Hoffman (of Biblical Studies and Technological Tools) is replying to this question from me:

Mark, advances in electronic communications technologies and equipment (especially Internet and mobile phones) makes Scripture and the tools to understand it more easily and widely available than ever. Yet at the same time rates of engaged regular Scripture reading among Christians in the West since the reformation has hardly been lower.

Are there technologies or tools you think have the potential over the next few years to revitalize Scripture reading among Western Christians?
He writes:

Thanks for this question, Tim. I know it’s a concern that is near to your heart!

Two or three decades ago, at least in the United States, it was not unusual to see Christians who would regularly carry their Bibles around with them and presumably read them. There was quite a market for Bible carrying cases. A quick check on Amazon shows that there still is a market for them (over 900 items under “bible carrying case”), but there in the fourth spot is a “Leather Christian iPad 2 Case.” My point? As you note, technology is providing more biblical resources than ever, and they are easier than ever to access. So why the decrease in Bible reading?

I am convinced that Christians, both consumers (readers) and producers of content, will eventually get in sync with the possibilities technology offers, but it also is probably going to require some revitalization of Christianity in general. I’m trying to say a few things with that sentence, so let me expand.

[I have been having real problems with WordPress today :( I hope I can post the expansion in another post.]

I’m marking again. Every time I mark an assignment there are distant students who could have got better marks if they had used a decent scholarly commentary or two, to supplement whatever they, their aunt Jemima (who did a course at Capenwray in the 1960s) or their pastor happen to have. Time and again I tell them, so now I’m telling you, the secret of a massive theological library that offers (at least) several good solid recent commentaries (in stock when you go to look for them)¹ on every Bible book. And, to make a good story better, this huge resource is available in your own home :)

Or a download link

1. And with your local theological library isn’t it always the case that the best commentaries on the book you are interested in have always been borrowed by either a PhD student or a class of hungry students with an assignment due?

Part of the Codex Sinaiticus (as displayed in BibleWorks) this early text contains works like The Shepherd of Hermas as well as now more familiar Bible books.

Gavin has updated is fine simple description of the various Christian Bibles and how they came to be. Anyone who thinks they are a Bible student, and who could not write a decent essay on the development of the different Christian Bibles (which includes quite a lot of people with degrees in the field ;) should read it. For those who already know this is a fine short and easy to read article to point people towards for their education :)

St. Eutychus has an entertaining take on biblical criticism, all explained with forks: Fork Criticism: Understanding Biblical scholarship through cutlery…

Having always had a surrealist streak I offer the following thoroughly derivative and trivial contribution to the discussion:

With apologies to both Rene Magritte and the good Saint... in English the inscription reads: This is not a fork.

AKMA has suggested (though it is phrased as a question: Time for FOSOT(NT)T? I think it was really a suggestion) that it is perhaps time to really start seriously on the project of producing a Free Open Source Textbook (probably as a prototype for a possible series).  Brooke (another initial primary discussant) seems both willing and more likely to be able (because of easing time-pressure) soon. The other initial contributor, Mark Goodacre, does not seem to have responded yet.

I pretty much agree with AKMA’s suggestions of format and approach, and for similar reasons I also agree that now might be the time to begin serious work on such a project. As he notes there is a conjunction of ripe technologies (together with a few exciting emerging – or at least not yet mainstream – ones) with a growing need and a growing willingness by scholars to consider such projects.I also have a personal reason for thinking the time is ripe. As I suggested in my Free open-source textbook project: call for participation I will soon begin to have more time available.

However I don’t think sitting waiting for volunteers to beat a path to our door will work – even though evidently we will be in the process of making a much better “mousetrap” than the existing expensive, out of date (by the time they hit print) and one-eyed offerings ;) We need a small self-appointed (unless we can persuade someone better credentialed to appoint) group to start putting the elements together, applying for funding, setting out clearly the parameters etc.

If at present the starters are AKMA, Brooke, Mark (?) and me who else is willing? (NB. perhaps looking at those names we would be aiming for an introduction to both Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and New Testament…)

For priorconsideration of the FOSOT idea on this blog see these posts.

I was interrupted by this Welcome Swallow, I think (since they seldom sit around on fence posts) he was on a Half-work Day too ;)

Today was a “half-work” day at Cloudy Paddocks. I got all the work I needed to done in half a day, and so could spend the other half on fencing the pig paddock. This is brilliant when it works as (on the change is as good as a rest principle) I get more than half the work done in each half that I would in a full day. It uses up a day of holiday, but keeps me on top of both my day job and my hobby job.

Pigcatraz or the pigs "happy place"?

Today I finished¹ the new fence for the pig paddock. When Richard was here, but there’s been little progress since.

The fence to this bush needs upgrading still.

I had been calling the paddock Pig Heaven as it has trees, damp patches and all sorts of piggy delights. But then I began to think of the theology of that :( So now, I’m calling it the Pigs’ Happy Place. I know there’s an allusion to the Sky TV adverts in this, but think about it… Sky want to keep their customers more or less content so they become food for advertisers. I want to keep my pigs really content till they become bacon. Not much difference is there? Except I won’t charge my customers!

1. Except for a few bottom staples on battens, really difficult with only one person despite Strainright’s brilliant batten holder, and the “Taranaki gate” which needs some thought.

Do not thump the book of G’Quan. It is disrespectful.

Many discussions around the Bible founder on the shoals of factual accuracy. The “facts of the matter”, and claims that they are either accurately or inaccurately reported, generate much heat (and for those who like good knock down arguments¹ delight). This should not surprise us, for since the Enlightenment, we have worshiped “facts”.

Indeed respect for the facts has served us well. Truth is found when the facts are reported and marshaled into arguments accurately.

Yet, always, but especially in matters of relationship, there is another sort of truth. Faithfulness too can be truth. In fiction when a character acts in ways which ring true to their nature (as built up elsewhere in the story or the corpus) and to the relevant aspects of the world as we know it (remembering that willing suspension of disbelief plays a role in all poetics) we say the story is “true”. Likewise when the other things all good fictions communicate, the attitudes and elements of worldview “fit” with (i.e. are faithful to) what we believe, we say the story is true. Similarly, in the ancient world,² when an ambassador spoke a message that represented faithfully what his lord would have intended, his words were true. This would have been so even if the message was in fact contradicted by a written communication that spoke differently – if the lord would indeed have spoken differently in the changed circumstances.

To expect the Bible to conform to the first sort of truth, in a world which lived by the second, is mere fundamentalism (a thoroughly modern system).

Of course, to interpret a text which seeks to be faithful requires more skill and judgement than to interpret one which aims at the facts. And isn’t it interesting how often “the facts” serve to support and sustain the status quo?³

Amanda at Cheese-Wearing Theology has posted this month’s Biblical Studies Carnival, in what ways is the “world” (of bibliobloggery) it presents true?

1. What H. Dumpty described as “glory”.
2. Before modern technologies made swift or even almost instant communication at a distance possible.
3. At least until the pressure for change becomes almost irresistible, at which point somehow those flighty facts change sides.

Until more complex theories of aerodynamics were developed accepting the possibility of "the flight of the bumblebee" required a suspension of disbelief - Photo by by stuant63

Yesterday I was asked: If Noah lived before the law was revealed to Moses, how did he know how to distinguish “clean” and “unclean” animals?

It is still holiday time (it’s the summer in NZ, though with all the rain and cold in recent weeks you wouldn’t believe it) so my answer was less full than it ought to have been:

Hmm… on Noah, Moses and the animals, there are two likely lines for an answer (a) the story of Noah is being told after the delivery of the law and so the telling reflects those categories; (b) there was perhaps a cultural practice of distinguishing clean and unclean animals even before the law was revealed to Moses (as there was already such a practice of not eating pork).

Of course the short simple answer is “we really don’t know” but people don’t like that one ;)

But it’s not as simple as that¹ behind any attempt to answer such a question lie two fundamentally different ways to read.

One way looks at the text from the outside, and reads as a “critic”. For a couple of centuries, in academic biblical studies, the most frequent way to thus “objectify”² the text has been to examine it historically to see where it came from and how it got to us. Such an approach noticing that there seems to be a “continuity error” here suggests that the text was written at some time later than the events described, and uses this and other signs to work out when and by whom. We could objectify the text in other ways, by examining it as an example of a particular genre or class of texts, against its sociological background…

The other way enters the “world” of the text, and reads it from the inside. This is to behave like a “reader” for this is how we read novels and other stories, indeed it is how we read physics textbooks too ;) In the case of Noah’s distinction my second answer (though it depends on a historical hypothesis and so perhaps looks like the same kind of answer as the first) tends in this direction. It is asking how we might explain this, not as a continuity error (the critic’s approach), but within Noah’s world (a readerly approach).

The great medieval Jewish commentator Rashi took a different readerly approach he explained it thus:

Of all the clean animals: that are destined to be clean for Israel. We learn [from here] that Noah studied the Torah. (From Chabad.org)

Each basic direction of reading offers several different options or styles. But the basic question facing a reader of any text whether to read as critic or as reader. “Readers” must offer the text a willing suspension of disbelief³ Indeed the idea of a need to suspend disbelief can be helpful in thinking about the reading (as opposed to the criticism) of all narrative. For in a laboratory report also there are elements of the narration of the experiment that are omitted, or poorly described, where the reader must suspend disbelief. Despite the variety of both critical and readerly approaches, and despite the fact that they can even share approaches (as above either can examine the text historically), on the suspension of disbelief they differ fundamentally.

[Incidentally,⁴ Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair has a really interesting meditation for Purim on "The Willing Suspension of Disbelief".]

1. Except the last answer, because we really do not know ;)
2. Make into the object of study and examination.
3. The phrase is Coleridge’s from the Biographia Literaria of 1817, to explain how readers might approach the fantastic or supernatural elements in his work, but has been widely used in thinking about how readers can read many sorts of fiction. (( JRR Tolkein has also nuanced it speaking about “secondary belief” based on an inner consistency to the reality described in the narrative. But that’s getting too complicated for a short blog post ;)
4. Though not at all a HT ;)

Psalm 90 makes a fine reading for a new year. Through the psalm, time (and especially the haunting disparity between short brutish human time and the timeless divine reality) is a strong theme. The psalm is peppered with time words:

• dor generation in v.1 (x2)
• b’terem before in v.2
• shanah year in vv.4, 5, 9, 10 (x3), 15
• yom day in vv.4, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15
• ashmorah night watch in v.4
• boqer morning in v.5, 6, 14
• ereb evening in v.6
• chish quickly in v.10

The psalm opens in the distant past with a heading associating it with Moses the great leader from Israel’s pre-monarchic origins.¹

The rest of the first verse forefronts the two key ideas of the psalm, time and our relationship with God. The wording of the opening stresses the persons involved. Very literally it would read: “Lord, a dwelling, you, you have been for us from generation to generation.”

This attention to time carries on through the psalm, and is straightaway extended in the next verse from a human timescale from “generation to generation” to extend from before the birth of the world into the “age”²  to come:

Before the mountains were born
or ever you had given birth to the earth and the world,
from age to age you are God.

From verse 3 to 11 the focus on time stresses time and again that the human and the divine timescales are incommensurable, and that humans suffer the divine wrath. This is not a psalm for the faint hearted, or for people living the comfortable smooth lives our TVs and magazines tell us should be ours. This psalm is not compatible with the Western dream.

But it “works” in a world full of natural disaster: earthquakes (still going on in Christchurch after over a year), floods (and even the minor ones in the Bay of Plenty yesterday cause pain and disruption), and all of man’s inhumanity to man (although 2011 was a year with more glimpses of hope for Burma that anyone expected as 2012 begins the Army is still attacking ethnic villages and destroying their crops, the political prisoners kept in inhuman conditions in the jails can still be counted as over a thousand).

Ps 90:10 is often quoted in something approximating to the fairly literal KJV: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years” this with its mention of strength suggests (or in the last few generations reminds us) that we might even live longer. However, in the psalm the effect is quite different, to quote the whole verse:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten;
and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
yet is their strength labour and sorrow;
for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

The whole point of the verse is that even if our life is long it is marked (sooner or later) by toil and trouble, and in any case (by any measure but our own pitifully brief one) are so short. Anyone who has reached “a certain age”³ will recognise how the years begin to fly away faster and faster.

So far, if I have presented it as I think it should be read, Psalm 90 is as far from contemporary cheery upbeat “worship songs” as it is possible to be ;)

Yet, it was my grandmother’s favourite psalm. Perhaps because the hymn based on it “Our God, our help in ages past…” used to be sung every “Remembrance Sunday”, and she had cause to remember. Her groom, my father’s father, was killed in the first world war leaving his new wife and toddler. Psalm 90 is a good new year reading in such circumstances. For as well as human mortality it reminds us of the divine author and finisher of our lives. “…our hope for years to come!”

There are two more reasons why this psalm is a favourite of mine. It is one of the few passages in Scripture to deal seriously and in any depth with human aging. And it contains one of the Bible’s few descriptions of creation as birthing:

Before the mountains were born
or ever you had given birth to the earth and the world,
from age to age you are God. (Ps 90:2)

As a result it gets a brief appearance in my new book Not Only a Father,⁴ and will deserve much fuller treatment in the one on human aging, if I ever write it ;)

1. Although there is considerable evidence that the headings may have been added to psalms after they were first written and used, there is no textual evidence for them being absent from the psalms that have them in most modern translations. Rather the reverse the early Greek  translation and the Qumran psalms scrolls seem to have more of these headings, suggesting that they were later additions.
2. Whatever exactly ‘olam means.
3. 50, 40, 30…?
4. I will add a link to the print version soon, for now the text is already available online in discussable format.