And again, the shutter has not rested. The pictures are in the usual spot, with the usual login. If it’s new to you, contact me.

Two days ago, Joseph turned 15 months. It feels like he’s been with us much longer, and at the same time, there’s so much more that I can’t wait for him to learn. Here are some of the things he’s been up to lately.

The owl babies return.

A new twist on headgear.

The joys of walking.

Focused on the shape-sorter.

Joseph treats a number of things like telephones, from rulers to bike lights.

Joseph has started helping in a number of ways.

More reading.

Joseph has started naming things (with varying success), among which the puzzle bits of his veggie puzzle.

Joseph reads the hungry caterpillar with panache.

Here’s how Joseph sees us.

Joseph’s cover version of the Sesame Street favorite.

In a desperate attempt to catch up with posting videos, I’m posting a few, knowing full well that a good amount still awaits in the camera, and that photos, too, haven’t been posted in a while. May you enjoy them despite the delay.

Joseph uses the spoon.

Joseph plays with the flag he received at Beaufort national cemetery.

Joseph says cheese and a few other things.

Some of the early excited walking.

Reading books just like mommy (nearly).

Joseph has taken to saying “Amen” at the end of prayers or readings from the book of common prayer. My guess is that for him, “Amen” and “The end” are still fairly synonymous.

Still a ways to go, but off to a great start.

Not all books need to be read.

The camera trumps parents almost any time.

Some foods are messier than others.

Joseph helps mommy make butter.

Wonder where he got the idea to read on the pot…

They don’t make keyboards like they used to, but now you can take one they used to make and use it like it was made today. (I tip my bowling hat to Diana.)

Here are some videos of our USA vacation this summer.

Time lapse video of a sunny day at the Maggie P.

Joseph playing in the deck pool. I swapped out the audio, because the conversation in the background was too private for youtube.

Part I of the “hanging” trilogy. I didn’t swap out the audio because audioswap wasn’t available tonight. Maybe I will later.

Part II.

Part III.

There are more lined up, but I haven’t edited the titles yet.

I’ve participated in a few Bible studies and small groups, and even occasionally led one, usually cribbing ideas from Dr. William Barclay.  Most of the folks in my small groups have been normal people like me, giving us the comfortable feeling of being on the same level and trusting in the wisdom of crowds and divine intervention to keep our group from just being the blind leading the blind.  However, there were those occasional strange people that participated, so here’s a little heads-up for you if you intend to start your own 20/20 Blind Club.

HOW TO DEAL WITH WORD READERS

A word reader is someone with formal literacy training who can look at a page covered with lines and dots, and actually consistently generate the same sounds from it.  Word readers aren’t normal humans.  Unlike me, they actually studied English in high school and college, whereas I didn’t have time to learn things like subclauses and similes; I was too busy pulling pigtails and thinking about how to advance past the seventh level boss in Turrican, muttering under my breath, “Scrap the laser, get those grenades,” or “No, it’s lasers, but I gotta crouch.”

You may have word readers in your Bible study. You can recognize them because they usually have Bible covers and ask the study leader for the “reference” of an idea instead of the “author.”  Listen for other giveaway phrases they say, like “verse,” “concordance,” or “ameliorate.”

You no longer need be intimidated. This short primer will equip you to impress them when you say “parallelism” instead of “that guy keeps repeating himself,” and “acrostic” instead of “this stuff doesn’t rhyme worth squat.”  (Here’s a fun little joke to play on your small group members.  Say, “All Christians rely on stuff taught in church.”  Your small group will be laughing so hard you might as well break out the cookies early.)

Note that most literary terms are Latin or Greek and came from the “classical period.” (The “classical period” lasted a few hundred years and featured people expressing complex ideas in tiresome long poems.  It began when Socrates bullied a cooper into admitting he didn’t know for sure that his casks were casks.  None of the poems from that period rhyme, and they all announce what will happen right after this, but then the commercial break makes no sense).

Here are a few terms you should know:

Passage: longish bit of words.  When someone just can’t stop talking, say, “Can you break down that passage a bit, buddy?” When he stares at you and says “uh…”, give him a thumbs up and say, “Concise, my man, concise!”

Instead of “I’m sure I head that in some sermon!” you can say the much more sophisticated, “That’s ex cathedra, Barry, ex cathedra!”

Your group may need to be encouraged to use analogy, which means “to apply an unrelated sappy story to their life.”  Exhort the whole group, “Brothers and sisters, this evening let’s use simile, which means ‘Talk like, you know, like, you had a thought, but it’s like something else.'”

Shout “Sola scriptura!” when someone says something you suspect isn’t quite kosher.  Last week when a guy wondered if ripping an eye out would actually help him, I yelled out “Sola scriptura!” at him.  You should have seen how quickly he dropped the topic. His girlfriend was so grateful she had tears in her eyes.

Actually any Greek or Latin words impress word readers.  If you say them with enough authority, they’ll question their own knowledge of terms and be impressed with you.  Here are a few suggestions:

“John, I think your take is a little short on ophthalmology.”
“Melissa, in this group we try to avoid viviparity, ok?”
“Chuck, you’ve got to raise your expectorations!”

Well, that’s about all, folks.  If you have exacerbating questions, ask me.  Remember, it’s all about loquation, loquation, and loquation.  Take that, word readers.

Continue reading →

Janet started reading “How to Read a Book” and gave me a summary of what she’s read so far.  I decided to apply it to “Between 2 Fires,” which I pegged as a book likely to give me a success in my first try.
I don’t remember how I got the book.  I do remember it was free – I think it was some “e-mail me and I’ll send you the book for free” offer.  He actually mailed it to Switzerland, which moved him up a notch in my book.  But getting it for free didn’t help it get read.  Perhaps it was the slightly cheesy title design, or my having just read Naim Stifan Ateek’s “Justice and Only Justice” in German, and being a bit sated by the Palestinian Christian topic.

Between 2 Fires is easy fodder for 80/20 reading, because its bulk is an account of a week Jack Kincaid and Ron Brackin spent in Palestine and their encounters, conversations, and observations while there.  I skipped those, reading the introduction before and the conclusion afterward, 8 pages total.  Basic summary: Palestinian Christians have it bad, and they need our support, because they have the answer to the conflict in the area.  You can give support through prayer or through financial gifts to Banner Communications or other ministries active in the area.

Unfortunately, it appears that sometime after 2002 their website has ceased to exist (www.bannerc.com).  The same seems to have happened to www.sat-7.org, a Christian Arab radio program.  www.win1040.com is still operational, and the Musalaha reconciliation ministry seems to have gained an online presence since, as has the Bethlehem Bible College.

My conclusion: I’ll try the 80/20 trick on other books.  If anyone wants to borrow Between 2 Fires to read the bits I didn’t, you’re welcome to do so.

I needed it myself, so I wrote a little tool that allows a user to choose a day of the week (e.g. Saturday) and enter a year (e.g. 2012) and then displays the dates of all the Saturdays in 2012 in a small table.  I wanted it because my tickler has no date indications and I want to avoid giving myself lots of tasks on e.g. a Tuesday, because that’s Janet’s night.  That should now be easier.

So without any further ado, here’s my Weekday Date Calculator.

Due to popular request, here is a whole big load of new photos.  If you’ve forgotten the login information, or if it’s your first time to look at the photos, please contact me or leave a comment.  If you want pictures at higher resolution, ditto.

It turns out that events in Basel had a decisive influence on what the KJV looks like.  Had Basel not had an active and able printer, who managed to convince Erasmus to come to Basel and do a project he’d cooked up, the KJV might look different in a number of places.

On vacation I started reading a little book I bought I remember not when, one so old it’s now out of print: Scribes, Scrolls, & Scriptures by J. Harold Greenlee.  It explains in layman’s terms with which implements the Bible was written, what kind of manuscripts exist, and how we can best determine the original Greek text from the manuscripts we still have, the originals being lost or destroyed.  It also goes through the history of manuscripts and published versions of the Bible or parts thereof.

One outstanding publication was the Latin Vulgate, completed in the late fourth century by Jerome.  According to Greenlee, “[t]he Latin Vulgate was a translation that could be understood by the ordinary people who spoke Latin.  …  [F]or many centuries the Bible of the Christian Church was the Latin Bible.  During much of this period, Greek was little known and its importance little recognized outside of Greece.”

And then came the printing press.  Although the first Bible printed, the Gutenberg Bible, was a Latin Vulgate (1456), the printing press made publishing much cheaper, and over half a century later the first Greek New Testament was printed, which “involved the very earliest example of lively competition in the publishing industry.”  The first to get started was Cardinal Ximenes of Toledo, Spain, but when they finished their New Testament in 1514, they decided to wait with publishing until they had the Old Testament as well, and when that was done, until they had papal approval.  That took until 1522.

In the meantime, “[a] Swiss printer named Froben, a Protestant, heard of the Cardinal’s project and promptly sought out the scholar Desiderius Erasmus to ask him to prepare an edition of the Greek New Testament as quickly as possible.  Erasmus had been anxious to publish a Greek New Testament and readily accepted Froben’s proposal.”  Froben asked Erasmus in April 1515, Erasmus moved to Basel in July, and after compiling a Greek New Testament from the manuscripts in the library of the University of Basel Erasmus and Froben placed this New Testament on the market in early March 1516.  His New Testament had weaknesses: for instance, he apparently made little use of what we now know to be the best manuscript available to him because it disagreed with the majority of manuscripts he had, and he had to translate missing parts of Revelation from Latin into Greek, with the result that “some words in his text of Revelation have never been found in any Greek manuscript.”

Erasmus was also arm-twisted by a forged document into expanding 1 John 5:7-8 in his third edition from the original triple witnesses of Spirit, water, and blood into heavenly witnesses (Father, Word, and Holy Spirit) and earthly witnesses (spirit, water, and blood), so that it would agree with the Toledo version.  Although he omitted the passage again in later versions, “[b]y a quirk of circumstances, it was Erasmus’s third edition that proved to have the most lasting influence on other editions by other editors, and thus the reference to the ‘heavenly witnesses,’ which is not found in any Greek New Testament manuscript produced earlier than the sixteenth century, came to be an accepted part of the Greek text and later found its way into the King James Version in English.”

Greenlee continues about this third edition, which became known as the “Textus Receptus,” thanks to the Elzevir brothers: “It is by no means a ‘poor’ or ‘bad’ text.  In fact, it is about as good, or as reliable, as the average ancient manuscript of the New Testament.  It gives us the whole Word of God.  Yet in numerous details it is not as close to the exact original text as are the best of the ancient manuscripts, and it is certainly inferior to the best text that can be determined by a proper comparison of the manuscripts using sound principles of procedure.”

So there you have it: a printer in Basel, a Dutch academic, and British-Spanish shenanigans shaped the King James Version we have today.