FourSenses.net

Though I have several opportunities to go to professional conferences every year, I don’t actually often attend them. One reason is that I have to pay for them. When you factor in travel, hotel, expenses, etc., it gets quite expensive. Another one is that I sometimes wonder whether they are really worth the time and expense.

Granted, there are several good reasons to attend professional conferences like the SBL: networking, meeting people, the book stalls, … the tote bag. One paramount reason should be to attend or present papers. The problem is, unless you are a star in the theological world or/and pushing the hot buttons of fashion, a lot of papers are very poorly attended. In the case of the SBL this probably also has to do with the overabundance of study groups, sessions, papers, and what not. All this put together, I don’t really try to present papers in conferences anymore (not counting the largely irrelevant fact that my proposal might be rejected of course). I’d rather put the time in writing.

The use of the Old Testament in Romans has been a fertile ground of investigation for decades, and rightly so since there are about sixty OT “quotations” in Romans. The number varies according to how you define a “quotation” and a few others technical arguments better left out of this post.

Westcott-Hort 1881: Quotation in Rom 2.6 in capitals

The debate is ancient as to whether here and there Paul refers or alludes to some OT passages or not. I have already mentioned the use of Ps 97 in Rom 1.17 as an example.

Working with L^aT_eX involves writing in one application (TeXShop, TextMate, etc.) and viewing your document in a pdf reader (Acrobat Reader, Skim, etc.). To see the result of your work, to correct or improve it, it is often practical to quickly go back and forth between the working text and the resulting pdf.

Scholar-theologian-bishop William Paley (1743–1802) was already a frequent tenant on the best-seller list when he published his Natural Theology in 1802, three years before his death. The book, which starts with the famous watch argument (“ … suppose I had found a watch upon the ground … when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive … that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose…”, p.1), remained on the best-seller lists for decades, albeit with modifications. Evidences of Christianity, another one of Paley’s books (1794), was a required reading in Cambridge, his Alma Mater, into the twentieth century.

Natural Theology is part of a flow of discussions related to science and religion that accelerated after the scientific revolution. In many respects, Paley follows the path of Isaac Newton’s own natural theology and claims that the scientific study of nature only strenghtens the belief that nature points to an Intelligent Being. Furthermore, when Paley wrote, David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion had only recently been published (1779). The basic point of Paley was that science and religion go hand in hand and that the study of the “Book of Nature” only reveals an intelligent and good Creator, hence the full title Natural Theology or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, collected from the appearance of nature.

Dutton, Edward. Meeting Jesus at University: Rites of Passage and Student Evangelicals. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008.

Evangelical student ministries have been around for decades, yet for the most part they have remained under the radar of critical and scientific work. Dutton’s essay, partly based on a doctoral dissertation in Anthropology of Religion presented at Aberdeen University (Scotland), is therefore a welcome addition to the literature on religion and higher education.

Dutton’s thesis is that university is a rite of passage, a corridor between two stages of life (hence the use of the term liminal, from the Latin limen, corridor). University is “a time when young people have their identities challenged, remoulded and even fundamentally changed as they become adults” (ix). These challenges and changes present an opportunity to mix with people of other social groups but also to join a structured and structuring movement like a Christian Union. The book “will examine the relationship between universities, the intensity to which they are a Rite of Passage, and the evangelical student groups within them.” (ix).

To the writing of commentaries there is not end.

There are so many commentaries on almost any book of the Bible today that one might as well give up trying to keep up with the field. It gets even worse if you pay more than lip service to working in several languages. For example, not counting commentaries in English, three pretty hefty commentaries came out recently on Luke: Bovon’s last volume of his four volume commentary; Michael Wolter’s volume published by Mohr-Siebeck; Heins Klein’s commentary published by Vandenhoeck, to name only these three.

From time to time, or often depending on your field of work, you might have to type textual criticism signs in you paper, thesis, masterpiece, and what not. Oftentimes the problem is finding the signs and then entering them into your document. There are several ways to find them: websites, the Character or the Glyph Palette of your system and sofware, etc. There also several ways to enter them, some more practical than others.

Recently, the Society of Biblical Literature made the new SBL Greek font available for free. This unicode font is designed by John Hudson, of Tiro Typeworks, who also designed the SBL Hebrew font.

This is what the font looks like (picture from the SBL site).

The font contains 1341 signs, all you need to reproduce the text of the Greek New Testament or the Septuagint and the majority of the signs necessary for NT textual criticism. As this picture shows (displayed are default font, rare ligatures, variant 4, and variant 6, and samples of nomina sacra), the font offers variants of the thêta, rhô, the sigma as well as all you need to write nomina sacra.

One of the problems when trying to read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is the evolution of the text through six editions. This is the result of Darwin’s interaction with his critics, his own reworking of this theory and its wording, his corrections, etc. The sixth and final edition will end up being about 150 pages longer than the first, with fifteen chapters instead of fourteen. All in all, about seventy-five percent of the text was reworked through the six editions.

According to many specialists, Darwin’s changes and interaction with this critics, positive and negative, led to a text that lost the clarity of the original. Furthermore, in the fifth edition, Darwin modified his theory to give less importance to natural selection. If this constant rework was considered a plus for long, this is not the case today. Which edition to read then? If in the past many preferred to read the sixth edition, Darwin’s final formulation, preference often goes today to the first edition (or the second since it is basically a corrected first edition).

Thanks to an agreement between Google Books and de Gruyter, a good part of my dissertation (written in French) is now available on Google Books.

The complete reference of the book is Erwin Ochsenmeier, Mal, souffrance et justice de Dieu selon Romains 1-3 : Étude exégétique et théologique , Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche 155, de Gruyter: New-York, Berlin, 2007, 23 x 15,5 cm. XII, 392 pages. Relié. ISBN 978-3-11-019696-2.

The book is a revised version of my Ph. D. dissertation presented in March 2007 at the Faculté Libre de Théologie Évangélique de Vaux-sur-Seine (France).