Greek

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.

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.

Publications

“Romans 1.20: Knowing God Through His Acts in History” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 100/1 (2009): 45–58

Dissertation Abstract. “Evil, Suffering, and the Righteousness of God According to Romans 1–3: An Exegetical and Theological Study” Tyndale Bulletin 59.1 (2008): 153–155

To write in Greek in X_ƎT_eX is actually quite simple, especially if you use a font that contains all the characters needed to write in English (or whichever languages you use) and in Greek (like Gentium, Cardo, etc.). To type in Greek. The following instructions are specific for the Mac. If you use X_ƎT_eX on Windows or LinuxLes you just need to adapt the commands for choosing fonts to your environment. These instructions also apply to working with Greek from other periods or other ancient or other non latin languages, provided you use the appropriate font.