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Today, Google has released an Offline Gmail web app, which uses HTML5 in place of the now-deprecated Google Gears. Similar offline access for the Calendar and Docs apps is available through these apps’ settings, but offline editing in Docs is apparently still in the works.

Related articles

• Offline Gmail, Docs and Calendar finally come to Google Chrome (thenextweb.com)

On the web:

• Steve Caruso connects one of the recently-discovered Jordanian codices to a coin from the era of John Hyrcanus I (HT: Jim Davila)
• Brian LePort surveys interpretations of ἡ κτίσις in Rom 8:19–22.
• John Byron notes a “music video” that particularly appeals to doctoral students.
• Dirk Jongkind considers Margaret Sim’s Marking Thought and Talk in New Testament Greek: New Light from Linguistics on the Particles ἵνα and ὅτι.
• Klyne Snodgrass has an article in Bibliotheca Sacra where he re-presents some of the issues he discussed in his 2010 lecture series at Dallas Seminary (HT: Brian Tucker).

On the web:

• Stirling Bartholomew considers Ezek 37:1b.
• Yonatan Adler lectures on “The Tefillin of Qumran: Archeology and Halacha” this Friday (HT: Jim Davila).

The latest reviews from the Review of Biblical Literature include:

Jewish Scriptures and Cognate Fields

• James W. Hardin, Lahav II: Households and the Use of Domestic Space at Iron II Tell Halif: An Archaeology of Destruction, reviewed by Raz Kletter

New Testament and Cognate Fields

• Michael R. Cosby, Apostle on the Edge: An Inductive Approach to Paul, reviewed by James M. Howard
• Jeffrey A. Gibbs, Matthew 11:2–20:34, reviewed by Warren Carter
• Scot McKnight, The Letter of James, reviewed by Alicia J. Batten
• David F. Watson, Honor among Christians: The Cultural Key to the Messianic Secret, reviewed by Adam Winn

General Biblical Studies and Cognate Fields

In yet another loss to the field of Biblical Studies, C. K. Barrett passes away (HT: Michael Halcomb).

Alison Babeu has a new ebook freely available in PDF format: “Rome Wasn’t Digitized in a Day”: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classicists (Washington, D. C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2011). According to the publisher,

The author provides a summative and recent overview of the use of digital technologies in classical studies, focusing on classical Greece, Rome, and the ancient Middle and Near East, and generally on the period up to about 600 AD [ sic]. The report explores what projects exist and how they are used, examines the infrastructure that currently exists to support digital classics as a discipline, and investigates larger humanities cyberinfrastructure projects and existing tools or services that might be repurposed for the digital classics.

...

Image via CrunchBase

Yesterday, I stumbled upon Nevernote, built especially for Linux users as an open source clone of Evernote. Despite what are, perhaps, the slightly ominous connotations of Nevernote’s name, the software seems to working reasonably well. It successfully downloaded all the notes in my Evernote account, and it allows searching and change syncing from a desktop client. The software seems like it can be a bit slow and memory intensive, but this performance issue may simply be a function of the size of one’s Evernote account. Also, nevernote doesn’t appear to have a built-in screen clipping tool, but there are several other methods of accomplishing this task.

The latest publications from the Society of Biblical Literature include:

• Yitzhaq Feder, Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual: Origins, Context, and Meaning
• Itamar Singer, The Calm before the Storm: Selected Writings of Itamar Singer on the End of the Late Bronze Age in Anatolia and the Levant
• Alan Lenzi, ed., Reading Akkadian Prayers and Hymns: An Introduction

On the web:

• James McGrath reflects on the value of liberal arts education.
• Emily Runde comments on the British Library’s ongoing exhibition of “illuminated” manuscripts from the “Dark” Ages, providing several stunningly vibrant page scans.

Eugene Nida has passed away. For the official press release from the United Bible Societies, see here (HT: N ijay Gupta).

Logos releases a new collection for medieval historical theology, which includes:

• Aidan Nichols, Discovering Aquinas: An Introduction to His Life, Work, and Invluence and
• Lawrence Cunningham, Francis of Assisi: Performing the Gospel of Life.

For more information, please see the product page.

Logos 4.3 (SR2) is available. The release notes contain details for the update.

Van Til’s perspective resembles Kuhn’s. One major difference is that, where Kuhn has mutable paradigms, Van Til has a reality-constituting mind of God.

On the web:

• Alan Bandy discusses faith and scholarship.
• Tim Henderson discusses the possibility that σωτήρ was a late-developing nomen sacrum ( part 1, part 2).
• Dirk Jongkind highlights some of Philip Davies’ recent comments on the Jordanian lead codices.
• Robert Woods reflects on reading Cicero’s On Old Age with college freshmen.

Christian Book Distributors now has Hendrickson’s facsimile edition of Codex Sinaiticus on sale for $499.00. For more information, see the the product page.

James Tucker considers Timothy McLay’s comments regarding memory and textual variation in the use of Septuagintal texts, particularly 2 Kgdms 7; Amos 9:11 in conjunction with Acts 15:16.

James Garland has an insightful article, “The Value of Humility in Academe (No Kidding)” at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Zotero 3.0 beta is now available. This beta release represents an exciting step forward in the Zotero Everywhere project. Included in this release are:

• Zotero 3.0b1 for Firefox,
• Zotero Standalone 3.0b1 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and
• Zotero Connector Betas for Chrome and Safari.

For more details, see the original announcement and the change log.

Steve Runge has a good introduction to the question of contrast and conjunctions’ relationship to it. Overall, conjunctions “do not create contrast that wasn’t already there, they simply amplify it. If there is no contrast present, using a contrastive conjunction is infelicitous as the linguists say. It comes across as wrong.” For more, see Steve’s original post.

Recently, on the web:

• The Centre for Public Christianity has a three-part interview with Lynn Cohick about women in the Greco-Roman world (HT: Michael Bird, John Byron).
• Brian LePort discusses the future of seminary education.
• Tim Henderson comments on a selection from Justin Martyr’s Dialog with Trypho.
• Joel Willitts discusses elegance in writing.

The latest reviews from the Review of Biblical Literature include:

Jewish Scriptures and Cognate Studies

• Joshua Blau, Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew: An Introduction, reviewed by Jeremy M. Hutton
• Daniel C. Snell, Religions of the Ancient Near East, reviewed by Gert T. M. Prinsloo

New Testament and Cognate Studies

• J. Harold Ellens, The Son of Man in the Gospel of John, reviewed by Cornelis Bennema
• Shelly Matthews, Perfect Martyr: The Stoning of Stephen and the Construction of Christian Identity, reviewed by Robert Brawley and Richard I. Pervo
• Allan J. McNicol, David B. Peabody, J. Samuel Subramanian, eds., Resourcing New Testament Studies: Literary, Historical, and Theological Essays in Honor of David L. Dungan, reviewed by M. Eugene Boring
• Robert B. Stewart, ed., The Reliability of the New Testament: Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace in Dialogue, reviewed by Tony Costa and Michael R. Licona
• Bruce K. Waltke and James M. Houston, with Erika Moore, The Psalms as Christian Worship: A Historical Commentary, reviewed by Eduan Naudé

Hermeneutics

C. S. Lewis’s introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation has since been reprinted under the title “On the Reading of Old Books” as, for instance, in Walter Hooper’s edited collection of Lewis miscellanies, God in the Dock. This introduction’s text is, however, also available at Silouan in HTML format (HT: Michael Hyatt).

According to Ancient World Online, InscriptiFact has just added “approximately 5700 new images of 296 new texts from the Persepolis Fortification Archive. The majority of Aramaic texts from the archive are now available.” From this archive, the InscriptiFact database also includes several anepigraphic and Elamite tablets.

Recently, on the web:

• Tim Henderson discusses what information Celsus provides about heresy and orthodoxy in early Christianity.
• Libby Nelson summarizes the state of financial aid after the removal of federal student loan subsidy for graduate students.

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In his classic on The Nature of the Gods, Cicero identifies the key problem facing him as being “the question whether the gods do nothing, care for nothing, and take their ease detached from all concern with the care and government of the world: or whether on the contrary all things have been created and formed by them from the dawn of time, and will be ruled and governed by them to all eternity” ( 69–70).

Logos 4.3 (SR1) is available. For details about the release, see here.

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Now at number 8 on the list of Amazon’s top 100 free Kindle books is Anne Stilman’s Grammatically Correct: The Essential Guide to Spelling, Style, Usage, Grammar, and Punctuation (2nd ed.; Writers Digest, 2010). According to the publisher, “this guide covers four essential aspects of good writing:

• Individual words - spelling variations, hyphenation, frequently confused homonyms, frequently misused words and phrases, irregular plurals and negatives, and uses of miscapitalization and type style to add special meanings
• Punctuation - the role of each mark in achieving clarity and affecting tone, and demonstration of how misuses can lead to ambiguity.
• Syntax and structure - agreement of subject and verb, parallel construction, modifiers, tenses, pronouns, active versus passive voice, and more
• Style - advice on the less hard-and-fast areas of clarity and tone, including conciseness, simplification, reading level, jargon and cliches, and subtlety”

Also, now at number 12 among Amazon’s top free Kindle books is Robert Masello’s Robert’s Rules of Writing: 101 Unconventional Lessons Every Writer Needs to Know (Writers Digest, 2011). According to the publisher, Masello provides “101 pithy writing lessons that help you improve your work, save time, and increase productivity.”

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Over the next couple weeks, Zotero users will see some major updates and new tools released, including:

• A new, read-write enabled website,
• Beta versions of Zotero standalone and its browser connectors, and
• A redesigned interface for integration Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org.

For more details, please see the Zotero Blog.

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Since May 2007, there has been a pretty healthy discussion among Ubuntu Linux users about installing and operating Logos Bible Software under that operating system. About a month ago now, I finally switched from Windows XP (SP3) to Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty), and since then, I’d been running Logos 3 (Libronix) inside a virtualized Windows XP machine using VirtualBox.

Those of us who have been lagging behind in upgrading to Logos 4 have recently seen some communication about current Logos 4 upgrade discounts ending, so earlier this morning, I called Logos, received a small additional discount for ordering over the phone, and have installed Logos 4 on the same virtual machine I already mentioned. An important note for other users in similar, VirtualBox setups, however: The installation may well fail if you select a shared folder as the destination for your Logos 4 installation.

Christian Askeland briefly responds to today’s Associated Press piece on Hebrew Bible textual criticism.