Research

Gleanings about Greek, linguistics, and saint cults in late antiquity and the early middle ages.

Gleanings about expanding your research materials with “Library Extension” and the possibility of 1 Timothy’s quoting Luke.

Gleanings about resources for moving from biblical studies to theology and expanded JSTOR access for members of the Society of Biblical Literature.

At present, Zotero’s “date” field doesn’t properly handle publications made over a range of years (e.g., 1950–1960).((Header image provided by Zotero via Twitter.)) Instead of including the full range in the corresponding note or bibliography entry, only the first year of the range would be presented (e.g., 1950).

If the Range Has an End

There is, however, a workaround that depends on entering the following syntax in an item’s “extra” field: issued: [first year]/[last year]. Thus, for example, if the extra field has issued: 1950/1960, Zotero would properly output a range of publication dates (thus: “1950–1960”).

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TopTracker provides a straight-forward, free time tracking utility that works on both Windows and OS X.

Cal Newport outlines the basics of how he reads when working on a project. According to Newport, “The key to my system is the pencil mark in the page corner.”

Michael Hyatt has a good discussion of digital notekeeping tools, a.k.a. “Evernote alternatives.” As even the nomenclature might suggest, Michael opts for Evernote.

I used Evernote for quite some time too but transitioned several months back to OneNote. I haven’t ever gotten particularly sold on Apple devices, so Apple-only alternatives were out by default.

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In How to Write a Lot ( affiliate disclosure), Paul Silvia provides his own progress monitoring system as an example (39–45). Since finishing the book last month, I have been adapting Silvia’s database format to a Google Docs spreadsheet that will track some additional data in addition to the data that he finds helpful. Since it has been helpful thus far, I thought I would make it available with some sample data.

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From AWOL:

The American Numismatic Society has created an Open Access digital library. One purpose is to host unpublished and/or orphaned MA and PhD theses/dissertations that have numismatic content. As a part of this library your thesis will be Open Access, full-text searchable, and http://schema.org properties will help Google relevance. If you (or someone you know) wants their research hosted for free (CC-BY license) alongside other numismatic work, email Andrew Reinhard at areinhard@numismatics.org.

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Research@StAndrews:FullText is:

[A] digital repository of research output from the University of St Andrews. Since 2006 the University has required theses to be submitted to the repository. . . . The Research@StAndrews Portal provides links to the full text of research publications which are stored in Research@StAndrews:FullText.

From the School of Divinity, 160 theses are available.

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Tyndale House recently announced the beta release of their Scripture Tools for Every Person (STEP) project, headed by David Instone-Brewer. The resource includes a nice selection of original-language texts—apparently including some, like the [Samaritan Pentateuch](http://www.stepbible.org/#!__/0/passage/0/SP/Gen 1/NHV/__/1/singleColumn), not yet listed in the documentation. Later this year, the Tyndale House edition of the Greek New Testament should also appear in STEP.

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As their free book of the month, Logos Bible Software is giving away volume 5 of the Expositor’s Greek Testament, edited by W. Robertson Nicoll. Volume 5 includes:

• J. H. A. Hart, “The First Epistle General of Peter”
• R. H. Strachan, “The Second Epistle General of Peter”
• David Smith, “The Epistles of John”
• J. B. Mayor, “The General Epistle of Jude”
• James Moffatt, “The Revelation of St. John the Divine”

For more information about the text and to download this volume, please see here.

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Christian Book Distributors now has the 10-volume Theological Dictionary of the New Testament on sale for $99.99. Orders for the product should ship on or after October 1.

While this year’s SBL program is still in preparation, the contents of the IBR research group sessions are now available via the individual research group links on the call for papers page.

Update: After copying this link yesterday, the call for papers page URL was apparently updated. Such is the Internet; the link above has now been corrected to reflect the current page location (HT: Joseph Kelly, Kirk Lowery).

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On the web:

• Zotero 4.0.4 is now available with some minor improvements over the previous stable version.
• Joseph Kelly highlights some good advice about how not to write a thesis or dissertation.
• Logos Bible Software has added the Aramaic Bible series to their pre-publication  program.

I’ve just now noticed, but a stable release of Zotero 4 became available earlier this week. This release includes a substantial number of updates over previous versions. For highlights, see here, or peruse the whole change log.

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Google Books has full-text PDFs freely available for the following works by S. R. Driver:

• Commentary on Deuteronomy (International Critical Commentary; 1895; repr., 1903)

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On the web:

• The SBL website now has a page with links to a number of program unit and seminar papers (HT: Charles Jones).
• Ohio State University has a special online exhibition about the King James Version (HT: Bill Warren).
• Zotero has seen a significant and a couple more minor updates over the past few days. The SBL citation style is also newly updated as of January 29.
• The W3 Consortium has a list of fraktur characters (e.g., for cases where they are used as text-critical siglia) and their corresponding Unicode character assignments. Among other fonts, Gentium Plus natively includes 1D510 (Majority Text) and 1D513 (Papyrus).

On the Web:

• Phil Gons digests Tony Reinke’s suggestions for reading more.
• Logos Bible Software has added the 12-volume Clarendon edition of Aristotle’s works (1908–1952) to their community pricing offerings.

Logos Bible Software is now taking $0.00 pre-orders for their upcoming edition of Codex Bezae. Among the manuscript’s noteworthy characteristics,

It is the oldest-known manuscript containing the story of the adulterous woman found in John 7–8, as well as a longer ending of the Gospel of Mark. There are also several apparent additions, including a story found nowhere else of Jesus addressing a man found working on the Sabbath.

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On the web:

• Mark Hoffman notes that Google Maps’ street view now includes several additional locations of significance around Israel.
• Charles Jones identifies several publicly accessible dissertations from the University of Pennsylvania.
• Dirk Jongkind reflects on Acts 17:3 in connection with the two latest Nestle-Aland texts.

Christian Askeland highlights four PhD studentships available at the University of Aberdeen set to engage the topic of “Authority and Texts: Concepts and Use,” considering questions like:

What constitutes authority and provides authenticity to texts and what is the role of textual criticism? How should authoritative texts (including religious, legal, and other texts), be used and interpreted, and how is this issue determined? Is investigation of the contextual meaning of texts at their time of composition necessary to understanding and respecting their authority, or do different criteria exist which influence readings of texts?

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Zotero 3.0.11 and 3.0.11.1 have just been released with some additional bug fixes. For change logs, see here, and for basic introductory material to the platform, see here.

Zotero 3.0.9 and 3.0.10 have recently been released with a number of bug fixes. For change logs, see here, and for basic introductory material to the platform, see here.

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Logos Bible Software is now shipping version 5. For an overview of the new version, see the playlist below:

&feature=autoplay&list=PLXkjd_l1xkSQAozD4PNGZALI6GolOqTas

If I had noticed it before, it had since slipped my mind. But, the PDF archive for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society is largely open-access. The open-access portion of the archive contains all the Journal’s volumes except those from the past two full years, which are accessible to subscribers. The archive also contains the first four volumes of the older Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society.

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The Oxford University Classics Faculty’s PINAX “is a digital library comprised of collections of displayed papyrus images and texts at Oxford.” Texts include papyri from Antinoopolis, Herculaneum, and Oxyrhynchus, as well as magical texts (HT: Charles Jones).

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Further thanks to Jonathan Kiel (via Brian Davidson) for passing along Miles Van Pelt’s Göttingen Septuagint sigla chart PDF.

Amazon’s selection of texts available for the Kindle platform occasionally includes some interesting oddities. For instance, those who really want to do so can apparently read the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert volumes 10 (4QMMT) and 16 (cave 4 calendrical texts) on Kindle for a mere $239.20 and $254.34 respectively, without print-equivalent page numbers. Or, used hard covers are available for just under $180. ;-)

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On the web:

• Tokens makes available the final part of their interview with Walter Brueggemann.
• Theological Studies has back issues from 5 years ago and beyond freely available online (HT: Charles Jones).
• Michael Halcomb reflects on some of Albert Schweitzer’s comments on Christian scholars.
• Tommy Keene highlights BibleArc.
• Archive.org has Gordon Fee’s PhD thesis available online (HT: Larry Hurtado).
• Bavarian authorities are commissioning annotated editions of Mein Kampf in hopes of further defusing the work’s value for extremists’ use as it comes into the public domain.
• Joel Willitts reflects on some of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s comments on “self forgiveness.”