Online Critical Pseudepigrapha Not Yet Mac Friendly

Original post (but see the recant below):

Jim Davila shares that an SBL Publications e-mail recently announce that the The Online Critical Pseudepigrapha now is more Mac-friendly.

Mac-Friendly Reader Interface
Mac users will be glad to hear that documents in the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha are now presented in an upgraded reader interface that is fully compatible with the Safari web browser as well as with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The project, if you're not familiar with it is one whose goal is "is to develop and publish electronic editions of the best critical texts of the "Old Testament" Pseudepigrapha and related literature."

However, as Ed Cook points out, the site still does not work with Safari. I normally use Firefox so did not notice this immediately. It is bad form for a misleading notice to have been released.

Update: Thanks to Ken Penner, who works on the project, and leaves a comment confirming what I had suspected. The project works in the public beta version of Safari 3. Good for them for making the efforts, but that version of Safari is in beta. The announcement that went out should not have mentioned working with Safari at all, perhaps unless it made quite clear that it only works with a new, buggy, beta version of Safari. In a month's time, though, we'll have the new OS and Safari 3 will be in release version and all will be well.

Minor Agreement of the Week: "You say that I am."

I'm not planning on an ongoing series (not even weekly but certainly not daily), but this is another fun agreement to point out.

When Jesus is asked at his interrogation before the chief priests whether or not he is the Christ, in Matthew Jesus says "You say [so]" and in Mark Jesus says "I am" while in Luke Jesus says "You say that I am!"

I suspect most would argue against calling this a minor agreement. But I will argue against the notion that Luke and Matthew both independently turn the question back on the interrogators, as Jesus does in all three gospels when interrogated later by Pilate.

Mark 14.62	Luke 22.70	Matt 26.64
σὺ εἶ ὁ χριστὸς ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ εὐλογητοῦ; ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν· ἐγώ εἰμι	σὺ οὖν εἶ ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ; ὁ δὲ πρὸς αὐτοὺς ἔφη· ὑμεῖς λέγετε ὅτι ἐγώ εἰμι.	ἡμῖν εἴπῃς εἰ σὺ εἶ ὁ χριστὸς ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ. λέγει αὐτῷ ὁ Ἰησοῦς· σὺ εἶπας.
"Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?" And Jesus said, "I am."	"Then are you the Son of God?" And he said to them "You say that I am."	"Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God." Jesus said to him, "You said so."

Luke's context comes after first giving the elongated answer about "If I tell you, you will not believe it" (Can't you just hear Jack Nicholson hollering "You can't handle the truth!"?) I note that manuscript Θ does have Mark's response including Matthew's "You say".

I wonder if one might offer the simplistic solution that Luke combined Matthew's "You say" and Mark's "I am" to get "You say that I am."

Welcome to Decker's NT Resources Blog

I'd like to join Stephen Carlson in delighting in the new addition to the biblioblogosphere with Rodney Decker's new "NT Resources Blog". I have long respected Rodney Decker's use of technology in doing his biblical work and his prowess with some Macintosh technologies.

Minor Agreement of the Day

The work I'm doing right now is really drawing attention to Minor Agreements--places in a story where Matthew and Luke agree on a wording over against what Mark has. (They become problematic for the predominant theory that Luke was composed by copying some of Mark without any knowledge of Matthew.) Here's my favorite MA today:

Mark 12.8	Luke 20.15a	Matt. 21.39
καὶ λαβόντες ἀπέκτειναν αὐτὸν καὶ ἐξέβαλον αὐτὸν ἔξω τοῦ ἀμπελῶνος.	καὶ ἐκβαλόντες αὐτὸν ἔξω τοῦ ἀμπελῶνος ἀπέκτειναν.	καὶ λαβόντες αὐτὸν ἐξέβαλον ἔξω τοῦ ἀμπελῶνος καὶ ἀπέκτειναν.
So they seized him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard.	So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him...	So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.

I'm not really sure which I prefer, actually (Killing someone first and then throwing them out of my yard, or throwing them out of my yard and then killing them). Apparently, both Matthew and Luke independently preferred the latter rather than the former.

iWork and other WP's for biblical scholarship work

I continue to get mixed reports on some issues regarding Word Processors. For instance, Chris Heard tells me Right to Left Unicode Hebrew is working for him in iWork just as well as it does in TextEdit.

But I read other reports, such as a note from tom140 on a TidBits forum (Comment #13) reporting:

Another shortcoming is that iWork is full of bugs when working with RTL scripts like Hebrew/Arabic which were fixed in TextEdit years ago. But since Office can't do these scripts at all, this isn't such a problem.

I think I will soon put together a table of features for those of us interesting in writing on biblical studies and then have folks who use each package extensively to rate how the software holds up. I had planned on doing this after January when Word '08 comes out. I may not wait.

Update:
It'd be nice if Redlex updated their WP comparison table. But what I'm interested is information on comparing broad features, any one or two that could be deal breakers for a particular scholar's work. For instance, in how I work, scriptability is a must. Here's my list so far of features that are potential deal breakers for biblical scholars, ranked ever so generally in the order of how potentially important the feature may be to biblical scholars. Let me know your additions and suggestions for the list.

• Intel version
• Bibliographic software integration
• Unicode RTL Handling
• Scripting/Macro Integration
• Cocoa application
• Open/Save .doc
• Open/Save Open XML doc format
• Unicode Glyph Insertion Dialog
• CPU usage in background
• Customizeable keyboard shortcuts
• Customizeable toolbars
• Copy/Paste Style
• Style Management
• Find/Replace Style
• Tracking Changes Feature
• Find/Replace Ignore Diacritics
• Outline View
• TOC Generation
• Cross Referencing Feature
• Index Generation
• Hideable Field Codes
• Check Spelling by Language
• Secondary Font Substitution Choice
• Noncontiguous selection
• Full screen mode
• Split view
• Text Flow Around Images/Objects