Hebrew in Lead Codices Turns Out to be Sindarin

The Telegraph has some of the best covereage regarding the newly discussed Lead Codices. This latest identification of the script itself is more than surprising.

Right of Return for Possibly-Fake Lead Codices

News this week is covering a set of lead codices with possibly some form of Hebrew, allegedly an early Christian text. You can follow good coverage from Jim Davila, as always. The truth of the matter is that little should be sensationalized until they have been openly studied.

But one aspect of the story intrigues me. Given that there is at least a good chance these are yet another fake (though perhaps not), we have a government throwing their full weight behind its authenticity, for the sake of the asset, but the Jordanian government doesn't even possess them. From the BBC:

A flash flood had exposed two niches inside the cave, one of them marked with a menorah or candlestick, the ancient Jewish religious symbol. A Jordanian Bedouin opened these plugs, and what he found inside might constitute extremely rare relics of early Christianity.

That is certainly the view of the Jordanian government, which claims they were smuggled into Israel by another Bedouin. The Israeli Bedouin who currently holds the books has denied smuggling them out of Jordan, and claims they have been in his family for 100 years.

Jordan says it will "exert all efforts at every level" to get the relics repatriated.

I have posted previously on the question of 'right of return' of stolen artifacts (vis a vis Parthenon friezes and the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum). When potential monetization takes a front seat, things will get muddy. This now becomes a hodge-podge of self-interest, and I doubt any scholarly conclusion can be found for many years to come.

The Promising MacBook Air

After seeing the new (2010) MacBook Airs in the wild, it will be hard not to go that direction when it's time to move to a new MacBook. They are amazing, and the only thing at this point is sacrifices is hard drive space and a slot to stick in that CD/DVD in. As such, it is a game changer regarding what MacBook I'd recommend. I think I used the optical drive in my MacBook about 5 times last year. Given that I'll still have a desktop and a cloud to handle backup and the occasional disk need, the Air becomes such a viable option. For me, really, the processor speed is the main issue, since I occasionally do some intensive work on the machine. However, I have one big concern, and that is the upgradeability of the memory.

I'd buy an 11" Air immediately, except for my concerns about being able to upgrade the SSD hard drive later on. My inclination would be to pony up for just the minimum SSD memory and then upgrade later once SSD prices have gone down. But, Apple has killed the first 3rd party attempt at an upgrade kit, and the future is shaky.  If this is the "future of the MacBook," is the future an inability to DIY expand your memory?

Background:

From watching the teardown pictures of folks getting inside the Air, getting to and removing the Flash Storage Unit is a piece of cake.  But when PhotoFast came out with the first 3rd party upgrade kit, the 256GB MacBook Air SSD upgrade kit, Apple killed it.  OWC has now announced the Mercury Aura Pro Express SSD MacBook Upgrade kit.  But worries are that it will be short lived, too. Why is Apple keen on killing the 3rd party upgrades to the MacBook Air? It was a custom, SSD modules soldered onto a a memory board solution that Apple created, but it is a shame that things are shaky in this area, especially given how easy the access is to the memory board.

I am eagerly watching Apple's response, if any, to OWC. If none comes, then there is a good chance that my next MacBook will be of the Airy ilk.

Thoughts on the SBL-GNT

A newly released eclectic Greek New Testament became available this month. Michael Holmes has provided expert opinion on production of the new SBL Greek New Testament. I have only spent a couple hours with the text, in addition to working through Wieland Willker's review.  I do have some initial reflections on the text that I could share.

The primary niche this text is filling is very clear. It is an eclectic Greek text from the SBL that provides a much more generous free-use policy than the Nestle text. There are situations where the usage rights from the NA27 have been limiting towards a project.

At the SBL general meeting, they were passing out hard copies to registrants. This hard copy is mostly worth what attendants paid for it. The Greek text uses the SBL Greek font, which is simply bad. It makes for awful reading, looking like perpetual italics. I was disappointed when the font was released and seeing it in this text is undesirable.

Also, the initial apparatus provided with the text is essentially useless. It serves as a descriptor for the process that Michael Holmes used to compile the text: take 4 eclectic texts (Tregelles, Westcott-Hort, Robinson-Pierpont) and compare them in order to catch all major variation units. This might be acceptable if it weren't for the fact that it doesn't make the NA text a major text to compare, only mentioning it when a variation differs from the less-scholarly-backward-transation "Greek text behind the NIV". But in the end, when I'm reading my NT, I don't care if a variant came from Westcott-Hort, but rather which manuscript it can be found in. Others have indicated the apparatus must simply be a stopgap solution. I would think so.

And finally, regarding its use. There are certainly places where the NA text needs a second thought. (See, for instance, Willker's exhaustive list.) I am eager to learn more about NA28 which is in the pipeline. But while Michael Holmes is very qualified (see, for instance, his work on the text of the Apostolic Fathers), the reader of scripture will benefit all the more from evaluation by committee. Holmes does in a way dialogue with the opinions of Tregelles and Hort, etc., but in the end they are still his evaluations.

Update:
Stephen Carlson has an excellent post on the apparatus, and keenly points out one benefit of the apparatus is that "a full two-thirds of the apparatus is listing differences with the Byzantine textform, enabl[ing] the user of the SBLGNT apparatus to get a very good sense of what the Byzantine text reads."


Further Update:
Michael Holmes graciously pointed me towards a very helpful faq blog post he has on some aspects of the SBL-GNT creation choices. You can find it here. 

What Books Are You Preaching From?

This week during seasonal sermon planning I did some investigation into what texts we've preached in our worship services at Raytown Christian Church in the just over five years we've been there. My partner Dawn and I are co-pastors, and we plan all the worship themes and preaching texts together, though we alternate the preaching duty each week.
After reviewing the texts from the last 266 sermons, I was at first stunned that we had only preached from 34 books. For three years we used the Revised Common Lectionary (which does not cover each book), and then for two+ years we have organized individual series, planned out months in advance. Here is a cloud representation of the books we've preached from, the relative size indicating the amount of times we've preached from it. It has been a helpful exercise, informative future sermon planning.

genesis exodus deuteronomy joshua ruth 1samuel 1kings 2samuel 2kings nehemiah job psalms proverbs isaiah jeremiah ezekiel hosea micah habakkuk zephaniah matthew mark luke john acts romans 1corinthians 2corinthians ephesians philippians hebrews james 1peter revelation

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