David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham, argued against the physical resurrection of Jesus, the literal truth of the Bible, and the continued existence of his own Church of England. But it wasn't until he used the words "bloody" and "damn" in a sermon that he got banned from two area churches. Ah, priorities.

DISCLAIMER: Well, this entry seemed like a good idea at the time, but my conclusions are flawed. I have had a number of folks contact me both in the comments and via private email with explanations for the vast differences in Amazon's currently bestselling Bibles and those found in lists elsewhere.

Here's what I now know thanks to a knowledgeable, but (for your purposes) unnamed source:
• Contrary to my speculation below, CBA stores as a whole do indeed outsell Amazon by a healthy margin (I just thought everyone bought from Amazon like me).
• Bibles with the apocrypha sell better on Amazon because they can't be as easily bought in physical stores, especially CBA stores.
• Contrary to one of my conclusions below, the NRSV is not quite as healthy as perhaps I thought after initially looking at Amazon's results. Evidently, it is just easier to obtain through Amazon than other sources. Unfortunately, many editions of the NRSV have gone out of print and its use as a translation is on the decline.
• I was at least correct on one count--study Bibles do indeed outsell text Bibles. Surely this is a change in practice from a generation ago.

I could easily just remove this post, but regardless of the error in some of my conclusions and speculations, the information by itself is still fairly interesting. Plus, I don't mind admitting when I err.
Therefore, I am leaving the post as is. Enjoy.

Tags: Translations

Tags: NIV, Wide-Margin

• XML: Mellel 2.1 uses an XML-based file format, shrinking file size by up to 400 percent. The format is clear and cleanly separates content from formatting, making it easy to write convertors and otherwise manipulate files.
• New Find and Replace: Mellel's new Find and Replace option fully supports Regular Expressions, but with a much friendlier interface.
• Find by formatting and style: Mellel now supports find and replace by formatting and style.
• Full Screen mode: allowing you to move into full screen mode (no menus, palettes, window frames, etc.) which is WYSIWYG and zoomable.
• Find Expressions and Find Actions: You can now save expressions you've created and complete find action, and "play" them later on.
• FindSets: Allowing you to create sets of Find Action you can run all at once, completely formatting or reformatting a document in a matter of seconds.
• Paragraph Style palette: Offering you control over applying, creating, editing, saving, and deleting paragraph style.
• Character Style palette: Offering you control over applying, creating, editing, saving, and deleting character style.
• Equation editing round-trip: Mellel now support round-trip editing of equations created in MathMagic. The equation is kept "alive" and editable in MathMagic.
• Auto-title in-place editing: You can now edit auto-titles in-place.

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Tags: Mellel, Macintosh

Tags: ministry

Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos.

Tags: TNIV, NLT

The article linked to was not supposed to be for publication. It appeared for a few minutes on our site, but it never appeared in print. The writer and her editor decided not to publish the story for lack of comments from the church, but they failed to inform us on the online side it had been killed. The reporter has asked Christianity Today's web site to pull the segment about her story, but was told it could not do it until this weekend.

A more thorough version of the story will be published in Saturday's Daily Journal.

“But whoever causes the downfall of one of these little ones who believe in Me—it would be better for him if a heavy millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea."
(Mark 9:42 HCSB)

“Behold, I am going to deal at that time
         With all your oppressors,
         I will save the lame
         And gather the outcast,
         And I will turn their shame into praise and renown
         In all the earth.”

         (Zephaniah 3:19 NASB)

Tags: prejudice

In Christ’s family there can be no division into Jew and non-Jew, slave and free, male and female. Among us you are all equal. That is, we are all in a common relationship with Jesus Christ.
       (The Message)

Tags: prejudice

Tags: Andrew

The M.G. Rhyming Revue is a studio-produced, eclectic collection of songs based on nursery rhymes aimed more at adults than children. That's not to say that children wouldn't like these songs, but it will take an adult with life experience to fully appreciate them. The music is written, scored and produced by Philip Wade, minister of music at Cypress Baptist Church in Benton, Louisiana. Philip also provides the lead vocal on many of the tracks.

It's no secret that most Mother Goose (the source for the "M. G." in the title in case you missed it) nursery rhymes had their origin long ago in historical, often political contexts. But later they were reduced to quaint little poems removed from their original contexts and quoted over and over by preschool children. Perhaps their origin combined with an adult's familiar but ignored recollection of these rhymes makes them the perfect venue for exploring the complex grown-up world we now live in.

Consider the familiar rhyme about Jack and Jill, but with a twist:

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.
After all was said and done, Jack said, "This won't do."
They went on down to the county court and said,
"I think we'll sue!"

I feel rather undressed without a lectern in a classroom or without a good solid pulpit in a church. (Do not give me a music stand! These contraptions cannot even support the weight of a good-sized Bible.) This affection for the lectern is not merely an idiosyncrasy on my part (I hope). The solid object from which a teacher or preacher speaks serves as the anchor for one’s notes, books, and articles. It provides a center point for engaging the class with the voice and the documents. Without a lectern, one loses this point of focus and gravity. One is reduced to standing directly in front of the class, perhaps holding one’s notes in one’s hand and grabbing a book off to the side once in a while. It is not good.

In the Star Trek fictional universe, the Kobayashi Maru is a starship that serves as the subject of a graded training exercise at Starfleet Academy, in which command division cadets are presented with a no-win scenario as a test of character.
...
James T. Kirk takes the test three times while at Starfleet Academy. Prior to his third attempt, Kirk surreptitiously reprograms the simulator so that it is possible to win. He justifies it by arguing that putting cadets in a no-win situation was cheating, and so he had to cheat in return. He receives a commendation for original thinking.

Tags: TNIV

"All down the ages the world has been refusing Jesus because it prefers its pigs."

Paul Phillip Levertoff

The context: Matthew 8:30-34

Like any design project, this one had a brief with some technical criteria, to help define and solve the design problem.

• Achieve a better character count (to maximize space and ultimately save paper)
• Eliminate artificial condensing of standard fonts (such as ITC Giovanni).
• Have visual similarities to ITC Giovanni, by Robert Slimbach.
• Make the font "stronger"
• Achieve as good as or better character count than ITC Weidemann or Century Old Style.
• Achieve better character count while maintaining readability.

Tim Botts said afterwards: "I was especially jazzed with the way the new One Year Bible turned out -- a 10% longer text in a stronger typeface -- yielding the same page count! To think we competed with Century OS and Weidemann -- and I think -- won."

We chose some key characters to design with similarities to ITC Giovanni - which Tyndale has been using for many Bibles, condensed 10% for space savings. This was also to show design management that the font would have that warm and friendly look that they had come to appreciate with Giovanni, and that they didn't want to lose. Overall Lucerna has its own character and visual appeal, with limited influence by ITC Giovanni.

So the font is a design solution to these technical and aesthetic considerations. Lucerna has indeed yielded printing/paper savings for Tyndale due to its space-saving design and should prove highly legible for the targeted demographic readers.

What struck me the most as I stood looking at the Bibles, reading the stories of the translators, and considering their impact on history – is that nobody was trying to kill me (that I know of) or persecute me (other than the left-wing side of the political spectrum) for contributing to publishing a Bible.

It seemed to me to be a strange culmination of events: I had purchased my first Macintosh (The SE30) in 1990, and released my first typeface intended for Bibles in 1995 (Veritas). Seven years later, I began Lucerna, and the first Bibles typeset in it were released in 2004.

It's difficult to describe the sensation I had while standing in the middle of all this history. The Lucerna Project was significant both personally and professionally, and I am aware that I have been given the opportunity to contribute to the history of the Bible. But why me? I'll always be grateful for the opportunity.

Tags: NLT, ESV

Tags: Wide-Margin

--Romans 12:2, NASB

It's easier to pull the trigger than play the guitar. Easier to destroy than create.

--El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas) in Desperado

We ain’t never gonna change / We ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong / We ain’t never gonna change / So shut your mouth and play along.

--"Never Gonna Change" by The Drive-By Truckers, on The Dirty South

The following is something I've wanted to talk about for a while, but had difficulty approaching. I thought about a multi-part series, I thought about a rant, but nothing seemed to work. And then I found out The Wire was starting its fourth season on HBO, and the third season is out now on DVD. And I had my opening.

Tags: Andrew

Tags: TNIV, Zondervan

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

The Guide also tells you on which planets the best Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters are mixed, how much you can expect to pay for one and what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate afterward.

The Guide even tells you how you can mix one yourself.

Take the juice from one bottle of the Ol' Janx Spirit, it says.

Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V--Oh, that Santraginean seawater, it says. Oh, those Santraginean fish!

Allow three cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the mixture (it must be properly iced or the benzine is lost).

Allow four liters of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it, in memory of all those happy bikers who have died of pleasure in the Marshes of Fallia.

Over the back of a silver spoon, float a measure of Qualactin Hypermint extract, redolent of all the beady odors of the dark Qualactin Zones, subtle, sweet and mystic.

Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it disolve, spreading the fires of the Algolian Suns deep into the heart of the drink.

Sprinkle Zamphuor.

Add an olive.

Drink...but...very carefully...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sells rather better than the Encyclopedia Galactica.

Well, not too bad. It gave me everything I need to know and then some. In preparation for this blog entry, I decided to look up kinkajou in the Wikipedia. To its credit, I got pretty much the same information--at least in regard to the main facts. But I nearly fell out of my chair when I noticed this sentence: "Paris Hilton's Kinkajou, "Baby Luv" has been in the media twice in the past two years; once when he scratched her and the CA Fish and Game Dept issued her a warning for illegally transporting the animal, and again in August 2006 when he bit her arm. Both injuries were minor. Owning a kinkajou in CA is illegal." Is this really important information to put an article about this animal? Will this be relevant in 50 years? In 50 days? [Note: it seems that evidently, there is a Wiki-squabble going on and various forms of the Paris Hilton incident have been added and removed over the last few days. If you decide to look up the kinkajou article and you think I made the whole Paris Hilton insertion up, please look at the history of the article. All I know is that I expect Google hits to my website to triple now that I've used the name "Paris Hilton" five times in one blog entry.] Regardless, this is a prime example of the lack of a final editorial control over the Wikipedia's content. Certainly, someone may remove objectionable content, but there's nothing to keep someone else from putting it back in. Such self-regulation appears very democratic on the surface, but it seems to me that there needs to be a final authority who can simply freeze content.

As an experiment of how easy it is to manipulate an article, I added a reference to myself in one. Now, I didn't add fraudulent information, but I did add irrelevant information. Under the famous residents section of the Wikipedia article on Shreveport, Louisiana, I listed myself as having been born there (which I was). I'm going to paste it here below because I don't think it's ethical for me to leave it there more than about 24 hours just to prove my point.

My name is in red because I created a stub for my name so that it could be edited, and thus a new article about yours truly could be created. Don't worry, as I said, I'm going to remove the whole thing. This is just to prove why I believe a peer-edited resource like Britannica is a much more reliable source of information than the Wikipedia.

David, I will concede to you a major point. You wrote in your last post about this subject:

We can talk all we want about how wonderful the editors and writers are for EB but the simple fact is this:

Virtually no one has access to the Encyclopedia Britannica in the 21st century!

So if you consider that to be a problem (I do!), then our primary concern should be creating access to the EB. If the publishers don’t fix that problem, their excellent information is going to become rapidly irrelevant.

Tags: Wikipedia, Britannica

“Don’t gamble on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,
hocking your house against a lucky chance.”

(Prov 22:26, The Message)

Tags: Proverbs, Message

Tags: 10 Commandments

We do plan to make a limited number of changes, similar to what most other translations have done a few years after they were first released for publication, though our sense is that the number of changes that we anticipate will be quite a bit less than typically is the case. The vast majority of these involve only minor changes in grammar, punctuation, and footnotes. We are still in process regarding the finalization and implementation of these changes, which we will probably begin to implement sometime next year (2007).

Tags: ESV, Crossway

Tags: Translations

English Standard Version (ESV)

Deluxe Reference Edition

Journaling Bible

Holman Christian Standard Bible

Holman CSB Minister's Bible

New American Standard Bible

NASB Side-Column Reference Wide Margin (Foundation Publications)

Zondervan NASB Wide Margin Bible

The New Inductive Study Bible

In Touch Ministries Wide Margin Edition

New International Version

Cambridge NIV Wide Margin

NIV New Inductive Study Bible

Zondervan NIV Wide Margin Bible

New King James Version

Holy Bible Wide Margin Center-Column Reference Edition

New Living Translation

NLT Notemaker's Bible

New Revised Standard Version

Cambridge NRSV Wide Margin Bible

Today's New International Version

TNIV Thinline, Square (TNIV Thinline Bible2)

Questions? Thoughts? Comments? Rebuttals?

What about original language texts?

What about the KJV or the Message?

What about the CEV? GNT? NCV? GWT? NAB? NJB? RSV? REB? Or my other favorite translations?

Tags: Wide-Margin, Translations

There has been increasing speculation about when a revised ESV might appear. The answer looks like being next month. There is a clue - even hard evidence - on the ESB blog site. A few entries ago (on August 2) they posted details of the forthcoming reverse interlinear. This includes a reproduction of the start of Acts 1. Close observation reveals that verse 3 has been revised. The existing ESV (including even the new journalling edition) has, 'To them he presented himself alive...' The interlinear has the rather more natural, 'He presented himself alive to them.' Does this suggest that most of the revisions will be to awkward word order? And if one revision is found in just four verses, how many changes might there be in total?

Am I not suprised that Crossway have included their revisions in the interlinear. To have kept the unrevised text would have been foolish: typesetting an interlinear is enormously expensive and it is not something you are going to want to drop for a second edition in a hurry.

Tags: ESV

The bigger picture here is globalization and democratization of knowledge. Wiki knowledge fits within the framework of a new way of organizing knowledge in the modern world. The era of printed collections of information gathered by an elite group of experts is slowly coming to an end.

I see googlization as a positive trend but it brings with it a big change in how we access information. I remember writing a paper on the subject of royalty in the history plays of Shakespeare. In order to find the quotes I needed I had to actually... gasp... read the plays! Over and over again. Can you imagine! What would you do today if you were writing such a paper? You'd google the topic of course! You'd start googling combinations of keywords until you were pointed to an online information source that perhaps allowed you to search Shakespeare's plays. In the process you'd probably come across other writers who had tackled the subject and use them in your bibliography.

So, Rick, I respect your concerns. We're all concerned about Wikipedia being abused for political and ideological reasons. But frankly, Encyclopedia Britannica has its own political and ideological aims as well. The difference is that with Wikipedia you have a collective mind composed of hundreds of editors "mediating truth" rather than some ivory tower cabal working at EB. Rather than shooting down Wikipedia, I think the real discussion we need to have is how can trusted sources of information like Encyclopedia Britannica embrace Wiki forms of information gathering and disseminating in order to stay dynamic.

Wikipedia is a new kind of encyclopedia for a new kind of mind. The global citizen is going to need global information and it is unlikely that this knowledge is going to carry the name of an 18th century colonializer.

No, I don't want Britannica updated by Wikipedia's methods.

Here's the deal...I'm not completely against the Wikipedia. I use it regularly and have quite a few links to it on my blog. I created a link to it in the blog I wrote today.

But I have trouble being confident in the Wikipedia for any kind of serious investigation of a subject. I might go there, but I don't know who wrote the information and I don't know how accurate the information is. At least with Britannica, I can at least know it was written by an expert in the area. Granted, "experts" can have bias, too, but at least the information in Britannica is not a moving target.

As for research as in regard to my students, the real problem is that the average student--high school, college, and even higher--does not adequately know how to discern good sources from bad sources.

I've watched as students run searches in Google and immediately run to the top selections regardless of whether they are actual good sources or not.

I'm not afraid of the democratization of knowledge, but more of the democratization of truth. That's what Colbert was driving at. If enough people think it's true, it becomes fact. And unfortunately, too many people don't know the difference.

1. Determining truth. You see the concept of an "expert" being a safe-guard against falsehood, while I see the concept of "democratic editing" being that safe-guard. Maybe another way of looking at this is that it is an authority question.

2. Old vs. new media. Wikipedia and EB represent two very different forms of publishing. It seems to me that the rate of information growth and change in this century makes the thought of waiting 20 years to get an update unthinkable. At the same time, hyper-editing at Wikipedia seems fraught with danger.

Image Source: Wikipedia

Tags: Wikipedia, Britannica

“Do not be quickly provoked in your spirit,
for anger resides in the lap of fools.”

(Eccl 7:9, TNIV)

Tags: Ecclesiastes, TNIV

Tags: TNIV, Bible study

Tags: NJB, Top Ten

The satirical current events show The Colbert Report, which airs Monday through Thursday nights on Comedy Central, has a history of messing with the mainstream media to comedic ends. But last night, host Stephen Colbert went after Wikipedia. The results, as always, were hilarious.

Check out the video for the Wikiality segment on YouTube. Colbert encourages his viewers to change the Wikipedia entry for elephant so that it says the number of African elephants has tripled in the last six months. The result? Various Wikipedia articles referring to elephants, African elephants, African Bush elephants, African Forest elephants and the like were immediately moved to semi-protected status by the site's administrators. Pages with the semi-protected designation can only be edited by registered and trusted users. Colbert's Wikipedia user account was also blocked from making edits.

"I love the Wikipedia. Any site that has a longer entry on 'truthiness' [a term coined by Colbert] than on Lutherans has its priorities straight."

Regarding the mechanics of the Wikipedia: "Any user can change any entry and if enough users agree with them, it becomes true."

"Who is Britannica to tell me that George Washington had slaves? If I want to say he didn't, that's my right. And now thanks to Wikipedia [types on his laptop keyboard], it's also a fact.

"Together we can create a reality that we can all agree on: the reality we just agreed on."

Tags: Britannica, Wikipedia

[Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had been grievously oppressing the people of Gad and Reuben who lived east of the Jordan River. He gouged out the right eye of each of the Israelites living there, and he didn’t allow anyone to come and rescue them. In fact, of all the Israelites east of the Jordan, there wasn’t a single one whose right eye Nahash had not gouged out. But there were 7,000 men who had escaped from the Ammonites, and they had settled in Jabesh-gilead.]

Tags: NLT, DSS, Accordance

Tags: HCSB, 1 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Chronicles, NASB

Tags: Andrew

Tags: Wide-Margin, Greek NT