Blue Cord

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the publication of the NIV, Zondervan is doing what it calls the Bible Across America. It is an RV tour that is driving around the country and making stops in a number of cities. At the stops, people are given a Bible verse and asked to write it on two index cards. The idea is that by the end of the trip, the tour will have collected all 31,173 verses of the Bible in hand-written format. They are asking people to write the verses twice so that they will have one copy to auction to raise money for the International Bible Society and another copy to donate to the Smithsonian Museum. The hand-written version is to be called “America’s NIV.”

I found out about it earlier this week when my step-father got to write a verse during one of the stops in Johnson City, TN. The tour will be near me in Manchester, NH, on October 20, and then in Boston, MA, on October 22. Both of those are days I teach at the college, so I am not sure I will be able to make it to a signing.

I made a discovery a few days ago that I thought I would share, in case any of my readers use the Logos Bible program. Perhaps most users already know about this, but I didn’t, even though I have used Logos for more than a decade.

It turns out that Logos allows users to employ mouse gestures to navigate through documents. For instance, if you hold the right mouse button and make a horizontal movement to the left, you return to the last passage you were reading. Making an upward gesture with the mouse will scroll the page up, while a downward gesture will scroll down. The program does not recognize many gestures, but it knows enough to make navigating much easier. If you want to see the complete list of movements it knows, do a search for “gestures” in the Logos help system.

I discovered this feature quite by accident. I have a plugin on Firefox that allows me to navigate the Internet with gestures. I inadvertently made one of the gestures in Logos without thinking and was surprised to find out that it worked there too.

I just heard about a new movie coming out entitled The Lost Treasure of Ugarit.¹ The movie website and trailer make it look like a theatrical release, but the Internet Movie Database has it listed as a TV miniseries.

One look at the trailer would suggest that this is an Indiana Jones rip-off. But if you ignore the fact that Jack Hunter dresses exactly like Indiana Jones, overlook the parallel plots of an archaeologist going after an ancient artifact of enormous power that his rival who works for an enemy government would also like to find, pay no attention to the scimitar wielding Arabs that chase him through a bazaar, and set aside the attractive and headstrong female counterpart who starts off disliking him but ultimately comes to love him, you will see that the movies are totally different.

From a scholarly standpoint, the problems with this film appear to be legion. On the website, it talks about Ugarit, “a town in Syria that existed during the Pharoah’s [sic] reign . . . before they were wiped out by the Pharoahs.” Of course, the city of Ugarit was wiped out by the Sea Peoples, not by the Egyptians. Their web page goes on the say that Jack Hunter is one of the few archaeologists in the world who can interpret Ugaritic. At first I thought this was a mistake, since obviously many of us can read Ugaritic, but I later realized that this might be a slur aimed at archaeologists (i.e., lots of philologists can read Ugaritic, but only a few archaeologists can).

Of course, none of this will necessarily prevent the movie from being a good one. You don’t have to get history right to tell a good story. The trailer looks at least somewhat promising, so I will probably make an effort to see this when it comes out.

1. A couple of online sources are calling it Jack Hunter and the Lost Treasure of Ugarit. It is unclear which is the actual title. [back]

Today was my first day of teaching at Merrimack College. I think it went well (i.e., no one got injured in the class). The classroom in which I teach was rather warm, but at least it is not receiving direct sunlight during the hours I teach in there. It should be quite nice by the end of September. It is not wired for technology, but I am told that can be brought in on an ad hoc basis. It does have a piano, however, as it is on the same floor as the fine arts department. I have always thought that Leviticus would work better as a musical, so perhaps this will be the year to try it out.

I am teaching two section of “Introduction to Religious and Theological Studies,” which all students are required to take. All of the intro classes I have taught up to this point have been either introductions to the whole Bible or introductions to the OT or NT. I have never done a general religious studies or theological class, and this intro combines both into one semester.

I am using three books for the course. For the religious studies section, I am having them read The Sacred Quest: An Introduction to the Study of Religion by Lawrence Cunningham and John Kelsay. It was recommended by some other professors in the department, and I am enjoying the reading I have done in it so far. For the theological segment of the course I am using Theological Foundations: Concepts and Methods for Understanding Christian Faith by J.J. Meuller et al. It is a team-written book that explores doing theology within a Roman Catholic framework. Each chapter has a segment on doing theological research using library resources, which will be helpful to first year college students. For the final week, the students will read Henry Chadwick’s Augustine: A Very Short Introduction. This college is run by the Augustinian order, so it is appropriate to have the students learn a bit about St. Augustine.

Because of my particular interests, the biblical studies section of my class will cover a few more class meetings than is usual, but I don’t think St. Augustine would mind. Tolle lege!

The Grand Rapids Press and and Channel 8 News in Grand Rapids, Michigan, are reporting that a man is suing two publishers, Zondervan and Thomas Nelson, over their publication of Bibles that contain the word “homosexual” in 1 Corinthians 6:9. The Thomas Nelson suit is over the NKJV translation, while the Zondervan suit appears to be connected to the NIV.¹

The plaintiff, Bradley Fowler, says his parents’ pastor used a translation that condemned homosexuality, which caused his parents to oppose homosexuality, which caused them to cause him to endure “emotional duress and mental instability.” He claims that it was “the intent of the publisher was to design a religious, sacred document to reflect an individual opinion or a group’s conclusion to cause ‘me or anyone who is a homosexual to endure verbal abuse, discrimination, episodes of hate, and physical violence . . . including murder’.”²

Setting aside the fact that neither Thomas Nelson nor Zondervan did the translation work and therefore may not be the right defendants, Fowler is going to have a very difficult time proving a causal linkage between the emtional duress he has suffered (which I am sure is quite real) and the particular translation his parents’ pastor used. Given that this is a church that used either the NIV or NKJV, it is probably a conservative church that was been opposed to homosexuality long before either of those two translations came out. Even when they read translations that did not use the word homosexuality, they were led by the Bible (and other factors) to conclude that homosexuality was wrong. The new translations may have given them some extra ammo, but it certainly did not create their opinions. And even if it did cause his parents to oppose homosexuality, it is still up to them to decide how to repond to their son. It is possible to disagree with someone who is gay without causing them emotional distress.³

The case also raises a lot of questions over academic freedom, translator responsibility, and freedom of the press (which includes any publishing activity, not just newspapers). For example, while I disagree with using the word “homosexuals” to translate 1 Corinthians 6:9 because it is inaccurate and somewhat anachronistic, it is a defensible translation. One can hardly claim that the translators (or publisher) were being irresponsible by translating it this way.

I suspect Fowler has one of two motives for bringing his suit. Either he is just trying to get money, in which case he is probably going to be disappointed, or he is attempting to get the publishers to change the translation. If it is the latter, I think arguments from solid scholarship are going to much more effective than a frivolous lawsuit.

1. The news sources do not discuss the translations, but as far as I can tell the NIV is the only translation they carry that uses the word “homosexual” in 1 Corinthians 6:9. The TNIV may also use the word, but I don’t have a copy to check. [back]
2. Only the part in single quotations is a direct quote from Fowler. The first part of the quote is the wording of the news report. [back]
3. I know our culture says that anyone who disagrees with you is automatically judging you, but that isn’t the case. [back]