The Exegetitor opens up
Mike Sangrey, the Exegetitor, blogs on the value of open sourcing in matters pertaining to the Bible, Biblical studies, and Bible translation. For those of you interested in how networking with others about the Bible can enhance knowledge for everyone involved, Mike's post is a must read. Why not just make it easy on yourself and add the Exegitor to your RSS feeds reader?! You'll be wanting to read Mike's posts regularly anyway, so you might as well be notified by an RSS feed when he's posted another one.
Categories: open source, biblical studies
Categories: open source, biblical studies
posted by Wayne Leman at 7:47 PM
2 Comments:
Thanks Wayne.
I've just made a comment on Exegetitor to my posting that I think has substantive relevance to Better Bibles Blog. So, here it is, too.
I agree (with Peter Kirk) that the verse-focal...ummmmm...focus of "The New Testament in Plain English" isn't going to work. As you've heard me say before, "except for the poetical sections of the Bible, and there are many, the verse structure is a form impressed on the text from outside the text." And since form triggers meaning (see Relevance Theory), the verse structure triggers meaning the original authors did not intend. So, I agree; the "walk down the verse-path to translation" will not result in an accurate translation. At least not in my opinion.
I appreciate your advice about many people each drafting a book at a time and agree with it. However, we ain't never done this before. So, I think what would need to happen first is to learn to walk with a few interested people working on one book. The main difference between the verse-oriented approach and my approach, I think, is mine is more top down with feedback loops flowing from the lower levels up to the higher levels. These feedback loops would systemically control quality. For example, a high level structure of the book could be discussed first with maybe several alternative proposed and on the docket. Each structure element would have a precis. These structure elements and precis would be arrived at through the translations we currently have. In other words, there is an assumption of cohesion and coherence that will ultimately direct the bottom up translation of the text.
Mike, sounds like a good approach. given the top-down methodology suggests that this must begin with a fairly small book (Ephesians and 1 John come to mind), in which the overview can be kept in mind rather easily. Once the pattern and progress can be sorted out, then the method could be applied to more substantial books. This would allow time for kinks in the system to be examined before valuable time is expended (and perhaps lost) doing it one particular way.
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