My Greek NT reference

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, references, greek new testament, translations, commentaries

A number of years ago I contacted a Bible scholar to ask if there is a reference book that explains the variations between the numerous Greek texts of the New Testament. I was particularly interested to find out if any of the variations—and there are thousands of them among the 5,000 or so Greek manuscripts—had any bearing on the primary elements of the Gospel: The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, His justification and sanctification of the children of God, and His sonship in the Triune God, in particular. The scholar assured me that Bible truth is not threatened by manuscript variations, and suggested a wonderful resource that I was able to purchase through a used bookstore, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament by Bruce M. Metzger. Published in 1971, it is still in print, but buying a used copy saved me about half the price of a new one.

I used the book on and off for several years, and just before the end of 2021 I decided to use it along with my reading of the Bible, and gradually work through the entire volume of 775 pages. Each year I read through the Bible, using a different plan each time. Sometimes I use different translations (most recently the English Standard Version, ESV, in 2018 and the World English Bible, WEB, in 2020). Most frequently I read the Recovery Version, RcV. I also vary the schedule and criteria for daily selections. For example for a couple of years I would read a certain number of verses daily (plus or minus 15-20% depending on chapter divisions), and in 2022 I used a copy without footnotes and minimal apparatus, and read a set number of pages daily (with some variation), 3 OT pages and 1 NT page daily. I'm doing a similar scheme this year, but reading the New Testament first, followed by the Old Testament. Throughout 2022, after each day's reading, I read the notes in Textual Commentary relevant to the NT portion for the day. Thus over the year I completed the whole book.

This is what a bipage of the book looks like:

At this size it is a bit hard to read. You may click on the image to see it full size (150 dpi).

The longest item on these pages refers to Acts 3:14, "But you denied the holy and righteous One and asked that a man who was a murderer be granted to you". This is from the opening words of Peter's speaking on the day of Pentecost. The word being discussed, which is transliterated 'ern'esasthe, means "denied". It seems that some copyists of early times disliked repeating this word, which had appeared in the prior sentence (3:13), and so substituted ebarunate, which means "oppressed", a rather inappropriate word. The translation committee studied not just the Greek but Hebrew and Syriac versions to winkle out the best explanation for the variation. What looks like an ink smear at the bottom of page 310 and the top of 311 is Syriac text, which is vaguely related to Arabic. Note that later on in the article several Hebrew words are also shown. This book is not for the faint of heart; we may not be able to read the snippets of Hebrew and other languages, and perhaps not even Greek, with any felicity, but we should at least be able to see them in the text without panicking, and trust that the Committee knew what they were doing!

Codex Bezae is a famous manuscript, primarily of the Gospels and Acts, an edited 5th Century text compiled from multiple earlier manuscripts. It has Greek on one page and Latin on the facing page, which makes it valuable to understand what the copyist and translators of the era may have been thinking. Abbreviations such as D and H and Aleph-star (see the 3rd line of the article) refer to manuscripts that would be known to a scholar. The text also frequently refers to groups of manuscripts of different copyist traditions, such as majuscules and minuscules (there are many of each) that were copied using different letter styles. The volume contains about 2,000 such articles of various lengths, covering all the important variations in manuscript texts.

Here is another example I found interesting:

This refers to Revelation 5:10, "And have made them a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign on the earth." The word in question, basileusousin, means "they will reign". Greek word endings are numerous and cause difficulty to copyists. The numeric codes refer to Bible manuscripts, and Aleph is a different manuscript from Aleph-star. One more example brings out a couple of important points:

A few manuscripts of Romans 8:1 include one of the most famous glosses in the New Testament. A gloss is a bit of text that a copyist introduced into the body text from a marginal note found in an earlier manuscript. Romans 8:4 reads, "That the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the spirit." Some very early manuscripts have the second phrase of this verse copied as a marginal note next to 8:1. In the Textus Receptus, which is the basis of the King James Version of the New Testament, these words were put into the body text. This is a serious error, because it makes the release of condemnation based on the sacrifice of Christ into a result of our performance. The words are appropriate in 8:4, not in 8:1, which properly reads, "There is now then no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus." Period. No qualification based on our "walk".

The article also mentions two text types, Alexandrian and Western. About half of all early manuscripts are either Alexandrian or Western. The other half are either Caesarean or Byzantine. These four text-types were current in various regions. The introduction to the book discusses them in an introductory way. Other reference books discuss them more fully. Most later manuscripts are of the Byzantine type, and until about a generation ago, a "near-majority text" such as the Textus Receptus was based primarily on Byzantine manuscripts. The problem is, Byzantine Greek arose as the Greek language changed in the eastern Roman empire in the 4th Century. Byzantine manuscripts containing more than a few scraps of the New Testament date from the 8th Century and later. Significant differences between Byzantine and other text-types indicate that Bible manuscripts were translated into Byzantine Greek, probably before the 5th Century. For modern English speakers, reading Middle English of 600 years ago is a chore. There is a similar difference between Byzantine Greek and First Century Greek (often called Koiné)

My reference library includes four Greek texts of the New Testament, including one that is a full Majority Text, treating words as if they were voters in an election. It is almost entirely Byzantine in character. The United Bible Societies Greek New Testament, Third Edition was published in 1975, based on the scholarship of the Committee mentioned frequently in this volume, which was published in 1971 as a companion volume. Dr. Metzger is the most prominent of the scholars of the Committee.

As a reference, it is unsurpassed. Reading the New Testament with the companionship of this volume impressed me with the wisdom of God in the inspiration and preservation of His book to us.

The reference shelf gets longer

kw: books, dictionaries, references

I mentioned about a week ago that I would be bringing home a few more dictionaries and other reference books as I clean out my office. My last day actually at the office has come and gone, I got home early, and I've been rearranging the shelves in my home office ever since.

As you can see, the big Webster's New 20^th Century (unabridged) sits below where the shelf space is high enough. All the others are above. I count 9 English dictionaries among a number of other reference works. The white tag on the newest CRC Handbook indicates it was a library discard when they got a newer edition – fortunately this library doesn't tear the covers off its discards!

These aren't the only shelves I've been working on; I have two 6-shelf built-ins and a number of other shelving units in this room. About a third of the total space still needs attention. I took a couple of boxes of lesser-used books to my son's old bedroom. He can sort through them and keep or discard as he likes. Is it really possible to de-clutter a whole house during one's natural lifetime?

A hierarchy of energy

kw: references, energy, combustion, fission, fusion, kerr black holes, annihilation

From time to time I find or gather a synthesis of related ideas, and this is as good a place to store them as any. Reading recently about the energy released from matter falling into a spinning black hole, often called a Kerr black hole after the New Zealander who first worked out the math, I sought to place it in the context of more familiar sources of energy. Not that a Kerr black hole is going to be easy to harness as a "source" of energy, but perhaps a sufficiently advanced civilization could do so.

Sundry classifications have been made of speculative levels of civilization, and they frequently hinge on the level of energy use. Here I present one based on energy source. The characteristic figure for an energy source is the fraction of the mass-energy that is made available at each level.

Level 0 would have to be pre-Human, based on what follows. The only source of energy is food energy, a type of slow combustion; overt, external combustion is not used.

The primary energy source of Level 1 civilizations is combustion. The genus Homo began using combustion (very) roughly a million years ago, and that is still the primary source of energy used by the human race, though our fuel supply has changed from time to time. One of our most efficient combustion systems is hydrogen-oxygen, so far primarily used for rocket propulsion. Burning a gram of hydrogen releases about 142 kJ of energy, while also consuming 8 grams of oxygen. By Einstein's energy equation, e=mc², we find that the combustion products must be lighter than the uncombusted gases by 15.8 trillionths of a gram per gram of hydrogen burnt, or 1.75 trillionths of a gram per gram of combined gases. Note that hydrocarbon combustion is somewhat less energy intensive on a gram per gram basis, when oxygen consumption is included.

Some nations are on the boundary of Level 2, in that a large fraction of their total energy is derived by nuclear fission. In the fission of U-235, a large variety of reactions may occur, but on average we find that the fission products and neutrons emitted weigh about 0.2 AMU less than the original uranium nucleus. Thus the mass conversion is about 0.00085 grams per gram of uranium fuel. This is about 490 million times as much energy per gram as hydrogen combustion.

Nuclear fusion has been a holy grail for many. Success in developing economical fusion power would yield a Level 3 civilization. Note, however, that the 4H-to-He system is only about 8 times as powerful as uranium fission, or 0.0071 grams per gram of H consumed. The methods being studied are mostly based on deuterium fusion, which has very little advantage over uranium fission, on a grams released per gram converted basis. If we could, however, capture large fractions of the Sun's energy output (such as by a Dyson sphere), we could sidestep our way to energy use characteristic of this Level, as the Sun uses the 4-hydrogen reaction.

Now we come to Kerr black holes. The theoretical maximum energy that could be extracted is 28% of the rest mass of the infalling matter. Thus, if a Level 4 civilization could harness a rapidly spinning black hole (in the range of 10,000-100,000 rotations per second if it is stellar-sized), 0.28 grams of effective mass-energy per gram consumed is 39 times the energy available from hydrogen fusion.

Is a higher proportion of energy release attainable? Could a Level 5 civilization arise that makes effective use of total annihilation? In the Star Trek civilization, "antimatter generators" produce antimatter fuel for use in starships (at least), moderated by "dilithium" and "rubindium" and other special materials. The matter-antimatter reaction does result in annihilation, but if you are generating the antimatter somewhere, rather than having found an antimatter mine, it may be assumed that you are using energy characteristic of a lower Level to do so.

For those of us on the threshold of Level 2, we find there is no political will, and great public opposition, to expanding energy sources that release large amounts of radioactivity or produce radioactive waste. Thus I favor sidestepping our way to Level 3 by effective use of solar energy. So far, we barely have a bit of a toe in the water on this. The side of earth facing the Sun at any one time intercepts about 64 quadrillion watts of solar energy, at ground level. Total human energy use is presently less than 20 trillion watts, or about 1/3200 of what is available. Of course, paving land and sea with solar cells is a formula for ecological suicide, but covering 0.1% of the total (because much is in darkness at any one time) would be enough to meet all our needs and then some.

How full of galaxies is the sky?

kw: references, galaxies, astronomy

This is just a quick reference note, to bring together a few useful quantities. I began to wonder just how many galaxies there might be in each square arc-minute or arc-second of the sky. I was surprised at the result.

First, the entire sky contains 4 x pi x (180/pi)² = 41,252.96 square degrees. This comes to 148.51 million square arc-minutes or 534.62 billion square arc-seconds.  The best resolution under "good seeing" with a ground-based telescope, and not enhanced with wavefront correction technology, is about one arc second. Thus, just recording and managing those half a trillion "sky pixels" is a big job already. The Hubble Space Telescope has a resolution in blue light of 0.05 arc-sec, so its potential number of "sky pixels" is 400 times greater.

How well populated is the sky? The Atlas of the Universe contains these figures:

• Number of large galaxies in the visible universe: 350 billion.
• Number of dwarf galaxies (ditto): 7 trillion.

Thus, an average set of three one-square-second bits of sky must contain two large galaxies. Each square second must contain about 13 dwarf galaxies. It takes a long time to gather enough light to see them all, clear out to just over 13 billion light years, but there is a lot going on in every square arc-second!

How big will they appear? A typical dwarf galaxy of 1,000-light-year size, 13.4 billion light years away (right after the universe cleared up enough to see that far), has an angular diameter of 0.015 arc second. So even Hubble won't be able to do more than register its existence in a particular pixel. Back up to 13 billion light years, when larger galaxies were forming up, and a 100,000 light-year-sized galaxy would subtend 1.5 arc seconds. Hubble can see a little detail in such an object. We can expect, as wavefront correction improves for large, and multiple-instrument, ground-based telescopes, that clearer images of such faraway objects will be obtained.

It is going to take a while, however, for a multi-exabyte database of the sky to be gathered and curated. Astronomers have a never-ending subject to explore!

A fun reference for mnemophiles

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, words, mnemonics, references

While I have been known to read the dictionary or an encyclopedia for enjoyment, I did not read all of Judy Parkinson's book yet. It is a reference book, titled i before e (except after c): old-school ways to remember stuff, and yes, the title is entirely uncapitalized.

Every language has mnemonics used to recall sundry facts. My wife knows a number of haiku and other short Japanese poems she learned, including one for remembering the years of the Asian Zodiac (2011 is the year of the rabbit), and there are two ways they remember their 72-character phonetic alphabet. One is rhythmic and starts "aa ii uu ee oo ka ki ku ke ko". The other, titled "Iro Wa", and actually spelled i ro ha, is a Buddhist poem about the transitoriness of life, which uses each character exactly once. Of course, they have about 7,500 other characters derived from Chinese that are not phonetic, which explains why 10-12 years of Japanese education are required before one can read a newspaper with ease.

In English, we have, for month duration, "30 days hath September...", the "I before E" rule for non-Germanic words (which means there are hundreds of exceptions, such as "weird" and "seismic"), and for astronomy buffs, "O Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me" to remember star classes in order: OBAFGKM. The rcent addition of classes R, N and S has lengthened the phrase with "...right now, sweetheart!"

The book's sixteen chapters cover all kinds of things, so rather than be comprehensive here, I'll keep it around and offer tidbits from time to time. Today's is this: Chapter 2 is on spelling words that are most commonly misspelled (or misspelt if you are really old-school). Most of the chapter consists of 75 rules that are almost as hard to remember as the spelling of the words. For example: "A Rat In The House May Eat The Ice Cream" is for ARITHMETIC. Slightly easier is, for distinguishing "capital" from "capitol", "PAris is the capitAl of FrAnce; there is a CapitOl building in WashingtOn." The silliness of memorizing the phrase fixes the two in your mind. My own bottom line is that we just need to remember the hard ones, look them up if needed, and when typing on the computer, trust your spell checker, at least a little: some might be homonyms, but that is a tidbit for another day.

Different doesn't mean bad

kw: book reviews, asperger's syndrome, asperger syndrome, autism, references

Tony Attwood is a clinical psychologist, who works with many persons who have Asperger's syndrome. His book The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome is both a text and a reference, written for a more general audience than his earlier book Asperger's Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals.

I found the book of interest because I am closely associated with four such persons, one at work, two students, and a fellow church member. I also have had some contact with autistic persons, and two characteristics are easy to spot: someone with Asperger's syndrome can maintain eye contact, at least for a short while, but an autistic person will very rarely glance at your face; and it is usually possible to hold a conversation with the one, but almost never with the other. Also, when stressed sufficiently, almost anyone will rock back and forth or from side to side; this is much more frequent for someone with Asperger's, and is often constant for an autistic person. It is often called "autistic rocking", and is the symptom that most directly leads one to conclude that autism may be largely a phenomenon of over-sensitivity to stressors. I recall reading that many autistic people recover more control of themselves after they have been trained to block out or ignore noise, or given dark glasses that they then wear almost constantly.

There was a time that I was working as an operating systems analyst. The top practitioners of OS programming in assembly codes are truly wizards of the craft. Typically, they are also either autistic or have Asperger's, or at least social anxiety disorder (which I have to some extent). We used to joke that certain programmers were "kept in the forest and fed raw meat." Actually, some of them are maintained in luxurious isolation of their choice, and work by telecommuting. It takes a special sort of manager to supervise their work. On occasion, when they desire human contact, I've met one or another. They are clearly weird, yet relish human contact in measured doses. I've learned to modulate things by working with my door closed as needed.

Note that I haven't used the word "disorder" with Asperger's syndrome (AS hereafter). While some put it on the "autistic disorder spectrum", I think it more useful to maintain, as did Hans Asperger, and also Tony Attwood, that AS is a phenomenon in which several traits seen in everyone are present in more extreme form. In that regard, AS is no "worse" than being seven feet tall (particularly if you have B-ball skills!) or four feet six (like "Mini-Me", Verne Troyer). There are about as many AS individuals as there are 7-footers and 4.5-footers combined...

My contact with AS folks in the working world shows that they can be very valuable employees, particularly because they are exceptionally able (sometimes boringly so) able to maintain focus.

Dr. Attwood's book begins with a general "What is it" chapter, followed by one that details the diagnostic criteria. The following twelve chapters each focus on a clinical (e.g. cognitive ability) or environmental (e.g. teasing) dimension of the live of someone with AS, particularly as a child. It ends with a FAQ chapter, and a full apparatus of references and resources.

The question can be asked, "Is it OK for someone with AS to know it?" I think it is. The ones I've talked to, who know they display AS, can talk about it frankly, and then go on about any subject of mutual interest...as I have many interests, it isn't hard for me to enjoy talking about their interest.

This isn't a book you just read, it is a reference book in itself. I read parts that interested me, and found them quite valuable.