Author Archives: thepatrologist

State of the Projects, September 2015

September 1, 2015 By in Uncategorized

I see that I haven’t written one of these for awhile. Not too much to report just at present.

PhD

Is going along well, though it could be going moreso. July was a productive month, and the start of August was not bad either, though things became more focused on writing the paper for Oxford Patristics. That was a helpful experience (writing the paper), as it also crystallised a few things not just about content but about approach and methodology that will be useful going on.

Patristic Readers

Sorry, nothing to report here. My ability to allot time here has been undercut by other concerns. This very day though I will finish up a small piece of administration that hopefully will move the print volume forward in its timeline.

Looking ahead

I’m off to Mongolia for another 2 weeks, which at this stage is quite a chunk of time. I’ve laid out my best plans to resume activities quickly on my return, including a timeline for completing draft chapters, as well as a small amount of dedicated time for Patristic Readers.

 

Academia as an Honour/Shame society

August 20, 2015 By in Academics 6 Comments

It’s blindingly obvious that Academia runs as a microcosmic honour/shame society because the one thing that ranks just below actual scholarship in scholars’ concern is prestige or honour as accorded them by their peers.

This is what drives almost all academic endeavours (beyond the actual desire to study): conference papers, journal and monograph publishing, etc..

Every act of publishing is an attempt to gain the symbolic capital of prestige among academic peers, via an act of heroism, which is the public display of scholarly prowess.

In conference format, this is open to ‘counter-claims’, where others offer criticism, questions, push-back which can provide the initiator with further opportunities to demonstrate prowess and thus increase their prestige. Alternatively, failure to respond well to interaction will render their attempt to gain honour into a shameful dismantling of their scholarly prowess, and so a loss of honour, with some corresponding gain in prestige to the interlocutor.

In journal format, the initiator likewise places forth a piece of scholarship in order to gain social prestige from their peers. The more prestigious the journal, the more honour accumulates to the scholar.

The monograph likewise, though on a greater scale. The monograph, however, invites more extended interaction in the form of reviews, etc., which provide the opportunity for counter-claims and rebuttals. However the sheer prestige-gain of a monograph usually outweighs the risk of publishing (prestige wise, not economically/monetarily).

Understanding academia in this respect also helps make sense of why academics trade off their intellectual labours to publishing houses that sell their works in closed access formats for ridiculous sums: academics trade their capital for social prestige from their peers, with a socially calculated disdain for market economics. Publishers trade on that disdain to fund their business model.

One should also remember that prestige and quality are not synonymous. Prestige operates as a short-hand calculator for quality: i.e. scarcity economics means that in theory the best material ends up in the best journals, presses, etc., but in reality the system is rigged to social-networks that promote internally correlated scholars and scholarship, so that quality and prestige may actually be divorced from each other. A top-quality scholar who is not socially connected lacks the pre-requisite social capital to gain the prestige that their work ‘deserves’.

More scattered reflections from Oxford

August 12, 2015 By in Academics, Updates

I hope you don’t mind these rambling conference dispatches:

Day 3 at Oxford Patristics. I enjoyed some interesting papers on Gregory of Nyssa. It’s always tricky at a conference to go to papers that are not directly tied to your interests, but are tied enough that you will (hopefully) learn something new and broaden your understanding. Hearing a paper that quite directly touches on your interests, that’s a rare find!

I went to one paper about the debates among Evangelicals over Eternal Functional Subordinationism, which was (and still is a bit) a hot topic for some sectors of Evangelicals. This paper was looking at how accurately both sides have read Augustine. I had hoped for more from it, I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know.

I spent some more time with the Digital Humanities session, and then sat around with a few powerhouses of DH afterwards. It was fascinating and enlightening to listen to them bounce ideas of each other in this intersection of geekdom and humanities/classics/patristics.

One of the great things about conferences is those moments when you realise that (most?) scholars are just like you: whenever one thinks about one’s own work there are many caveats, insecurities, and sense that it’s only barely ‘just there’; whenever you think about someone else’s, you assume there is this huge wealth and depth of knowledge of everything that backs it up. No, usually they’re just barely there like you. It’s comforting. I mean, sometimes there is a vast knowledge of everything, and that’s both scary and good. And sometimes there’s people who act like they have a vast repository of all knowledge, and you should just not worry about those people and move on with your life.

Part of me feels like I could write a series of posts deconstructing imperial and academic culture and empire of Americans, but this is probably not the time or the place.

Here are things that make conference life better (not just this one):

Presenters:

  1. Have a clear structure to your paper
  2. Have a clear handout for your paper
  3. Talk loudly, at a measured pace, with confidence
  4. If English is not your native language, speaking softly will not improve this problem.
  5. Respect your audience. They choose to give their precious attention and time to listen to your obscure and not-really-relevant-topic paper (all papers are like this, in the end. If it was universally relevant you would have written a monograph already and done a book tour).

Audience:

  1. Don’t shift to let people through to a seat, move over so they can sit where you are.
  2. Don’t leave unnecessary empty seats – they’re unnecessary!
  3. Do your absolute utmost for the cause of silence. Of course some noise is unavoidable throughout the whole conference area, but noise accumulates quickly. Whether in a session or out, keep quiet.
  4. If you don’t have a good question, don’t ask it. We don’t need your soapbox issue.

 

More rambling tomorrow, or the next day!

Some scattered reflections from Oxford

August 12, 2015 By in Updates

It’s the morning of the 3rd day of the conference here.

Firstly, one could play ‘beard bingo’ here. There are several different types to watch out for: 1. Hipster theologian, 2. American college professor, 3. 18th century gentleman, 4. Orthodox priest, 5. American college professor ‘alternative’.

But more seriously, yesterday was the first full day of talks. My paper was on the first slot, and I had a good number turn up, 20-30, which I thought was very generous. I didn’t deliver as well as I’d have liked, but it was okay. I had one question, which I think I answered quite competently. So overall it went well.

I spent the rest of the morning primarily listening to papers on ‘Varieties of Arianism’. The topics listed interested me more than most of the other Basil presentations.

It must be quite challenging for non-English-native speakers. I know that many of them have excellent English, but the choice to present in English and face the difficulty of trying to speak at a high level in not your native language, or else to speak in your native language but then have a much smaller audience, must be difficult. I did sit in on one paper in Italian of which, I confess, I understood very little.

Since I’m staying with a student friend here, I took a couple of hours off and did some touring around the colleges with him. He’s a reformation history guy, and quite a good tour guide to boot.

In the afternoon I attended a workshop session on Digital Humanities. An area of great interest to me but about which I am not very well informed. It wasn’t the most enlightening, but it was enlightening.

Two back to back receptions in the evening and then another dinner in an English pub. Yes, I can see why English pubs are popular in a way that Australian ones are not.

I’ve enjoyed a good chance to meet a range of people, and had some fruitful discussions with some researchers in my area, which has been encouraging.

 

Oxford Patristics 2015

August 6, 2015 By in Academics 1 Comment

Well, today I’m off to Oxford. I’m attending the XVII. International Conference on Patristic Studies, where I’ll be giving a paper on Tuesday morning about Basil’s exegetical practice in Against Eunomius, very specifically on Acts 2:36 and how this interacts with other authors and Basil’s broader hermeneutical methods. Or something like that.

This conference only happens once every four years, I guess that makes it the Olympics of Patristic conferences. It will be my first time there and I’m looking forward to it, though I admit to being a little intimidated by the sheer size of the conference and the caliber of people who will be there. Presenting first up on the first day doesn’t help, except in the knowledge that it will be over and done with quite quickly!

I’m looking forward to visiting a friend of mine and staying with him during the week. I think I’m looking forward to presenting, though taming my presentation into a sharp 15 minutes that still has meaningful content is proving… unruly. I’ll get there though.

 

The problem with closed-access peer-review academia

August 4, 2015 By in Academics Tags: , , 1 Comment

Recently I’ve enjoyed reading two unrelated but stimulating discussions taking place. The first example you can read here and here. I would summarise Skinner’s concerns in the second post that in a democratised (and that’s probably not the right word) sphere, everyone feels the right to have an equal opinion, and it’s difficult to give expert opinions their due weight. The remedy is (and I’m not saying this is Skinner’s view), traditionally, to point to the process of peer-review. Publishing is the sifting and sorting process that lends publications their authoritative weight. It’s why academia is a closed shop, it’s what the PhD is for: proving you’re ready to take a seat at the secret-society of peers who know about such and such a field.

The other discussion I’ve been listening in on is in the area of Digital Humanities and calls for greater open-access to research, data, etc.. One correspondent pointed to two articles that deal with the natural sciences:

Ioannidis,  2005 “Why most published research findings are false“, and,

Burembs and Munafò, 2015, “Deep Impact: unintended consequences of journal rank“.

Now, while those are quite a different field to Biblical Studies or Classics, or any Humanities discipline, we’d be fools if we thought that similar problems arising from journal ranking, bias, social pressure, and confirmation bias, we’re going on in Humanities disciplines.

Peer-reviewed closed-access publishing is run for the profit of publishers, and it’s paid for by the unpaid labour of academics. Is rigorous peer-review a great thing? Undoubtedly. Ought it be the gate-keeper to the conversation? Probably not. We do live in a more democratised world, and although everyone probably would admit theoretically that the only guarantee that you’re reading something worthy of critical acceptance is to read it critically for yourself with the pre-requisite knowledge to evaluate it, we’re all lazy and would much rather see the imprimatur of authority and say, ‘good enough for them, good enough for me’. But the result of that is richer publishers, elitism in academia, and a circle of bias that diminishes the value of peer-review to zero guarantee of truth or quality.

Composition Exercises: some thoughts

July 30, 2015 By in Pedagogy

Last week I got to some chatting about the difference composition exercises might make between classical Greek students and Koine/Seminary students’ learning outcomes. Here I share some thoughts on composition exercises.

 

If you look in most traditional textbooks for classical languages, exercises typically focus on translation. The bulk of exercises involve translation of sentences from a target language into a native language. Then, depending on the style of textbook, and the pedigree of the pedagogy, they might include some native to target language exercises.

 

Sitting on my desk right now is Mastronarde, who has both directions, I know Duff does, and if I dug up a few more, we would find that they do to. Some textbooks don’t have them, notably I have Mahoney’s First Greek Course which focuses more on reading, writing, and composition, than translation per se. Decker’s Reading Koine Greek doesn’t bother with it at all. I suspect that textbook wise, classical Greek textbooks tend more towards ‘translation as practice’ than Koine textbooks have.

1. Translation is only a minimal learning experience.

That is, the actual practice of tranlsation doesn’t provide much in the way of meaningful input for the student. It only asks them to perform transformations using the knowledge they already have. It is skills-practice not learning-input. Furthermore, the main learning that goes on is looking up and checking words and forms. Which isn’t negligible, but it’s not significant.

I suspect if we dug a bit more into the history of composition exercises, we would find that they emerged at a time when Latin education was under pressure from German philology, and speaking Latin was going into decline, but there was still as sense that students should learn some ‘practical, active’ Latin, and that the solution was to teach them to ‘compose’.

2. ‘Composition’ exercises are not really composition.

To be fair, all those volumes that are called composition very rarely involve composition. They are almost entirely translation, starting at the short sentence level and working up to connected paragraphs. I also happen to have a folder on my computer that is pdf scans of a range of Greek and Latin composition books. Only the most advanced go on to paragraph length texts and discuss matters of style and expression. So let’s not delude ourselves that students are doing composition when really they are learning the reverse of overly-literal translation skills, simply reversing the direction of the languages.

3. Even minimally helpful things are helpful.

However, let’s keep in mind that even if composition isn’t that great, because it doesn’t provide much in the way of genuine comprehensible input, it does provide some valuable things: practice in using the language, testing of one’s knowledge, and reinforcement of forms. Especially where other forms of this kind of articulatory practice are absent (oral conversation, for instance, or target-language-only written communications), translation exercises are of benefit to students.

4. Translation is a high-level skill, not a low-level one.

I have to confess, I use translation in teaching students far more than I am happy with. Why? Because it’s a very easy and non-intense way to test whether comprehension of a target-language text has taken place. To do so by other means requires more creativity, more set-up, and more effort. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a good way.

If you forget classical languages for a moment and think about languages that you know actively, communicatively (assuming you know any), you’ll know that translation is actually a very difficult skill to do well, orally or written. It requires a solid grasp of both languages, idioms, culture, field-of-reference, and moving between the two. We are all familiar with the fact that translation is tricky! (and treasonous). So let’s not pretend that translation is actually an entry-level skill for language learning. It’s a high-order skill that demands a lot of language before it can be truly effective.

 

What’s the answer? I don’t think composition is bad. But I do think it’s inferior. I think there are better options for what composition exercises do. Those better options are: question and answer in the target language, target language comprehension questions, target language composition (without translation), and so on. But they require more set-up, more from the teacher, and more from the student.

How to get there? If you’re already working in a text-based, translation-oriented set-up, the first step I recommend is to get down some basic grammatical vocabulary and questions and begin to introduce them one by one. For example, quo casu? is probably one of my most used questions for Latin students. It’s the first step towards discussing the grammar of the text in the language of the text.

 

Technology doesn’t per ipsa make for better pedagogy

July 27, 2015 By in Pedagogy

I don’t really like to spend my time criticising pedagogical approaches, but last week a sponsored post by Dr. Kinneer appeared over at http://www.challies.com/sponsored/ancient-greek-for-the-digital-age

Now, I am all for digital tools, and I think what Dr. Kinneer goes on to describe (and there is a link to a sample lesson (https://youtu.be/1zJ7twvimdM)), is a great step forward, but if you do watch the video, I think it tells you that this line in the article, “Multimedia resources allow for new and better ways to learn an ancient language.” is actually false. Because this is not a new way to learn an ancient language, nor in my opinion is it a better way. It is the same traditional approach embedded into multimedia presentation.

Is it an improvement? Probably. Does using bite-sized multimedia presentations and tools help? Undoubtedly (for some, though I have more and more concerns about how the connectedness of devices contributes to inability to concentrate on the presence of the present). But this isn’t pedagogical novelty, it’s the same very well-travelled train being re-gauged and put on a new track.

If we really want to improve the teaching of Greek there is only one thing for it – to engage in the very best practices in second language acquisition, learn from the research in SLA, and be prepared to change at a fundamental level the pedagogical approaches used, rather than carry on down a path that sees hours of blood and sweat poured out for very little reward.

Why Classical (Greek) students are better at Greek than Seminary students

July 21, 2015 By in Greek, Pedagogy 5 Comments

I have taken courses in both disciplines, and taught students who have come out of both processes, and Classical students almost always have better Greek than NT students. There’s a very simple set of reasons for this though, and it doesn’t really have to do with NT students only doing Koine.

Classical students generally train in classical grammar, which on the whole is slightly more complex than Koine grammar. That’s just the reality of the process of koinification going on in the history of the Greek language.

They then move on to reading fairly demanding literature: Plato, Homer, Greek plays, Attic oratory. These are all high-level literary texts that demand a lot from their students. It’s functionally equivalent to taking a grammar class in English and then in your second year reading Shakespeare and the like.

Thirdly, depending on how they acquire their Greek, they are very likely in a multi-year program that involves reading a considerable amount of such Greek. If they’re a classics major, this is over 50, and up to 100% of their course-load for several years.

Seminary students, though, move from a a grammar class to reading the newspaper. The NT is not a high-register set of documents. It’s sophisticated, challenging, but its level of language isn’t and isn’t meant to be ‘Shakespearean’.

Secondly, they read a fairly closed corpus. Seminary students very rarely read outside the NT at all. In fact, it’s quite possible for them to get through Masters degrees without reading outside the NT. Only the few who are outliers, for whatever reason, will read outside that closed corpus, and even then it can be quite a limited foray.

Thirdly, working in Greek texts amounts to a small amount of most seminary programs. It would rarely rise about 25% of the course load, and overall may be somewhere closer to 10% of a whole degree program. That would only really change if there was some NT specialisation going on.

No one should be surprised then that seminary students come off poorly against students trained in Classical greek. It has very little to do with ‘rigour’ or approach, and mostly to do with sheer time and volume of material, and secondarily type of literature read, which is bleedingly obvious. Should seminary students ‘do more Greek’ and ‘read more widely’? Well, it wouldn’t be a bad thing, but most seminary students are training to be NT scholars, and just piling on more Greek has to mean less of other things.

There’s no punch-line to this post. No agenda or solution or suggestion. I’m just observing that this is the way things are and it’s entirely reasonable that things are this way.

Bridging the gap: some reflections on teaching Josephus

July 14, 2015 By in Greek, Pedagogy 4 Comments

As I mentioned earlier, I spent the last week taking a small group through some selections of Josephus’ Antiquities.

In the course of doing so, it again struck me the great gap there is between training in Greek grammar and fundamentals, and reading actual texts. This was highlighted in the case of Josephus because there are so few actual resources to help the reader of the Greek. Indeed, I suspect that apart from Early Christianity scholars who dip into select passages for contextual purposes, most of Josephus doesn’t get read much in the Greek. It is far easier to rely on the translations by Thackery and Whiston, both of which are quite dated and so readily available. Josephus is quite long, and he is not in the ‘canon’ of classical texts.

If a student goes on to read a canonical text (Biblical or otherwise, I speak of the well-trod road of favoured classical texts to read), there are usually boundless helps available. For example, the student desiring to read Iliad book VI may well turn to the Bristol Classics Edition which will have invaluable aids, or the beloved Green and Yellow series of Cambridge, which will include more technical and literary commentary, or Steadman’s more recent volume with Vocabulary and Grammar notes.

The student who wants some commentary on Josephus could perhaps purchase one of the Brill commentary volumes, which retail for $100+ and cover at most 4 books from a work. While Feldman’s work is undoubtedly top-notch, it will not make it into the hands of many students, and few people are likely to read Josephus in any case. They certainly will not be encouraged to do so by the publication of these volumes.

I suspect the ‘old school’ mentality was that scholars would just ‘keep on reading Greek’, and consult their reference works, and figure out everything for themselves. But for anyone who hasn’t obtained this mastery with 15 years of reading and work, the gap remains too large, too difficult to leap by one’s own ability. All that is needed is a little bridging, a note here and there on usages that are unfamiliar, vocabulary that is odd, constructions that are difficult to understand, and students (and journeymen too!) could be reading a lot more texts, a lot more fluently.

“It depends…” – Some thoughts on translation

July 7, 2015 By in Language 1 Comment

As I mature as both a reader of ancient texts and a teacher, I find myself saying a lot more, “It depends…”, as well as “You could translate it that way”, “That’s one way to render it”, and a lot of “it depends on the target audience of your translation.”

 

Most students who study Greek or Latin in a traditional program are taught to translate, and to translate in order to show their knowledge of the underlying grammar. That is, the goal of their translation is not ‘word for word accuracy’ or ‘literal rendering’, but ‘demonstration of grammatical knowledge in the target language’. Later on, they are told, you can use freer translation, but for the beginning stages we want to see that you know grammar like we know grammar.

Which, from that school’s philosophy, makes perfect sense. But we all know (we do all know) that translation is an intricate art and is always betrayal. Translation isn’t even simply a spectrum from ‘literal’ to ‘dynamic’ with some super-holy synthesis in the middle where the HCSB lives.

When we translate we are trying to convey something of the base text to something of the translated text. Usually that is ‘meaning’. But even meaning is a bit nebulous – do we want to preserve the meaning of words, or of phrases, or of clauses, or the gist of the whole passage, or sometimes the socio-communicative function of the text? It’s never simple.

Likewise, our translation can be familiarised, that is we can try and render elements of the socio-cultural context of the base text into immediately understandable analogues in the target language’s culture (for example, what do you do with the Good Shepherd in a culture that doesn’t have and never has had sheep?), or your translation can be alienised, preserving idioms and cultural references that won’t be immediately understandable to the reader and will require them to acquire new information about the base text’s culture, or even defamiliarised, as in taking elements of a text that are comfortable and familiar, say in an already existing translation version, and rendering them in a way that is jarring and dislocating so as to force the reader into a new act of reading.

Personally, the way I try and train readers of ancient texts is to focus as much as possible on getting htem to read what is right in front of them. Read the text “as it is”. When I bring this over to translation, my philosophy is “best represent the text as you can” – if it has ambiguities, try to render them ambiguously, if it has clarity, express that clarity, if it has foreignness, preserve the foreignness. I think of this as fidelity in translation, but I recognise that there are other ways to do that, and that even a single translator (myself!) translates differently for different contexts and purposes.

Poetry is a great place to test translation philosophy. If you accept Jakobson’s functions of language and even some modicum of structuralism, then poetry is a form of language in which the focus is on the actual code, the language used to mean is the focus. Poetry is language highlighting language (but not language talking about language, that’s the metalinguistic function!). Anyway, what do you translate in poetry? If you focus on meaning, you lose poetics, but if you focus on poetics, you must betray meaning! And even if you focus on poetics, you still face the difficult choices.

 

Say we’re translating classical Greek poetry into English. Do we choose an English verse form? Free verse? Alliteration? Metre? Even if you choose metre, you’re doing a ‘disservice’, since Greek metre is quantitative but English metre is stress-based. But doing so is also, and indeed has, created an English metrical traditional. Whereas the further back you go you see a more alliterative tradition in English. But if you translate into a contemporary poetic medium, you might end up with Free verse. And whatever you do, you are in fact creating as well as translating, and inevitably betraying. One could focus on meaning, but then you will betray the poetic function of the text. You have no choice but to fail! And yet translations succeed. That is the amazing thing about translations, that it’s actually possible.

 

What are your thoughts? How do you feel about translation and translation-philosophies?

Patristic Readers – Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Simplicium

June 19, 2015 By in Updates Tags: , , 1 Comment

As promised, I have a new short pdf text up at Patristic Readers, it’s Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Simplicium, De Fide.

I decided to tackle this short text after finishing up Ad Ablabium, partly because the latter is too short for a print volume by itself, partly because I thought it would prove a very manageable short text dealing with a related topic, i.e. continuing in the vein of Gregory’s Trinitarian theology. The Greek is not overly difficult, and the high amount of repetition should be of great benefit to students with less developed skills. I commend it to your reading leisure!

Hilary, verse-flipping, and the true Scotsman.

June 9, 2015 By in Latin Tags: , , ,

No true Scotsman is a form of (informal) logical fallacy, of the type where having set up definition X of something, e.g. “A scotsman is blah, blah, blah”, and faced with a particular example, “Well then, so-and-so is a scotsman, based on your definition”, the interlocutor moves the goalposts, “Well, no true scotsman would (insert characteristic of aforementions so-and-so”), thus excluding them from the refined definition X1.

A similar thing is going on in Hilary’s debate(s) with (unnamed) opponents, which he tackles in Book 5 of his De Trinitate. Having spent Book 4 tackling the confession drawn from the Letter of Arius, and arguing from the Old Testament that the Son is God, he then spends Book 5 arguing that the Son is verus Deus, “true God”, against the contention that the Father alone is verus Deus.

In sections 25-31, Hilary turns his attention to the combination of Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is One” (audi, Israel, Dominus Deus tuus unus est) Isaiah 65:16 “they will bless [you] the true God” (benedicent [te] Deum verum). Modern translations render the Hebrew of that verse differently (So that he who blesses himself in the land shall bless himself by the God of truth (ESV) Whoever pronounces a blessing in the earth will do so in the name of the faithful God (NET)), but let’s stick with the Latin for now.

Hilary’s response is very interesting. Firstly, he suggests that te is an addition, and a very problematic one. “if te is read, the pronoun appears to signify a second person; otherwise if the pronominal word is absent, then the noun[1] refers to the speaker of the statement itself.”[2] Now, actually, Hilary is very interested in two related questions every time he does this kind of exegesis: who is the Speaker, and who is the Addressee. Furthermore, when the Speaker is God in the Old Testament, and the Addressee is called ‘God’, Hilary understands this to be indicative of the difference in the Trinitarian persons, for otherwise God should (properly speaking) refer to himself in the First person alone.

The next thing Hilary does is to quote Isaiah 65:13-16 at length. He does this because he considers proper interpretation to depend upon proper contextualisation. (To those who think the Ancients didn’t know anything about exegetical method, take note!) The introduction of this passage clearly indicates that the Lord is speaking through the Prophet. Hilary further argues for why the adjective ‘true’ is supplied here, and argues that it is in reference to the ignorance of the Jews who worshipped God simpliciter, not as Father, and so were ignorant of the Son and did not recognise him as God in his incarnation.

Then (wait for it…) he commences a clause-by-clause analysis of the whole passage, giving his thoughts on what each element means. Especially important is his understanding of verse 15, “You will leave your name for a rejoicing unto my elect, but the Lord will kill you” [3]. Anyway, differences aside, Hilary interprets the first part of this in terms of Romans 2:29 and the elect, i.e. Christian believers, as the new Israel. The second part, “The Lord will kill you”, he interprets in line with his principle that a mention of God by God must indicate a difference of persons. Thus the Dominus who will kill is the Son. This allows him to take the ‘new name’ of Isaiah 65:15b, “but my servants will be called by a new name”, to refer also to Christ. All of which leads to the key verse, 65:16. Having established by the context that the God referred to within the passage is God the Son, the words verum Deum refer not back to God the Father, Deus solus verusque, but to God the Son. Thus one cannot use the adjective verus to exclude the Son, for the very verse they call upon to do so, actually refers to the Son as Deus verus!

[1] i.e. Deum

[2] Personae enim alterius videtur esse pronomen, ubi te est: caeterum ubi pronominis syllaba non erit, ibi ad auctorem dicti refertur et nomen. V.26 with a slightly freer translation.

[3] Relinquetis enim vos nomen vestrum in laetitia electis meis, vos autem interficiet Dominus; again, significantly different from Modern translations, such as “You shall leave your name to my chosen for a curse, and the Lord God will put you to death (ESV)”;  “ Your names will live on in the curse formulas of my chosen ones. (NET)”

Writing and Speaking for comprehension, some ideas.

May 25, 2015 By in Pedagogy

Here are some ideas I was tossing around with some students last week. Let me list the exercises first.

  1. Read a passage, 10 or so verses or more, at a measured pace. No analysis, just ask yourself, “what percentage of that did I understand?”
  2. Read a passage and translate meaning word for word without analysing forms or trying to put into English word order.
  3. Listen to someone else read a passage aloud that you’re unfamiliar with.
  4. Listen to someone else read a passage aloud that you are familiar with.
  5. Transcribe out a passage by sight.
  6. Transcribe out a passage by dictation.

I think of no.1 as a kind of gauging exercise. It gives you a sense of where your language is at in relation to a text/author. Generally I think you want to do free reading at around the 90% and more range, with some work in the 90%-80% range. Below 80% the amount of comprehension drops significantly that it’s hard work and not as rewarding, below 70% and you begin to miss too much to be really worthwhile for free reading. If it’s 100% then, on the one hand ‘Great!’, but on the other hand you are not really stretching yourself to acquire new input, though you are reinforcing and solidifying your current competency.

I like to do no.2 with students sometimes because it forces them to stop parsing, analysing, and especially second-guessing. I want them to blurt out what they are thinking, and move on. If we get to the end of the sentence/passage and it’s all a mess, then we can say, “okay, let’s back up, let’s see where this language train de-railed.”

3 and 4 are really challenging, especially if you’re working in a language that you primarily focus on text-based work (Greek, Latin, etc..). If you’re the listener, you are doing something you’re not really used to, and that’s giving you input in a different way to reading. The use of familiar passages is going to give you better comprehension and so it’s going to work at a different level. Meanwhile, working with similar but unfamiliar texts (Apostolic Fathers, narrative portions of the Greek OT translations, etc..) is going to put you in a familiar field, but out of your comfort zone. On the reading side, students have a tendency (I think), to subvocalise, but not to vocalise, and there’s a big difference! The reader gains benefits in being forced to read aloud for someone else’s hearing. As this kind of exercise developed, you would work more on phrasing, emphasis, diction, discourse and rhetorical analyses.

5 and 6 are things I’m experimenting with. On 5, I have recently started an ambitious project to transcribe my own copy of the Greek NT. I think it will take about forever, but copying out a text is again a different kind of practise. It’s input, because you are getting the language, and it’s a kind of highly structured output, since you are reproducing it. Having written out …δὲ ἐγέννησεν more than a few times in Matthew 1, I have the written form of that particular verb inflection really solid! I suspect the pay-off of a lot of transcription would be much better composition and probably speech.

I haven’t done 6, but I suspect it would be a nice and very challenging combination or 3-5. In fact, I would assign exercises 5 and 6 to those parts of NT/Greek courses that deal with textual criticism. There’s no better way to experience the kind of errors scribes make than to face the challenges of scribing oneself. Give them a copy of a majuscule manuscript and ask them to transcribe it, perhaps even to put it into miniscule with accents, or whatever, you could have a lot of fun and variation on this.

Language as problem-solving

May 21, 2015 By in Language, Pedagogy 2 Comments

One way to look at language as a phenomenon is to realise that it solves problems.

That ‘problem’ is communication, and so language solves a set of problems that range from the most simplistic (I want you to give me a rock), to the incredibly complex (I want you to have the same knowledge of Hindu ontologies that I do). But whatever it is, it’s a problem for which language provides a tool to solve.

If you think of language this way, it also helps makes sense of why languages are so similar – they have to solve the same set of problem-types. There might be infinite ‘problems’, i.e. infinite purposes to which you can apply language, but they ultimately can be typed as a finite set of purposes or problems. And so we can classify language patterns across languages by what they solve.

For example, things that generally fall under the ‘Imperative’ label solve a fairly basic problem: how do I tell you I want you to do something? I use something that functions as an imperative.

This is a good example to talk about. Let’s say I’m sitting at dinner with you and I want you to pass the salt.

I might say, “Pass the salt”. We would call this, grammatically, an imperative. But English linguistic cultures generally don’t like plain imperatives.

We might instead say, “Please, pass the salt.” I don’t know what grammarians call ‘please’; we could analyse it historically and etymologically, and talk about, ‘if it please you’; or we could talk about it functionally and say that it softens the directness of the imperative.

Or we might say, “Would you please mind passing the salt”, in which case we have added a verb (“mind”) and a modal phrase (“would”) to make the imperative more indirect. Grammatically most people would not parse this out as an imperative. But it’s functionally an imperative.

Now, when you come to a different language, you can ask yourself this question, “How do I get someone to pass me the salt?”

Do you see how the problem gives you an acquisition tool? Or to rephrase, thinking of language like this allows you to set up situations to acquire language. Want to learn the imperative? Create situations where you can elicit it and where you can use it and be corrected.

Mongolian is an example close to my experience, and a good counter-example. It’s useless to translate something like, “Could you pass me the salt?”. You get something like Чи давс надад өнгөрөж болох уу? This is not even a proper sentence, because you can’t use ‘pass’ in that way. Nor something indirect like, “I would like the salt”. Even “I want to get the salt” is not appropriate, Би давс авмаар байна. In Mongolian this is an indicative statement that expresses the fact that you want the salt. There is no socio-linguistic sense that makes it an implied imperative. You are simply telling the other party about your volitional state.

To get the salt, you need to say something like давс аваад огооч, which translates as something like “take the salt and give [it]”. The combination of  “take, then give” is the proper expression for the English “pass”, and the -ооч ending there is one form of imperative.

This is on the simple side of examples, but I’m trying to illustrate that thinking of language as a set of ways to solve problems allows you to:

1. Ask the question, “How does my language solve problem X?” often instead of “how do I translate X?”

2. Set up and look for situations that elicit certain structures, by thinking through what problems there are.

How I stopped blogging and started writing a thesis

May 18, 2015 By in Updates

Not entirely, but I am writing here a lot less, and it’s probably (at least partially) a good thing?

This isn’t (entirely) a ‘sorry for not blogging more’ post, it’s ‘here’s how I raised my own productivity’ post.

Firstly, I don’t take my computer home at night and don’t have any internet at home anyway. So I don’t write up thoughts and posts in the evening which is one time I normally would. In fact, I try not to do anything too much work-related at home, even on weekends.

Secondly, and I’ve talked about this a little before, I have two measures on my computer to stop procrastination. One is that I have a filter set up on my web browser to stop me using time-wasting sites for more than 25 mins a day between 8am and 5pm. Secondly, I use Freedom to basically shut down the whole internet for myself. Previously this has been frustrating, since I often need some minimal web functionality and I’ve used anti-social to block only some sites, but now I just shut down the lot and defer anything that needs ‘checking’.

Thirdly, and this is the new development for me; I’ve upped the ante in using Freedom, I now block out about 2hours at a time. And throw my phone into a drawer as well. This way it’s just me, itunes, and my work. Overall it means I get around 6 or more productive, focused hours per day. Today I read and annotated almost a whole book, and achieved some other sundry tasks too (patristics and language related mainly).

So that’s what’s working or me. Disconnecting from lots of things to just connect with the one task in front of me.

Patristic Readers – Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium

May 11, 2015 By in Greek Tags: , , 2 Comments

Just now I’ve posted up and released a pdf version of my Patristic Readers edition of Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium.

 

Altogether, the number of hours for this volume is not staggering, but it has taken quite some time. I’ve refined my process for Greek quite well, and when I’m on task and working I get through things at a decent pace. However, there are many gremlins that slow things down, and working on something like this is distracting for the doctoral research, so I suspect it will be a little while before the next volume. The next one will involve a Latin Father, and so there is also some more ‘set-up’ time on the Latin front as well.

I’m moving towards some print volumes, my hold-up remains cover design but I think we’re making progress there. I’ll let you know.

 

State of the Projects, May 2015

May 1, 2015 By in Updates

I spent a considerable amount of time in April writing up material on Ephesians, and then 2 weeks in Mongolia teaching Ephesians. That was useful, productive, but not very PhD related.

Patristic Readers

As I write this update I am quite seriously about an hour’s worth of work away from launching a second pdf volume. So let me go ahead and tell you that the text is Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium. I just need to compile and format the final vocabulary list, and format a few pages into proper shape, and then compile the pdf. So that should be done by early next week.

PhD

Has been a bit slow. I have a good 3.5 month run now before any other major obligations, and finishing of the Gregory volume will free me up too. So I am going to be reading and writing a great deal on Basil and Hilary for the next 3 months and should make some substantial progress.

Teaching

Perhaps one reason for less side-projects is that I have 7-10 hours of tutoring work going on each week, and that is about the right amount for me. It means less of those delightful projects get done, but conversely it means more income, and I do quite enjoy teaching languages and reading texts.

Conferences

Next on my list is International Patristics at Oxford in August. You can read my paper abstract here.

State of the Patrologist

April 27, 2015 By in Updates

No, not state of the Projects. That would be in a few days. Today I’m just going to write about what’s been happening, what’s coming up, etc..

On the weekend I flew back home from Mongolia, where I taught Greek exegesis of Ephesians over two weeks. It was a good time, both the teaching and the chance to reconnect to many friends, Mongolians and foreigners, in country. I was also glad to be among brothers and sisters at my two churches there. I have another trip planned for September.

Obviously posting has been slow here; I have a few more posts to work through talking about figurative language. And an insight or two on language learning based on my recent trip.

Disappointingly, I missed out on grant money to head to SBL this year, so I’m now looking at self-funding my way over there. I suspect that’s where most of my tutoring money will be directed for the next six months. I think, having already written a paper, and just the timing of presenting this year with a section theme that is spot-on for my thesis topic, it is probably worth the money (if conferences are ever worth the money).

I’m really hopeful to get the next Patristic Reader done within the next 2 weeks. I would say 1, but that may be too ambitious. It’s quite close to finishing. There has been no real progress with my cover design though, which is a little frustrating. That is almost all that’s holding back print editions.

Tomorrow (or today, depending on when you get this), Latin 1 with Conversational Koine Institute kicks off. I’m working over the material for the first lesson this very day, and it will be a lot of fun. If you’ve been thinking about some Conversational and Introductory Latin, don’t miss out, go and enrol now.

No more trips planned until August, so looking forward to settling down and writing a chapter or two of the thesis over the next 3 months.

Triple language overload

April 20, 2015 By in Language, Updates

The Patrologist has been quiet lately because he’s in Mongolia teaching Ephesians in Greek. It’s really a test of one’s linguistic competencies to explain the intricacies of Pauline grammar and theology in a third language while your notes are in your first. But it doesn’t leave much time for blogging. Some semi-regular thoughts on all things Patrology will resume the following week. In the meantime, let me just say what’s up with the crazy thought process behind Ephesians 4:16! That sentence is all over the place.