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This is me picking up some pieces and adding nuance to one of my usual hobby horses, that is communicative approaches to ancient/classical/historical languages. 1. Does Grammar/Translation ‘work’? I think this partly depends upon what we mean by ‘work’. My main interest is developing students who can
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In this post I discuss, in brief and embryonic form, the difference between lemma and token frequencies for John's Gospel. At the bottom of this post you'll find an unwieldy table. I haven't quite figured out a good way to do tables. Anyway, these
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In today's post I rambling self-reflect on my history as a language learner. I don't suppose that has a broad appeal as a topic of interest, but if you already know me, you might find it of interest. I sat down to write this out
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(These are some notes I am drawing up for an Intro Greek class; the proximate source the analogy is Mike Aubrey over at koine-greek.com. It's a very versatile analogy, when you put it to use; like all analogies, it has points of dis-analogy though. Welcome
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I didn’t realise we needed to retrieve this doctrine until I picked up this book, despite all the blogosphere hullabaloo in 2016 about trinitarian doctrine and complementarian theologies in evangelical circles. And yet, as the editors, Fred Sanders and Scott R. Swain, put forward in their introduction, the doctrine
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There’s a lot of similarity between the casual/adjunct/temporary-contract academic, and the Hedge Knights of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. For, in Martin’s fictional world, Hedge Knights are indeed knights, they have the title (having been knighted by another knight)
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Charles Lee Irons, "A lexical defence of the Johannine 'Only Begotten'" in Retrieving Eternal Generation. Edited by Fred Sanders and Scott R. Swain (Zondervan, 2017), 98-116. In the course of writing a response and review of this book as a whole, I thought it worthwhile
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Download monogenes-in-pro-nicene-exegesis.mp3 As mentioned in my last post, I was in Boston last week for AAR/SBL 2017. More than a few people have expressed interest in my paper, and so I arranged for it to be recorded (My thanks to Charles Meeks!) You can
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As you might know, I'm currently in Boston for the AAR/SBL 2017 Annual Meeting. I arrived on Friday evening after a fairly long journey (but reasonably pleasant), and managed to sleep a full night and not suffer any particular jet lag. This time round I realised there
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In 2016 the sad news emerged that three commentaries written by Peter O’Brien, a respected New Testament scholar, had been pulled following an investigation finding them guilty of plagiarism. See Eerdmans’ post here. Sad, because it’s clear to all who know him that Peter is indeed a formidable
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The only useful thing I ever learned about curriculum design was at a staff development day while in Mongolia. Thankfully the presenter spoke in English and it was translated for the Mongolian staff. I say, “thankfully”, because this (a) reduced my overall cognitive load, and (b) meant I could process
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Asking New Testament students to provide a translation of a known (chapter/verse) NT text in an exam or exegetical paper is a waste of time. It tests nothing and it discriminates nothing. Every student ought to be getting 90-100% on this part of an assessment anyway, because either: