Here are some of the pictures I took while in Myrtle Beach last weekend. Some are pretty good. Some, not so much. We had a wonderful time, and are seriously considering going back at the end of this summer. That’s how much fun we had. 🙂
We went to Myrtle Beach, SC, last weekend and had a wonderful time. I have lots of pictures that I’ll be posting to Flickr very soon. I just got back from getting my waterproof, single-use camera developed, and there are a few shots in there that might show up, too.
In the meantime, here’s a complete and total summation of our entire trip. I shot this video within about an hour of our arrival, and the whole vacation was one great moment after another.
Tonight, whilst reading my lesson for Sunday School, I came across a quote that I really like. I normally don’t get much out of quotes, since generally they are out of context, don’t stand alone very well and can be easily misused because of that. This one, however, is complete all by itself. And it’s quite deep. It was spoken/written by one of three men: Alexander Chalmers, Allan K. Chalmers or Joseph Addison. Whoever said it, here it is:
The three grand essentials of happiness are: Something to do, someone [something] to love, and something to hope for.
I really like that. The quote as I read it in my book had “something to love” instead of “someone to love,” but either one works. If you try to center your life on those three tenets, it seems to me, your life will eventually approach happiness.
Using that as a benchmark, my life is overflowing with happiness. And it is.
Yesterday was my 40th birthday. I was not happy about that particular number approaching, but now that it’s over, I feel great. My friend Steve Benfield emailed me early yesterday with the subject, “Welcome To Old…” which got the day off to a humorous start. I got tons of well-wishes from friends, many of whom I haven’t actually seen in several years. I had a demanding Tae Kwon Do class last night, and then I came home to a meal of tacos, lovingly prepared by my wonderful son, Thomas. He also baked me a cake, with chocolate frosting. Yum!
I have it pretty good. 🙂
As you can probably tell, I haven’t been motivated to write anything in well over a month. I don’t know why, but that’s what’s happened. I didn’t finish my Lenten project, though I am still occasionally working on it. I did just earn my orange belt in Tae Kwon Do, so that’s cool. And I’m going to be 40 on Tuesday, which is not cool, but it’s sort of unavoidable. I had a lovely birthday dinner with my entire family on Saturday night at Stoney River, which is the most-bestest steakhouse in the world. I loves me some garlic mashed potatoes.
I have an idea for a post about direct vs. indirect quotations in the Greek NT text, but I haven’t fully scoped it out yet. Maybe it will be coming soon. Maybe not.
I’m doing a lot more playing around with Scala, though I am still a lightweight. Sometimes when I’m reading other people’s Scala code, I feel very uneasy about my skills. Scala is beautiful and elegant, but sometimes the terseness of it make it a little overwhelming.
I’m testing out Mercurial for version control. I also tried Git, but based on what I’ve read, and what I’ve experienced, I think Mercurial is the better choice, at least right now. Git is the new, sexy thing, but Mercurial is better established, and the tooling is far better than for Git. Git is gaining ground, but I’m going to stick with Hg for now. I just bought “Mercurial: The Definitive Guide” from O’Reilly, and I’m reading it now. My VP has started asking questions about DVCS and should we switch from SVN and such, so this experiment will be useful shortly.
I’m playing a lot of backgammon. I taught my mother-in-law to play a few weeks ago, and my mother last night. Both picked it up quickly. I’m reading “The Backgammon Book” by Jacoby and Crawford, and trying to commit all the charts and probabilities to memory and get some real strategy going. My game is improving, but I’m still easily beatable.
Oh, and I”ve lost 22 pounds since February 28. Yay, me!
So, there you have it. All two of you now know why there hasn’t been anything new here for a while.
Update, the First: As I said back on February 19, I’m working on translating the Gospel of Luke from Greek into English as a Lenten project. Once I changed the project from simply reading the text in Greek, to translating and analyzing the Greek text in two different forms and writing down a reasonable translation, I knew that my timeline was going to shift. I am now certain that I won’t be finished with the project before Easter. There’s just no way around it. I haven’t had nearly as much time for translation as I’d hoped, and the additional research takes up what little time I do have. Does this mean I’m giving up on the project? No. What it means is that even though I won’t be finished by Easter, I’m going to continue the work until it’s completed, however long that might take. If I’m still working on it in May, that’s fine. I will complete it, it just won’t be when I originally planned.
Update, the Second: As I said on March 1, I have started a new exercise regimen. I am getting up at 5:00 AM, Sunday – Friday, to workout. (To be honest, I have slept in until 5:30 a couple of days.) Each day I get up, do some warmups to get my blood pumping, and then practice every Tae Kwon Do kick, block and punch that I’ve learned so far, multiple times per side. I then go through my TKD forms (3 of them, so far), and then do pushups & sit-ups or squats. I may be dropping the 100 Push-Ups challenge from the regimen, for now, because yesterday when I tried to do a push-up, my right biceps made a sound that was not a good one, and it felt like if I continued, something was going to snap. Last Thursday, the last 5 push-ups really hurt, and not in that “pain is just fear leaving the body” sort of way. This was “if you do one more of these, at least one muscle in this group is going to break” way. I need to at least lay off the push-ups for a week or so and then try again. We’ll see.
The good news is that so far, I’ve lost 13 pounds. It’s been well over a year since I’ve been at this weight, so I’m quite happy with that. I just need to stay motivated and keep at it.
And finally, the trophy. I’ve been a member of Grayson NPS Tae Kwon Do since August 2009. This past weekend, 22 of us went to the ICMA Region 2 Martial Arts Tournament. I was part of the demo team, which took 2nd place (out of 7 teams) in the team demo competition. I also won 3rd place (out of 5) for martial arts forms (I did Taegeuk Ee Jang, for those of you familiar with TKD). Between us, we won 14 trophies, which is pretty darn good.
Much video was shot of the various competitions. As it gets posted, I will provide links.
Submitted without further comment:
From an interview with Daniel B. Wallace, there is this question and Dr. Wallace’s response
Lastly, if there is one piece of advice you could give to someone entering New Testament Greek scholarship, what would it be?
Work on your languages hard. Without a solid foundation in Greek and Hebrew—and for doctoral students—German and French and/or Latin, Coptic, and Syriac—you can’t have an influence on biblical studies. It’s imperative that you take language acquisition and maintenance very, very seriously.
Well, I’m working hard on my Greek, as you can probably tell. I had some French in high school, and I do have a book on Coptic that I plan to read at some point. I definitely have plans to learn Hebrew, after I reach a certain point in my Greek studies. Where that point is, I don’t know. I suppose I’ll know it when I see it.
As for picking up German, Latin or Syriac, or of advancing in French… I need 63 hour days… 😦
As I said, I am reading the book of Luke in Greek as a Lenten project. At the urging of a friend, I have decided to write down my translation, which I will post here when completed. So today, I started working on the verses I’d already read, but had not written down. As I was doing this, I decided to read the Greek not only in my UBS4, but also in my Byzantine text. (The Byzantine textform is essentially the Greek text that underlies the Textus Receptus, which was used by the translators of the King James bible, so it is quite different in some places from the NA27/UBS4.) I have now noted two places in my translation where there are differences between them.
The one that was most interesting today was Luke 1:35b. Here it is from the UBS4,
διὸ καὶ τὸ γεννώμενον ἅγιον κληθήσεται, υἱὸς θεοῦ.
And here it is from the Byzantine,
διὸ καὶ τὸ γεννώμενον ἅγιον κληθήσεται υἱὸς θεοῦ.
Can you spot the difference? The UBS4 has a comma after κληθήσεται, but the Byzantine does not. Thus, the UBS4 would be translated something like,
And because of this, the one who is born will be called holy, the son of God.
But without the comma, the Byzantine comes across something like this,
And because of this, the holy one who is born will be called the son of God.
You can argue that there’s not a whole lot of difference between the two, and there probably isn’t, but the feel of the two is different. At least I think it is. The King James bible takes it even farther, with unusually awkward language,
therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.
I think I’ll stick with my UBS4 translation. 🙂
Of course, in antiquity, when these documents were originally written down, they didn’t use any punctuation at all. Or spaces between words! It wasn’t until the Middle Ages (I believe) before Greek writing included spaces, punctuation and accents. So, the placement of a comma or not is certainly up for debate.
I said I’d noticed two differences between the two texts, and even though this one has nothing to do with a comma, I will point it out for those who care. It is an additional clause in Gabriel’s greeting to Mary in Luke 1:28. The UBS4 has,
καὶ εἰσελθὼν πρὸς αὐτὴν εἶπεν, Χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη, ὁ κύριος μετὰ σοῦ.
and the Byzantine has
καὶ εἰσελθὼν πρὸς αὐτὴν εἶπεν, Χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη· ὁ κύριος μετὰ σοῦ, εὐλογημένη σὺ ἐν γυναιξίν.
The first would be translated,
And he went in to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!”
And the second,
And he went in to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one; the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.”
There was a bit of a punctuation change, a semicolon for a comma, but nothing major. The real difference was that the Byzantine had the extra bit about being blessed among women. I love this sort of thing, by the way: seeing differences between manuscript traditions and thinking about why one has something and another does not. I can’t tell you why the Byzantine has the extra clause and the UBS4 doesn’t, but it’s still an interesting thing to think about.
In 2007, I announced that I was going to try to translate all of the book of Jude from Greek into English as a Lenten project. It did not go well. I realized pretty quickly that my skills were not at a point where I could do the work, and so I quietly stopped working on it after a few days, and never mentioned it again.
Now it’s three years later, my translation skills have improved, and I have more confidence. I heard about this Yahoo group called LentenGreekReading a couple of weeks ago and their announced plans to tackle the book of Luke for Lent. I joined the group and on Ash Wednesday, I began my reading.
Lent, as you may recall, lasts 40 days. Well, we say it lasts 40 days, but the actual time varies by denomination. Basically, you just don’t count the Sundays between Ash Wednesday and Holy Saturday (the day before Easter). If you do that, you get 40 days, even though it’s really 46. Anyway, Lent is observed by the Catholic church, and some Protestant denominations, like mine, the United Methodist Church. While Lent is traditionally a time of fasting and self-denial, more recently, some Protestants have used it as a time of devotion to a special purpose or project. Hence, the reading plan.
So on Ash Wednesday, I read Luke 1:1 – 38, which took me about 2.5 hours. Yes, 2.5 hours to read 38 verses. Those verses covered Luke explaining to Theophilus why he wrote the book and the foretelling of the births of John the Baptist and Jesus,
The next day, I read Luke 1:39 – 66, and that only took about an hour. Yes, there were fewer verses, but I could tell I was moving at a better pace. Those verses included Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, the Magnificat, and the birth of John.
Today’s reading was Luke 1:67 – 2:20. I finished it in about an hour, but I had a bit of a head start, since I had already translated all of Luke 2:1 – 20 for Christmas. This reading included Zechariah’s prophesy about John, and the birth of Jesus.
I am pleased with my progress so far, and I feel good about my changes of actually finishing the project before Easter. I will post occasional updates if I find something interesting in the translation. Wish me luck; I’m sure I’m going to hit some rocky spots along the way.
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