The Logos Academic Blog
What is the draw, exactly, to owning the Loeb series? They present well in a bookcase, but unless you use them, they are no more than art. But thousands of us purchase Loeb volumes year after year, amassing our own personal libraries of texts whose authors are long dead. Why? [Read more…]
Perhaps the most exciting and ambitious project of 2018 is the end-of-year release of Part 1 of the Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca on December 26, 2018. We talked to both Rick Brannan, the profoundly-expertised-Greek-guru-resident-scholar-guy at Faithlife/Logos, and Kyle Anderson, Content Production Manager at Faithlife, about the process of getting these volumes into a searchable format previously unrealized (his actual title is Information Architect and Team Manager, Content Innovation). There is a fascinating story here concerning the intersection of ancient texts with the Internet, and the importance of making significant works both utilitarian and delightful to end users. [Read more…]
Photos by Tavis Bohlinger
In this second installment of Design Showcase, we are immensely privileged to feature perhaps the most exciting new book project to come to light this year, Septuaginta: A Reader’s Edition. This immense 2-volume work, edited by Gregory R. Lanier and William A. Ross, is jointly published by Hendrickson Publishers and Deutsche Bibel Gesellschaft and will certainly be an invaluable resource for many generations of students, pastors, and scholars for years to come. [Read more…]
Photography by Tavis Bohlinger*
Welcome to the first in a new series on the Logos Academic Blog (theLAB), in which we discuss everything but the actual content of a book. Design Showcase is a series of interviews with both publishers and designers of the best academic resources in the world of biblical scholarship. In this first of the series, we’re going to take a look at the Tyndale House Greek New Testament, or THGNT. [Read more…]
by Logan Williams
It is now a general consensus among New Testament scholars that, despite its deviations from Jewish traditions, early Christianity can nevertheless be understood as a Jewish phenomenon. Even so, we all recognize that the “Jewish world” of the first century was not just the “Jewish world”: a plethora of theological ideas and religious practices regularly circulated throughout the ancient Mediterranean and exerted constant influence across a variety of religious groups. [Read more…]
Brill volumes have a special place in my heart. Not only are they aesthetically pleasing as bound physical monographs, with utmost attention to detail in their craftsmanship of cloth-bound covers and gold-letter embossing, but the aesthetics also extend to the written text. [Read more…]
by Alan Taylor Farnes
In 2007, James R. Royse published his exceptional study on the scribal habits of six early New Testament papyri. In his work, Royse revolutionized text critics’ understanding of the text-critical canon lectio brevior potior or, “the shorter reading is preferred”1 by demonstrating that the scribes he studied tended to omit more than they added. In its place he coined a new canon which he called lectio longior potior or, “the longer reading is preferred.” [Read more…]
by Christoph Heilig*
Two weeks ago, Tavis Bohlinger wrote a blogpost in which he encouraged students and scholars of the New Testament to focus on the “common dialect,” ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος of the Greek language—that is, the Greek spoken roughly between 300 BCE and 300 CE. In the German-speaking sphere, from which I come, many students of theology still learn “Classical Greek” as it was used between 500 and 300 BCE (well, at least the Attic dialect of that time). [Read more…]
by Vinh T. Nguyen
In his recent post Four Reasons to Master Koine (and to Leave Attic Alone), Tavis Bohlinger made a plea to specifically focus on Koine in order to master “this particular type of Greek as thoroughly as possible.” This post continues a collegial dialogue about studying Greek which includes an article from Shawn Wilhite on the importance of reading background texts of the New Testament. [Read more…]
Learning to read Koine (or biblical) Greek is essential, if you are training for church ministry, an academically focused career in biblical studies, or simply as a means to reading the New Testament in its original language.
Even while I was in seminary, however, there was pressure to learn to read Attic, or Classical Greek. I was inspired to expand my narrow horizons beyond the NT, to begin reading Homer, Sophocles, and Plato. Indeed, even on this blog, we recently posted an article encouraging people to read widely throughout the corpus of Classical Greek literature. [Read more…]