At this year's SBL in Chicago, I took part in a session on Monday afternoon, in the Synoptic Gospels section, that was devoted to reviewing Zeba Crook's Parallel Gospels. The other reviewers were Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, Paul Foster and Robert Derrenbacker. My article review is available here:
Zeba Crook's Parallel Gospels: Review Article
Mark Goodacre
Update (22 April 2014): My conference paper is now revised and published in SBL's Review of Biblical Literature here:
Review of Zeba A. Crook, Parallel Gospels [PDF]
Mark Goodacre
Please cite as: Mark Goodacre, review of Zeba A. Crook, Parallel Gospels: A Synopsis of Early Christian Writing, Review of Biblical Literature [http://www.bookreviews.org] (2014)
I had to bolt at the end to another obligation, so missed the Q&A. What I wanted to ask was if Crook had considered the better approach of starting with a target translation and just eliminating all false positives and false negatives within each pericope. (This is what I did in the synopsis in my diss.) I see no benefit in forcing the same token English word for υπο across the whole text, since the tool is not at all designed for discovering or identifying vertical wording parallels.
ReplyDeleteThe readability/usability factor with the poor wording and the intrusive bracket explanations is just awful. And, a more readable wording choice would eliminate the need for the bracketed clarifications.
Maybe that could make space for the necessary line breaks??? The publisher made a huge error in contracting the text with their normal "word count = # of pages" formulae and not accounting for the necessary white space. I could never use this as it is.
Good point, Joe. There's no need to make the translation fully concordant beyond the immediate context.
ReplyDeleteMaybe there's a weird case or two where Zeba's solution would make a difference, such as a μετά + genitive in Mark matching up with a μετά + accusative in Luke. But even in the case, the student needs to know that the case endings don't match up.
Does it even make sense to make printed Synoptics anymore? Isn't this exactly the sort of thing that should be interactive? That way one could align at any level one wishes. Read in the order of Mark rather than Matthew. Add or remove Q and Thomas. Follow references or do colouring.
ReplyDeleteI'm a paper man, myself, but I recognise that I'm living in the past.