Mark Mattison's Gospels.net

I am grateful to Andrew Bernhard for sending over news of a change in his website Gospels.net. He posted the following message on Labor Day:

Thank you to all who have visited my site during the past twenty years. I am humbled by the attention it has received and grateful for the opportunities it has provided me to connect with interesting people around the world. I am now pleased to pass gospels.net on to Mark Mattison. I have been impressed by his dedication, as an independent scholar, to preparing public domain translations of ancient gospels not included in the New Testament. I regard Mark's work in making these gospels available online and usable by all as invaluable. I wish Mark only the best in continuing his work of making these texts easily accessible (without either sensationalizing or denigrating them). Gospels.net is his website now.

Andrew's website has been online since the early days, and I have happy memories of finding it, enthusing about it, and linking to it on the NT Gateway. I've just taken a look at the NT Gateway from seventeen years ago, and there it is on the Non-canonicals page, then titled "Jesus of Nazareth in Early Christian Gospels". I must admit that I do miss those simpler times when it was possible to be almost exhaustive in one's coverage of the area, and I miss the fun of hand-coding my web pages.

Going back a little further, it's a "Featured Link" in July 1999, with the comment "This fine web resource by Andrew Bernhard is the new version of the web site formerly known as The Quest of the Historical Jesus. This is a first class resource, featuring introductions, fresh translations, bibliography and links on canonical, non-canonical and hypothetical gospels. Its most notable new feature is The Greek Fragments of the Gospel of Thomas, an on-line edition of the Oxyrhynchus fragments of Thomas with translation."

But that is quite enough reminiscing. Andrew has now handed on his site to Mark Mattison, who is well known for his The Paul Page. The new gospels.net includes Mark's translations of The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, The Gospel of Judas, and other ancient gospels.

When I asked Andrew why he decided to transfer gospels.net to Mark, he replied:

Over the last five years or so, there have been a lot of changes in my life. As a result, my interests have changed pretty drastically, and I just realized that I personally wasn’t going to be devoting much more time or energy to the study of ‘lost gospels.’ I actually retired the site back in January, but then I changed my mind and decided it would be better to pass it on to somebody else. Mark seemed like the perfect fit, and I have no doubt he’ll make great use of the site. He’ll probably make it better than I ever did! Regardless, as far as my own scholarship on early Christianity is concerned, I am done.”

So this post is in part to say a big thank you to Andrew for his fine website, and the work he has put into it over the last two decades, and in part to thank Mark Mattison for taking it on and taking it forward.

Podcasts Update

I've updated the NT Gateway: Podcasts page with the two new podcasts that have been established recently, T. Michael Law's Septuagint Sessions and the T & T Clark Podcast, the first episode of which features Dominic Mattos interviewing Chris Keith.

Update (4 Nov. 2014): the second episode of the T & T Clark Podcast is now available and features an interview with Francesca Stavrakopoulou.

Markus Barth on Ephesians and Colossians

Over on New Testament Perspectives, Matthew Montonini has made available Markus Barth's Lectures on Ephesians and Colossians (audio), originally published on cassette in 1969, but now digitized.

I've added a link on the NT Gateway: Ephesians and Colossians page.

Update (4 Nov. 2014): Matthew was facing so much traffic on these files that people were no longer able to access them, so I have uploaded them to my webspace and Matthew has updated the links -- all are now working again.

New Online Journal: The Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting

Thanks to Stephen Goranson for the notice about this new venture from Eisenbrauns:

--
Introducing,
the Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting (JJMJS) -

FREELY AVAILABLE ONLINE FROM OCTOBER 20!

JJMJS is a new interdisciplinary peer-reviewed online journal, published in cooperation with Eisenbrauns.

A rich variety of Jewish and Christian traditions and identities mutually shaped one another in the centuries-long course of Roman Late Antiquity. A no less rich variety of scholarly approaches – from the history of Christian Origins to that of the late empire, from archaeology to Dead Sea Scrolls, from Rabbinics to Patristics – has in recent years converged upon this period, the better to understand its religious and social dynamics. JJMJS seeks to facilitate and to encourage such scholarly investigations across disciplinary boundaries, and to make the results of cutting-edge research available to a worldwide audience.

JJMJS is free of charge with complete open access. The journal is published in cooperation with Eisenbrauns and will be available in hard copy, which can be ordered from Eisenbrauns.

To download individual articles please click here. If you would like to share your ideas and interact with the articles published in our journal, please visit our Forum page. We welcome your interest and warmly invite your collaboration in this new scholarly enterprise.

For further information about the journal, please see the introduction by the co-editors in issue 1 (2014) and the About tab.

--

The first issue includes articles by Mark Nanos, Dieter Roth, Jonathan Klawans and Craig Evans. I must admit that I rather like the interface they are using too -- nice and clear and easy to use.

I have added a link on the NT Gateway: Journals page.

Philippians Videos

I'm enjoying teaching the Life and Letters of Paul this semester at Duke.  Today we reached the Epistle to the Philippians and I found a new video which I previewed in class.  It's another of the St John's Nottingham videos, and features Paula Gooder in typically lucid form:




I've added it to the NT Gateway: Philippians page just above the also excellent Bibledex: Philippians video from the University of Nottingham.

Biblical Studies Online Website

Several have already publicized this great new resource from James Crossley and Deane Galbraith, both friends of the bibliobloggers:

Biblical Studies Online

It uses a blog format, with individual tagged posts, to create a nice series of topics that can expand as time goes on, covering a good, full range of topics of interest to scholars and students of the NT.  I particularly like the stress on audio and video resources, and I've already found all sorts of things I did not know existed (like Chris Rowland lecturing on William Blake).  

I am looking forward to watching this site develop and to discovering lots of new resources.  I've added a link over on the NT Gateway, on the Biblical Resource Index Pages page.

The Bizarre Case of Google Books Unavailable Outside the U.S.

Over on the NT Gateway blog, I noted yesterday that William Wrede's Paul is now available in toto on Google Books. Accordingly, I added a link to the Paul: Books and Articles page. But then it appeared that a lot of people were unable to access the book. In comments, Holger Szesnat, my colleague on the NT Gateway, noted:

In my experience, most google books that are available in full view in the U.S.A. are not accessible outside of that country. I don’t even get ’snippet’ view of the ET of Wrede’s book. The publication date seems to make no difference. Particularly galling when, as I once noticed, a scan had been made at the Bodleian library in Oxford, but UK web visitors would be prevented from accessing the google book scan. Even worse when you live on the other side of the globe, with absolute no way of reading that book.

One thing that U.S.-based people can do though is this: download the google books PDF, and then upload it to archive.org – from where it is accessible to anyone. So much for google’s supposed copyright concern behind all this, incidentally. The German original is available on that site already: http://www.archive.org/details/pauluswred00wred

The rest of us (i.e. those who do not live in google-land) can use proxy servers like hotspot shield to get around the problem – as long as you are prepared to put up with slow speed and annoying advertisements.

Well, this was news to me. I am really surprised that books like this, over one hundred years old, are not showing up in some countries. I realize, of course, that copyright laws differ from country to country. Nevertheless, I am curious to know how widespread this kind of difference between Google Books at home and abroad is. Anyone else experienced this?

Now, if anyone would like to upload the PDF of Wrede's book to archive.org, it would be great to hear from you. As an interim measure, I have uploaded the PDF to my web space here:

W. Wrede, Paul (translated by E. W. Lummis; London: Philip Green, 1907) [PDF]

Update (14.01): Roger Pearse comments.

Continuing developments on the NT Gateway

I am delighted with the work that Holger Szesnat, who has joined the team at the NT Gateway, is doing in populating the site with lots more valuable resources. You can keep an eye on all our updates by following the NT Gateway blog.

Audio and Video

There has been a lot of talk recently in the biblioblogs about audio and video in the NT Studies area, and the usefulness of new audio and video resources in teaching (e.g. AKMA and Homilia of a Budding NT Scholar, among others, commenting on St John's College, Nottingham Youtube videos). This has made me realize that it is high time that I begin the task of integrating links to audio and video resources into particular areas of the New Testament Gateway, and not just in gather-all pages like the one I recently added on podcasts. It is early days yet, but I have added pages on Historical Jesus: Audio and Video and Paul the Apostle: Audio and Video. So far, I have added links mainly to BBC documentaries and discussions (all audio streaming) and some podcasts, but next I'd like to work out how to link to some video too, including projects like the St John's Nottingham one. There is a lot more work to be done in this area, but it's exciting to have this new beginning. Suggestions, of course, are welcome.

Podcasting -- everyone's at it!

In the words of Lily Allen, "everyone's at it". Well, six of us in the biblioblogging world, anyway! Steve Wiggins has a new podcast over on Sects and Violence in the Ancient World. I first saw reference to this on Daniel and Tonya's Hebrew and Greek Reader. There are three so far, the latest, Whence Monotheism, out today. It's a bit longer than 5 Minute Bible and the NT Pod. Because of this steady growth in the number of podcasts in our area, I have set up a new page on the NT Gateway on Podcasts (see also the recent NT Gateway blog post) and I'll be adding Steve Wiggins's next, though I'm hoping he sets up a separate tag for the podcasts because at the moment they simply occur among the other blog posts. Also today, a new Targuman podcast from Chris Brady.

The Return of the Gospel of Thomas Bibliography

On Thursday, I blogged about the Gospel of Thomas Bibliography authored by Sytze van der Laan, which disappeared from the internet in 2000. Within days of that post appearing, Sytze van der Laan popped up on the Gospel of Thomas e-list and announced that the site is back at a new location. Is this the longest hiatus in the history of Christian origins websites? Well, it is very welcome. Here is the new link:

Gospel of Thomas: Bibliography, Coptic and Greek Texts

I have, of course, returned it to the NT Gateway page on the Gospel of Thomas and have added a note on the blog over there about other new items on that page.

Greek Bible Study

I'm grateful to Sarah Madden for alerting me to a fine new site for working with the Greek New Testament and Septuagint:

Greek Bible Study
Anonymous site. Excellent, colour-coded Greek New Testament (Tischendorf) and Septuagint, with mouse-over Thayer word definitions (long and short), word studies, notes facilities and more. Unicode fonts, good search facilities, and a graduated reader based on William Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek.

I've added a link high up on my Greek New Testament Texts (test) page since those pages will soon be integrated into the site. (More soon).

New New Testament Gateway Prototype

Over the last few months, I have been doing some serious thinking about the future of the New Testament Gateway. I have outlined what I see as shortcomings in the past, so I won't repeat them here. I am now ready to float a solution. This solution involves using Blogger as my CMS (Content Management System), which has several advantages over the static HTML pages that have made up the New Testament Gateway for the last (almost) decade. In particular, it allows me to add other contributors to the site who can straightforwardly edit and update pages. But it also makes it much easier for me to maintain the site, and adds additional functionality like RSS feeds throughout, commenting facility and so on.

In an earlier post, I said that I was looking to add some wiki functionality to the site. Several people balked at this because it might potentially take away from the strength and identity of the site. I have listened to those comments and think that my current solution enables me to have the best of both worlds, to remain as director of the site and yet to add several experts in particular places.

I spent a lot of time exploring different ways that I might rework the New Testament Gateway, and I am grateful for the help of a group of people that I consulted about it (Zeth Green, Jonathan Robie, Danny Zacharias, Brandon Wason and Rick Brannan; also, separately, Stephen Carlson). Although, in the end, the decision to experiment with blogger has been my own decision, discussing the site with others was very helpful in clarifying what it was that I wanted to do.

Although I am using Blogger as my CMS for the prototype, most users will not realize. The look will be familiar; I have adapted the template I use for this blog but have integrated some elements from the current New Testament Gateway. Those familiar with the New Testament Gateway should find it easy to navigate. So far, I am just testing the site with the Greek New Testament Gateway, and that is the only part of the old site that I have ported over to the new format:

Greek New Testament Gateway (test)

Therefore the new version is contained within the links at the top of each page; the links in the side bar still take one to the old versions of the site.

Some brief notes:

(1) I have not yet edited any of the content. As soon as I am happy with the prototype, I will begin editing content, and inviting others to help. At this stage, we are just looking at design and function.

(2) Ultimately, the main URLs of the site will remain in tact, so NTGateway.com will still take one to the main page of the site (which will be redesigned, but more on that anon), NTGateway.com/greek will take one to the Greek New Testament Gateway and so on. The third layer of links, e.g. NTGateway.com/greek/fonts.htm, will, however, change because of the way that I am using blogger.

(3) As part of the redesign, I will be retiring certain parts of the old site. This will include the Bookshelves, and one or two other parts of the site that have fallen into disrepair. I will keep the related site, All-in-One Biblical Resources search, on-line but will not be integrating links to it in the new version, since it's now long in the tooth and technology has overtaken what it was doing well back in 2000 or so.

(4) One useful thing to come out of the consultations was that it became clear that while I have a clear idea of what "The New Testament Gateway" proper is, I have not always communicated that very well. Let me clarify that I think of The New Testament Gateway as the annotated directory of internet resources that are listed on the main page at NTGateway.com. The All-in-One Biblical Resources Search was a sister site, and the NTGateway Weblog is a companion blog. There are other materials hosted at NTGateway.com that are just that, materials hosted in that domain, but not part of the gateway.

I would be very grateful for your feedback. If this test version works OK, I will begin to re-jig the entire site.

Synoptic Project Website

Talking about Synopses, and especially colouring Synopses (Reflections on the Synopsis) reminded me that I needed to add a link to Ben Smith's Synoptic Project on The New Testament Gateway: Gospels and Acts: Texts and Synopses page. I have now done that and here is what I wrote:

The Synoptic Project
By Ben C. Smith: a superb resource which enables one to view the Synoptics in parallel in Greek and English, and then to add colour according to a variety of colour schemes. You can call up parallels either by beginning from the Itemized Itinerary or you can begin from an Inventory of Matthew or of Mark or of Luke. This Synoptic Project is not yet complete, but there is already enough done to confirm that this is likely to be an outstanding resource.

I must admit that I love playing with the colour schemes on offer, and am flattered that Ben labels one of his schemes "Goodacre" referring to the primary colours scheme I set out in The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze (see the companion website section Synopses for more).

While adding this, I realized a problem with the architecture of the NT Gateway, whereby people on the Synoptic Problem pages might not find their way to the Texts and Synopses page, so I have added a major link to the latter page on the former page. I am planning some substantial work on the architecture of the site this summer; more anon.

Type Greek

I've added a link to a fine new resource on my Greek Fonts page:

Type Greek
By Randy Hoyt: a very useful tool, describing itself as "a web-based software tool that converts text from a standard keyboard into beautiful, polytonic Greek characters as you type. Using an easy-to-learn and standardized system called beta code, TypeGreek converts your keystrokes into Unicode-compliant Greek in real-time."

If you are not yet typing in unicode, this may be just what you are looking for. It behaves in the same way as the Unicode Classical Greek Inputter by James Naughton, which has often been mentioned on this blog (see all my entries on Unicode).

One minor comment: I find that the iota subscript only works if I am using a standard US keyboard, so to get it to work on my current computers, I have to switch to a US keyboard from my default UK keyboard. My guess is that that is a peculiarity of using a US PC with a UK keyboard, so this issue may be unique to the tiny set of people like me. (And if you want to know why I use a UK keyboard, it's because the @ is in a different place; likewise inverted commas and the £ symbol; years of touch typing on a UK keyboard makes the switch to US difficult).

Maps

Over on Biblical Studies and Technological Tools, Mark Hoffman (mgvh) has a useful annotated list of free mapping resources on the web, Still more maps . . ., which provides some extras that it would be useful for me to add to my Maps page, so I will add it to my "things to do" file.

István Czachesz URL Update

I've adjusted the URL of Apostolic Commission Narratives in the Canonical and Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles by István Czachesz on my Non-Canonical Christian Texts page.

Historical Jesus articles update

A couple of updates on my Historical Jesus: Articles page: revised URL for Robert Miller's Jesus Seminar and Its Critics and the addition of E. P. Sanders, "The Question of Uniqueness in the Teaching of Jesus" (cf. my previous blog post on this).

Journals page update

I have updated the New Testament Gateway: Journals page, with an adjusted URL for Bibliotheca Sacra, with thanks to Tommy Wasserman for pointing it out.

Sorting Unicode Greek in MS Word

Steven Craig Miller has written a great little macro to facilitate sorting in MS Word a list of accented Greek words in Greek alphabetical order. I offered to host it here on the NT Gateway, and have added a link on the NT Greek Computer Software page, to the following effect:

Sorting Unicode Greek in MS Word [Zip archive]
By Steven Craig Miller. Click on the link to download a macro which facilitates sorting in MS Word a list of accented Greek words in Greek alphabetical order. Instructions on how to use the macro and exactly what it does is in a PDF file, while the macro itself is in a text file entitled "ConvertUnicodeGreek2Uppercase". For security reasons, a copy of the macro is also in the PDF file. This archive is hosted here at the NT Gateway, but if you have any questions, please e-mail the author of the macro at: stevencraigmiller@comcast.net.

Oh, and while I was at it, I updated all the links on that page too.