Archives for “Linguistics”
The so-called Synoptic Problem in biblical studies results from the search for an explanation of the similarities in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) that even in a cursory analysis essentially necessitates that there was borrowing between them. In many cases there are entire sentences that are reproduced verbatim in two or even all three of the Synoptics. Although the first to formulate the problem, Johann Jakob Griesbach, posited that Matthew and Luke were the source of Mark, the reverse order is the dominant theory today: the “priority of Mark” is the leading theory that posits Mark as the first written Gospel, which Matthew and Luke then used as a source.
Lately I’ve been interested to learn of Mark Goodacre’s special contribution to the argument for Markan priority. In essence, Dr. Goodacre has demonstrated that in parallel pericopes, while the different Gospels may differ significantly near the beginning of the passage, by the end they tend to conform to much more similar wording. After Goodacre goes on to show that the wording that corresponds more closely toward the end of each passage is more consistent with the wording of Mark throughout the rest of the passage, this amounts to a strong argument for Markan priority. This suggests that Mark was being used as the source, and the redactors of the other two Gospels, after starting off strong in their objective to make the story their own, had a tendency to undergo the effects of what Goodacre calls ”editorial fatigue”, i.e. they lapse into less creative, more verbatim borrowing from Mark.
- Dialectology and the Gospels Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels...
- Meandering through the Synoptics Ok, I promised to write stuff I find interesting as I go through my diss research, so here’s a couple thoughts I had tonight as I was researching. These will...
- An (ancient) introduction to “faith in Christ” vs. “Christ’s faith” Originally inspired by this recent post by Doug Chaplin, I exhumed a paper I wrote in third year Greek while an undergrad (I estimate this to be c. 2000-2001). As...
Ok, I’ll give this a try, although I didn’t get any bites with my last attempt at soliciting information from the learned…
I need to find the best references for textual variants in the Gospels. I’m not as much interested in the critically identified “best readings” of the text themselves, but good apparati that show the variants. Right now I’m finding that Aland’s invaluable Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum has a cracking good apparatus, but I need at least one more good source to try to fill in gaps. My goal is to identify variations between the Vorlage and each of the early translations I’ll be working with, so while I don’t have time to become a textual critic, I do have to avail myself of the best available critical work in order to get an idea of what each translation’s Vorlage might have looked like so that I’ll be able to distinguish a stylistic/synctactically significant divergent rendering from a calque of an obscure MS variant.
- Dialectology and the Gospels Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels...
- The Truth Project and critical thinking The most dangerous shyster is the one who has convinced himself to believe his own pitch. Over at The Creation of an Evolutionist, Mike is continuing to blog through his...
- Meandering through the Synoptics Ok, I promised to write stuff I find interesting as I go through my diss research, so here’s a couple thoughts I had tonight as I was researching. These will...
Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels may have originated/developed based upon dialectal considerations. As I run across patterns such as Matthew’s preference for plural nouns and lexical issues such as synonym substitution that by all appearances don’t significantly influence thematic or other conscious stylistic differences, I automatically think dialect, although of course idiolect variation occurs within a single dialect. This is contingent, of course, on being able to identify the place of origin for other texts with which they may be compared, so I recognize it’s a tall order. I assume there are plenty of guesses about where certain Gospels (John, for instance) originated based upon other considerations.
Related posts:- Help wanted: critical editions of the Gospels Ok, I’ll give this a try, although I didn’t get any bites with my last attempt at soliciting information from the learned… I need to find the best references for...
- Meandering through the Synoptics Ok, I promised to write stuff I find interesting as I go through my diss research, so here’s a couple thoughts I had tonight as I was researching. These will...
- Editorial fatigue : author :: progressive latitude : translator The so-called Synoptic Problem in biblical studies results from the search for an explanation of the similarities in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) that even in a cursory...
Using an analogy especially interesting to me as an historical linguist, Sabio Lantz at Triangulations reminds us of the power of understanding that the Christian faith isn’t quite as unique as we all like to think:
We often see that naive mono-linguists think their language is unique in its ability to express deep thoughts. Well of course they do — they have never mastered another language. A good way to cure this parochial blindness is to do comparative studies. Using comparative linguistics researchers have learned more about the very nature of language than by studying any one language in depth.
He draws a correlation (the same one I drew a while back) between comparative linguistics, which shows that the Indo-European languages are related by a common source language, and comparative biology, which shows us that all life is related by a common ancestor. He goes on:
Related posts:- The Truth Project and critical thinking The most dangerous shyster is the one who has convinced himself to believe his own pitch. Over at The Creation of an Evolutionist, Mike is continuing to blog through his...
- Proving Christianity with inerrancy In a discussion involving my rejection of inerrancy, a frequent commenter mentioned the inerrantist objection, ”Without [our Bible] can we confidently walk up to a non-believer and ask him to believe our own...
- The place of fear in our bibliology The other night, a friend and I reiterated our independent observations that, despite all nuances, what ultimately stands behind most of American Christianity’s implacable dedication to inerrancy is fear. Dr. Jim...
Ok, I promised to write stuff I find interesting as I go through my diss research, so here’s a couple thoughts I had tonight as I was researching. These will doubtless seem somewhat stream-of-consciousness, so I apologize in advance for any seasickness that results from an attempt on your part to read through the meandering thoughts of this Synoptic explorer.
(Please bear in mind that although I had a good class on the Synoptics over ten years ago, I’m not really conversant in the literature. My subject is primarily linguistic and related to early translations of the Synoptics from Greek, so I’m having to approach these biblical studies questions as a rank amateur.)
It strikes me once again that explaining the parallels between the Synoptics isn’t as difficult as explaining the differences. These are so perplexing because it appears at times that whole swaths of shared material are meticulously reworded so as not to be verbatim; tenses in verbs, number in nouns, virtually interchangeable lexical items, etc. are switched seemingly to avoid being word-for-word the same. Yet these will frequently occur amid whole phrases and sentences that are virtually identical between two or more of the Gospels, above and beyond the obvious identity of the general narrative enclosing them. The question arises, why is there this fluctuation between trivial differences in wording that don’t seem to play into authorial thematic emphases and entire sentences showing verbatim agreement?
Related posts:- Editorial fatigue : author :: progressive latitude : translator The so-called Synoptic Problem in biblical studies results from the search for an explanation of the similarities in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) that even in a cursory...
- Dialectology and the Gospels Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels...
- Help wanted: critical editions of the Gospels Ok, I’ll give this a try, although I didn’t get any bites with my last attempt at soliciting information from the learned… I need to find the best references for...
First of all, I have decided to try to use this blog as something other than a distraction from my doctoral work. Specifically, I’m going to try to figure out ways of including aspects of my research for my dissertation here (but not so much that I get ripped off, of course). For those who don’t know, I am ABD in a PhD program in historical linguistics at the University of Georgia. My dissertation involves translations of the Gospels into a few languages for whom those translations are among the earliest attestations. It’s more interested in linguistic aspects of those translation languages than the Gospels qua biblical literature, but my interaction with them is bound to bleed over, at least in my understanding and familiarity with them. So we’ll see how that goes.
Related posts:- Dialectology and the Gospels Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels...
- Meandering through the Synoptics Ok, I promised to write stuff I find interesting as I go through my diss research, so here’s a couple thoughts I had tonight as I was researching. These will...
A recent study in Nature News that I just read about is of interest to my field of graduate study, Indo-European linguistics. Of special interest to me, it ties in historical linguistics, the theory of evolution, and the nature of scientific inquiry in an interesting way.
Historical linguists have long supposed a link between most of the languages of Europe and India’s Sanskrit, an ancient forerunner of modern Hindi and a few other Indian languages. This link is now universally accepted to be common descent: they all shared a proto-language, spoken by a single population before splitting up and “evolving” into many of today’s languages.
The “common ancestor” of this family of languages is referred to as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). As with biological evolution, we can reconstruct its path and make suppositions about interrelationships based upon shared similarities and/or differences. Our suppositions cannot be confirmed: no one’s going to find a cassette recording or a written document in PIE, so our reconstructions will never be confirmed that way, although various stages before that proto-form have been captured and fleshed out our understanding better. Similarly, evolution, while corroborated by ancient evidence all the time, never stands a chance of finding a fossil of the first single-celled life. A fossil or a document of more “transitional forms” would be nice, but they’re not necessary to make a reasonable extrapolation that the ones we have found share ancestry.
Related posts:- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Indo-Europeans Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline. Once upon a time, in an area...
- Genetic map of Europe Click to enlarge The New York Times has published an article on the results of a genetic study that sought to show the genetic interrelationships of the peoples of...
- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Birth of Historical Linguistics Earlier I made mention of the consistency of sound changes, what the nineteenth-century German grammarians called the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze (the “exceptionlessness of sound change”) . The catalyst for this...
Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline.
Once upon a time, in an area hypothesized to be along the steppes of Russia, on the north side of the Black Sea, lived a people called the Indo-Europeans. They spoke a language we refer to as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Gradually over the period of 3000-2000 BC, tribes within that culture began to migrate to other areas, taking their particular dialects of late PIE with them. Eventually, this culture ended up splintered into several groups that spanned from Europe in the west to India and the Xinjiang region of northwest China. As time passed and isolation from other tribes increased, each of these dialects became their own distinct languages and evolved as languages always do so that by the time of recorded history there was little real mutual intelligibility between the non-contiguous tribal dialects; these dialects became the branches, or language families, of Indo-European.
Related posts:- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Birth of Historical Linguistics Earlier I made mention of the consistency of sound changes, what the nineteenth-century German grammarians called the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze (the “exceptionlessness of sound change”) . The catalyst for this...
- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Tools of the Trade My last post dealt with the anthropological side of my discipline. Most of what we know about the history of the Indo-European people groups comes not from historical records per...
- Genetic map of Europe Click to enlarge The New York Times has published an article on the results of a genetic study that sought to show the genetic interrelationships of the peoples of...