Wayne Leman has been posting portions of a paper by Mark Strauss entitled Why the English Standard Version (ESV) should not become the Standard English Version over on the Better Bibles Blog. It’s long, and so it comes in parts, beginning here. Strauss highlights numerous problems with the ESV, its translation, its use of English,…
Author: martin
Husband, father, some time Old Testament lecturer, IT consultant, and other things as well...
bible codes, part II: gematria
Having previously discussed the Bible’s use of Atbash codes, it is time to look at the other type of code probably found in the Bible (as opposed to those people erroneously see there), that is, gematria.1 Before going too far, if you don’t have decent unicode support in you OS and browser, you’re going to…
where was the garden of eden?
OK, the correct answer is “I don’t know.” (But we did come across an idyllic valley during our travels in Tasmania once…) Genesis doesn’t tell us too much, and although we know of two of the rivers identified (the Tigris and the Euphrates), there’s no consensus on precisely what the other two rivers refer to….
the dirt on dirt
I’ve just seen yet another ad for a product which will kill 99.9% of all household germs. I’m worried about the 0.1% that are tough enough to survive and then have free reign since our anti-bacterial wonder-sprays have left the field completely free from competition. Surely they’re the germs we really should be worrying about,…
educational nursery rhymes
Just a quick post this week. It has long struck me that there are educational opportunities we miss with young children, one of them being in the realm of nursery rhymes and other songs we teach the kiddies. In our house I’ve tried (with limited success) to introduce some variations to the normal wording in…
disciplining children
Everyone has something to say about the best way to discipline children, even people without children! In Christian circles it is common to emphasize the “biblical” approach to discipline, an approach which inevitably (and not inappropriately) turns to advice from the book of Proverbs. Here are a few of the verses in Proverbs to which…
bible codes, part I: atbash
Now the title to this post ought to be enough to signal that things could very easily get very strange (or perhaps “silly” is a better word)—am I about to predict the date of Jesus’ return? or perhaps disclose the results of some future sporting event? Are next week’s lotto numbers hidden in the pages…
is everything we do ‘worship’?
There’s a tendency among many evangelicals—at least many of those with whom I’m familiar—to take Rom 12:1 as the basis for arguing that the Bible tells us that all we do should be described as “worship.”1 As a corollary to this, the point is often also made that referring to parts of a church service…
is it always wrong for christian couples to choose to remain childless?
Recently, Lionel Windsor over on the the Sola Panel wrote an article entitled Welcoming Children in which he argued that it is inappropriate for Christians who marry to plan not to have children: The Bible teaches that marriage is good, and that one of the indispensable reasons for marriage is children. So if you notice…
בראשית or ΕΝ ΑΡΧΗ or “in the beginning” part II
OK, I’ve been having some trouble getting unicode to display with WordPress, I tried upgrading, but nothing seemed to work. Finally I managed to get it working by editing wp-includes/wp-db.php and commenting out the lines setting the $collation_query to “SET NAMES utf8”. For some reason, this now seems to have things working and I can…