Jewish daily prayer now available on your PDA

Tibet Rights reports on JewBerry, a Blackberry program that a large number of Hebrew Jewish texts for daily prayer. In 1999 I owned a Handspring PDA that had the Book of Common Prayer on it. Now the iPhone has applications for the ESV Bible and the BCP.

‘m glad to see that everyone is taking advantage of these technologies. I particularly enjoyed these remarks, that show technology helping to blend the sacred into the secular:

“Throughout the day, Jews gather in office-building stairwells and conference rooms to pray, and while sometimes you might not remember your prayer book, no one goes anywhere without their BlackBerry,” says co-creator Jonathan Bennett, of Cedarhurst, Long Island.

Among JewBerry users is the president of Yeshiva University, Richard Joel.

“I love it, because now I can not only look how the market is doing, but I can also say my evening prayers,” he says, adding that “at the heart of what Yeshiva is about is the notion that it’s not our technology that informs civilization; it’s our values.”

Link.

Zondervan sued for NIV translation

Grand Rapids NBC affiliate WOOD-TV reports that Bradley Fowler is suing Zondervan for $60 million. NBC25 online also carries the story.

His complaint? Zondervan sells New International Version (NIV) Bibles that translate the 1 Corinthians 6:9 word arsenokoitai with the word “homosexual.” The NIV was published in 1978 and many churches have adopted it widely. As a result, Fowler expects an apology and the $60 million for the resultant suffering at the hands of his own church and family.

From the article:

He claims the company is misinterpreting the Bible by specifically using the word homosexuals. Fowler admits that every Bible printed is a translation, interpreted in some way, but he says specifically using that word is not a translation but a change.

“These are opinions based on the publishers,” he said. “And they are being embedded in the religious structure as a way of life.”

Fowler says he came across the discrepancy while researching a book. He says Zondervan Bibles published in the 1980s use the word homosexuals in the Corinthian passage in question, but earlier and later ones don’t.

Part of the problem is discerning the responsible party. Zondervan only publishes and sells Bibles, it does not translate them. The list of tranlsations that they publish and sell is an alphabet soup: AMP, KJV, NASB, NIV, NIrV, NRSV, TNIV. The copyright holder for the NIV translation is the International Bible Society and the translation work actually done by the Committee on Bible Translation.

The job of Zondervan is in publication: taking a particular translation, adding commentary notes, appending an index, maps, pictures, etc. These packaged study Bibles are additionally copyright by Zondervan. They do not actually create the translation but they do make it widely available. My suspicion is that the responsibility lies with the translators and not the packager-publisher.

Unfortunately, suing a 1970s-era translation committee can’t really get an apology or $60 million dollars. Going after Zondervan (owned by HaperCollins and, in turn, owned by Fox News Corp.) can get these things.

Has Bradley Fowler suffered “20 years of emotional duress and mental instability?” Without doubt. Can he link it to his church’s and his family’s use of the NIV translation of 1 Corinthians 6:9? It seems so. What’s the best way forward? Perhaps not to go it alone against Zondervan-Harper-Fox, but to take a class-action suit against the translation’s copyright holder (IBS) or the translation committee (CBT). It won’t get the reparation money, but it has a better chance of success and of making a difference.

Greek geek paragraph: When I’m in my office, I’ll check my BDAG lexicon for its sense of arsenokoitai. Other translations, such at the King James Version, the American Standard Bible and the New American Bible do not translate it this way. The NRSV renders it as “sodomites.” The recently-translated TNIV and ESV render it as “practicing homosexuals.”

Update: ThinkChristian has also picked up the story (hi guys!). MetaFilter lists it in a series of other actions taken by gay activists following the California gay marriage fight.

News roundup: The Christian Post has picked up the story also. So has WSMV Nashville, which adds that Thomas Nelson Publishing has been named in the suit for $10 million. Thomas Nelson is based in Tennessee.

Christians crazy-go-nuts with Wordle

Wordle is an application to create tag clouds. The clouds show, proportional to size, the frequency of words in a text. It’s not a bad way to get the gist of what a text is all about. Commonly used on blogs to get the sense of what the whole blog is about, Wordle is getting used with arbitrary texts and, especially, Christian texts.

The ESV Bible blog has wordled the ESV Bible. (Both New Testament and complete Bible texts.)

Another blog carried wordles of individual books of the Bible.

On Wordle is Luther’s 95 Theses.

On Wordle is Jonathan Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

On Wordle is also John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Someone has also done a lovely wordle of the Psalms in Hebrew. (See above.)

By the by, the largest words in Hebrew above are “LORD,” “God,” “eternal,” “my soul,” “all,” and “not.”

Weeds and Wheat: Jesus Christ and Marcus Yallow

One of today’s Bible readings is Matthew 13:24-30, the Parable of the Wheat and Weeds. In the ESV, it goes like this:

He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

Today I was also reading Cory Doctorow’s new novel Little Brother. In chapter 8, the Department of Homeland Security seeks to root out terrorists by testing an individual persons’ behavior against some normative behavior. The test passes and the person is innocent (wheat); the test fails and the person is a terrorist (weed). Trouble is: statistical error makes this kind of discernment difficult. In the words of Cory:

If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here’s a math lesson you need to learn first. It’s called “the paradox of the false positive,” and it’s a doozy.

Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that’s 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result — true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.

One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a “false positive” — the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn’t. That’s what “99 percent accurate” means: one percent wrong.

What’s one percent of one million?

1,000,000/100 = 10,000

One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you’ll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won’t identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify 10,000 people as having it.

Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent inaccuracy.

That’s the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test’s accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you’re looking for. If you’re trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer — a test — that’s one atom wide or less at the tip.

This is the paradox of the false positive, and here’s how it applies to terrorism:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.

That’s pretty rare all right. Now, say you’ve got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren’t anywhere close to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events — a person is a terrorist — with inaccurate systems.

Is it any wonder we were able to make such a mess?

Telling the difference between actual wheat and a weed is pretty easy. That test has just about no chance of error. But for someone without a green thumb, telling the difference between the good plants and the weeds isn’t as easy. Just the same way, you can’t tell the difference between a terrorist and an innocent person very easily. Cory estimates that 40-60% accuracy is about right, but I’m not as optimistic.

It’s an interesting collision of two readings today. Saint Matthew and Cory Doctorow both put the same paradox of false positive into the mouths of Jesus and Marcus. Be careful when trying to root out the weeds (you probably aren’t as good at it as you think)! For now, the wheat and the weeds will just have to live together.

The Passion in Google Maps

From the ESV Bible Blog:

This week is Passion Week (or Holy Week), the week that commemorates the final week of Jesus’ life. It encompasses Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday through his resurrection on Easter.

Here’s a Google Map that shows what happened where during this week in and around Jerusalem (including a harmonization of the four Gospel accounts). Click a letter on the map for details of what occurred in each place.

Link to Google Maps to see it all.

Amazon, Kindle and Bible copyrights

The ever-strange Washington Times carries commentary on Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. Fred Reed raises the question about the problems of selling e-book content that is in the public domain. While it’s within Amazon’s business model to sell an “e” edition of a work published by a company, what happens when one charges for a work in the public domain?

From the article:

Kindle is close to being mass marketable. However, the economics seem hazardous for Amazon. The company makes money, legitimately enough, by selling physical books that are out of copyright. If you want your child to read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” Amazon will sell you a copy. I don’t know what proportion of a bookseller’s income derives from the sale of books in the public domain, but it has to be considerable — the Bible, the classics and so on.

Reed glosses over the concept that the Bible is in the public domain. It is not. Particular translations of the Bible have copyrights applied to them. The (New) Revised Standard Version is held in copyright by the National Council of Churches. The English Standard Version is held by a division of Good News Publishers. The New American Bible by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Specific publishings of study Bibles are also held in copyright. My HarperCollins Study Bible is the NRSV. The Biblical text is copyright by the NCC and the support material held by HaperCollins, itself a holding of News Corporation.

In the US, only the King James Version is held in the public domain. For the UK, the King James Version is held in perpetual Crown Copyright and not public domain. I’m no copyright expert and won’t touch this one with a ten-foot pole.
So, don’t worry about Amazon raking in money based on Kindle “e” editions of the Bible. They will be paying out big bucks to the publishers and holding companies for the right to distribute particular translations and editions.

Holy Bible: Wiki Standard Version. 2.0. Beta.

Via ThinkChristian, Iyov reports on YouVersion, a Bible commentary done wiki-style. I posted earlier on what a wiki catechism might be like, so this is a good opportunity to expand this theme.

Like Wikipedia, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Part of the experiment of Wikipedia is to see what happens when people dump their knowledge into an empty wiki without restriction. Largely a social experiment, the purpose is not to replace the  trusted and reviewed editors of actual encyclopedias.

Rather, a new technology has enabled a new kind of collaboration. Wikipedia and Barcamp are two concepts that just couldn’t exist prior to these technologies. Some friends of mine did a similar experiment with a board game. They sent a simple board game and some playing pieces to their friends and asked their friends to write the rules themselves. Once they send the rules back, then ask, “what kind of games did they come up with?”

Similarly, rather than having a Bible commentary written by trained, trusted, vetted and reviewed theologians, what happens when people (not even just Christians or Jews) write their own commentary? What is the result? By what fruits will it be known?

Like the Talmud, rather than editing out minority opinions, they are retained as part of the text. In the margins, yes, but still better than burned and forgotten.

I looked up John 1:1, just to taste the fruit of the wiki commentary. So far I see some attacks on Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have a minority interpretation of this verse. Some exegete the doctrine of the Trinity. Another posts a video based on the verse, used at a Christmas service. One person simply remarks, “I love this verse.” Just about none of these would be found in a traditional commentary. In fact, I’d argue that they don’t belong in a traditional commentary. That’s why they are here.

Elegant Bible art: relationship networks in the Scriptures

Following up on Google Earth-style views of Biblical scenes, Chris Harrison has mashed up art and the Scriptures.

(making the rounds: Boing Boing and Think Christian)

Again, the comments on various blogs are divergent but enlightening. I particularly enjoyed this comment on Boing Boing:

i like that way that, if i knew nothing about the bible other than what i could work out from these charts, i’d assume jesus was a minor character in it. notable, but still minor.also, it kind of recasts the bible for me as being less about interesting and unusual people like jesus and moses and more about geography.

this one too:

The cast of players in the Bible makes the list of characters in even the thickest and most convoluted Victorian novel look as short as a list of W’s bestest friends. It’s cool to have a chart that ties them all together.

(Tangent update: while you’re at it, check out these pictures of computer center cabling.  It gets my art-appreciating sense tingling as well as my OCD neatnik sense tingling.)

Scientology vs. Christianity on copyright

Jonathan Kay, writing for the National Post, muses on one of the differences between Scientology and Christianity (and Islam for that matter). He opines that Scientology, through its litigious copyright enforcement, closes off its primary texts in serious contrasts to Christianity, which keeps its Bible free and open. Further, he says that one of the marks of a “bona fide” faith is the freedom to criticize it.

From the article:

[Officials in the Church of Scientology] have also tried to get Google to exclude anti-Scientology websites from its search results, and used hardball legal tactics to harass, bankrupt and intimidate their critics — many of them disaffected former members. In the United States, the Church of Scientology also has been a staunch backer of draconian copyright legislation. If you want to know whether Scientology qualifies as a “religion” on par with other bona fide faiths, try to imagine the Catholic Church or the Saudi royal family charging people tens of thousands of dollars to learn their religious tenets, and suing anyone who dared republish the Koran™ or Bible™ on the internet.

Read it here.

Copyright and the Biblical Canon

The New Testament is preserved in about 25,000 ancient manuscripts in many languages (principally Greek, but also Latin, Syriac, Ethiopic and others) found all around the Mediterranean. How did we get 25,000 copies of a text, stored in many diverse (off-site) locations, in any number of media (languages)? By rampant copying and duplication.

Even before the advent of duplicating machinery like photocopiers and computers, Christians spread the New Testament text across Europe, Asia and Africa. Not only that, but they did it so well that the text has can generally be considered reliable.

It’s hard to make an appeal to what the Bible says “in the original” when it is made up of thousands of varying manuscripts like this. However, through the exciting and incredibly nerdy science of textual criticism, that’s the endeavor promises to do: a reliable reconstruction from a diverse set of near-duplicates. (Textual criticism’s methods are not essentially different from making computer backups, CRC’s, or diffs.)

Without the freedom to share and the freedom to back up or to copy, there would be no Bible. If the Church in Rome had decided never to make a copy of Paul’s letter or to share it with nearby churches, we would certainly have no record of it today. If Mark decided that Matthew and Luke had to pay exorbitant royalties to make their derivative gospels, Christians would be poorer for it.

It is notable that Christian Gnostics, who focused on keeping their doctrines and teachings secret, had their documents lost, quite literally, to the sands of time. Only 20th century archaeologists have now been able to find their hidden witness.

To be Christian is to owe a debt to forerunners who duplicated and copied freely and without concern. We owe it to them to be interested in the same causes today.