Scale in literature: with reference to the New Testament and other texts in English and Greek

This dissertation explores "scale" in literature in general, and in the New Testament epistles in particular. All creative activity has its locus at an appropriate point within a wide scale spectrum: literature is no exception. This became apparent in 1965 when scale relationships were observed by the author in cumulative sum graphs of the Pauline epistles. Such scale differences are familiar to architects who use scale as a creative tool, but a wide search through standard reference books, surveys of work on statistical stylometry, linguistics and Biblical studies failed to provide any evidence that scholars were aware of scale in literature.Further investigation revealed that scale differences were to be found in many fields of creativity, in architecture, art, photography, music and engineering. Also explored was an interesting parallel found in the multi-layered scaling associated with the mathematics of chaos.To provide a broader perspective through which to view the Pauline epistles, 80 works by six modern authors and the writings of three ancient Greek authors were selected as test material. Graphs were prepared showing the sentence sequences and distributions of these works comprising over 400,000 words, and scale differences were found, not only between works, but also between sections of individual works. These were related to differences in genre, and this raised serious questions concerning the statistical homogeneity of samples containing scale differences. Care was taken to relate patterns directly to the content of the text and to the findings of Biblical scholarship.Links with theology revealed that the sense of the numinous presence, and the sense of the sublime in art, were on occasion directly reflected in sentence length. Human moods and feelings were found to have unpredictable but measurable manifestations in terms of scale in literature.The Pauline epistles revealed a common scaling structure of varying degrees of complexity, and a mathematical model was devised to demonstrate that major parts of all thirteen epistles share similar unusual scaling features. Significant patterns of a different kind were also found covering the texts of Hebrews and substantial portions of 1 and 2 Peter. It is submitted that these patterns provide new hard evidence which must be considered together with the evidence from other sources in arriving at conclusions concerning the authorship of the New Testament epistles

Spatial metaphors of the ancient world: theory and practice

Group C-2 of the Excellence Cluster 264 Topoi Space and Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Texts is dedicated to the study of spatial metaphors and their functions in texts of different genres, languages, and epochs. This outline of the work of group C-2 takes as its point of departure and theoretical framework a general linguistic typology of spatial metaphors. This outline is followed by a series of case studies ranging from wisdom texts and philosophical treatises to tragedy and from Ancient Egyptian to Shakespearean English. These examples are aimed at illustrating both the challenges and the possibilities of the study and interpretation of spatial metaphors in their respective contexts

Taylor University Online Course Catalog 2009

The 2009 catalog of Taylor University Online at Taylor University Fort Wayne.https://pillars.taylor.edu/institute-correspondence/1021/thumbnail.jp

The theological purpose of First Timothy as an ethic for the universal church

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/2035/thumbnail.jp

Biblia Arabica: An Update on the State of Research

The aim of this contribution is to review some of the major areas of current research on the Arabic Bible, along with the factors and trends contributing to them. Also we present some of the tools that are currently under development in the Biblia Arabica team, Munich. We provide here a very condensed survey of the transmission of traditions, as well as ways that biblical manuscripts in Arabic have been analysed and classified, covering both Old Testament/ Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Overall, the lack of critical editions for Arabic biblical texts in general reflects not just the overwhelming number of versions and manuscripts, but also the fundamental challenge these translations present on the level of textuality. Standard paradigms of authorship and transmission break down in the face of the complex reuse, revision, and layering of paratexts seen in these texts. It is the careful study of manuscripts, not simply as texts but also as physical objects, which holds promise for reconstructing the practices of producers and consumers of the Arabic Bible. A union catalogue of Arabic Bible manuscripts will gather the paleographic and codicological information necessary for further research. Moreover, it will link manuscripts, translators, and scribes to the online Bibliography of the Arabic Bible, which is intended to be a comprehensive, classified, and searchable reference tool for secondary literature. In conclusion, scholarship of the Arabic Bible now has considerable momentum, but must continue to keep its fundamental resource – that of manuscripts – in the foreground of research

Echoes of Scripture and the Jewish Pseudepigrapha in the Pastoral Epistles: Including a Method of Identifying High-interest Parallels

Within Biblical studies, the term ‘echoes of Scripture’ is often used to describe a detailed study of verbal parallels (or potential references) between the New Testament and the Jewish Scriptures (i.e. Christian Old Testament). This present study expands upon this tradition by seeking to identify verbal parallels between the Pastoral Epistles and two different sets of source texts: the Septuagint and the Greek manuscripts of the Jewish Pseudepigrapha. The parallels are detected using a method that is analogous to the syntax analysis phase of a compiler or a natural language processor. As such, the study defines a set of syntax rules for textual references in Ancient Greek literature and then scans these rules to find instances when they are true (or satisfied). Based on the literary theory of allusions, the method relies upon the rarity of the matching words in order to highlight the most likely parallels for further evaluation as potential references. During this search process, the method also generates metadata that can be used to evaluate the relative influence of each set of source texts

Network Science in Biblical Studies: Introduction

Source at https://asejournal.net/.The notion of a network is ingrained in contemporary culture. In everyday English parlance, we casually talk about television networks, computer networks, professional networks, telephone networks, and so on. Even though the word has a technological flavor, the idea of a network is purely mathematical at its core. A network (or graph in mathematical language) is an abstract model that consists of two kinds of elements: nodes connected by links. The nodes of a network can represent social actors, cities, molecules, computers, words, and basically anything we want to think about in terms of network theory. A link represents some connection between two nodes, such as the friendship between two people, a piece of wire connecting two machines, a shared characteristic of two entities, a web link from one page to the other, or a flight route between two cities.1 Figure 1 shows a widely used example of a small social network, the friendship network of Zachary’s Karate club, with nodes standing for members of the club and links representing friendship ties between them. Once we decide what the nodes and the links stand for, an abstract model of the underlying real-world phenomenon can be built that lends itself to further analysis (see below)