Happy New Year (Really)!

Well, my last post was early, but now I can officially wish y'all a very happy new year! Ah, 2007! This should be a good year, I think. Tomorrow, my resolution is to bring some new asisaid Challenge questions for my wonderful blog readers to be tormented with.

In the mean time, just a few moments ago, I decided on a few resolutions:

1. I don't have a lot of hope for learning a musical instrument, but it is time I became fluent in at least musical notation. Then I could play around with MIDI stuff and maybe compose something (even though I couldn't play whatever I came up with).
2. Aim for fluency in Greek. I want to be able to read the Greek New Testament as my primary Bible some day. Maybe not this year, but this is the year I need to expand into reading it more often.
3. Write a book. I need to quit talking about this and actually put the pen to the paper. I have the beginnings of a novel as well as a book on philosophy of religion. One of them should be at least in a rough draft by the end of 2007.

Feel free to share your resolutions below. Once again, Happy New Year!

Nifty Bible

I just opened a Christmas gift of the Reformation Study Bible (ESV). It is edited by R.C. Sproul and has extensive notes on each page. It reminds me a lot of my Harper-Collins Study Bible (NRSV), save that it comes from a conservative scholarly viewpoint rather than a liberal scholarly viewpoint. It is nice to see it is a scholarly conservative viewpoint — the type of thing Sproul is good at providing — usually conservative leaning study Bibles seem to ignore or entirely dismiss the other side without sticking to scholarship. This new Bible and my Harper-Collins ought to balance things quite nicely. It seems to deal with points such as the documentary hypothesis rather fairly even as it expresses its disagreement with those points.

Oddly, for my general detachment from the KJV tradition (other than that I like the way the KJV sounds), my two study Bibles have a heritage linked to it. I'm not familiar with precisely how much influence the KJV exerted over the NRSV and the ESV, but the former is the official heir to the RSV and the ESV apparently draws enough from the RSV to merit reference to the RSV copyright.

Interestingly, the ESV apparently picks up the middle ground on gender translation, favoring a neuter reference (such as “people”) when the original text is not referring specifically to a male, but retaining the usage of “brothers” and other similar words as opposed to “brothers and sisters.”

I've ended up with two other ESV Bibles over the last six months, but I've not yet investigated it much. We'll see. I'm still partial to the NIV and NCV and I'm still using the NLT the most (since that's what edition of the One Year Bible I own).

To use Christopher's phrase, me likey.