J. Mark Bertrand writes for Lectio about a gorgeous new edition of the Bible:
When 2014’s Kickstarter sensation Bibliotheca finally delivered at the end of last year, I called its creator, Adam Lewis Greene. […] The longer you have to wait, the more your expectations build. And the higher your expectations, the greater the risk of disappointment. The unexpected popularity of the Bibliotheca project on Kickstarter brought a whole genre of Bibles — the multi-volume, reader-friendly kind — out of the archive of past ideas. Before, the conventional wisdom had been that nobody wanted a beautifully designed and produced edition of Scripture separated into volumes so as to do away with the necessity for super-thin pages and super-small print. (Or at least, nobody wanted to pay for it.) When Bibliotheca raised nearly $1.5 million for exactly such an edition, the conventional wisdom was quickly revised. […]
Bibliotheca turned out even better than I expected. And Adam’s interest in typography proved to be much more than a hipster affection (as more than one cultural commentator had opined): the level of care taken in every aspect of the page design and typesetting was breathtaking to observe.
For example, the first thing I saw when I opened the first volume at random was an example of hanging punctuation, a quotation mark sitting just outside the edge of the column so as not to disturb the visual flow. It’s a gorgeous detail. […] To understand the spirit of Bibliotheca’s design, you have to recognize first and foremost the kind of reader-friendly book it is. This is not a mass market paperback. Not a thriller off the bestseller list. Bibliotheca is designed like an art book. (Not surprisingly, it is also printed by a firm in Germany that prints art books.) Where one kind of design strives for populist accessibility, another aims for the kind of minimalist purity that exalts its content — or rather, signals that its content is meant to be exalted. The designer doesn’t presume to make it beautiful; rather, the designer recognizes its inherent beauty and designs accordingly. That’s what Bibliotheca does.
But of course what primarily interested me was the translation:
Bibliotheca’s revision to the American Standard Version was so extensive that, as I predicted, it has now been copyrighted as the American Literary Version. While I don’t comment much on translations at Bible Design Blog, I thought I might make some observations about the ALV. […]
A word I would never use to describe either this format or this translation, however, is accessible. The translation is literary, and occasionally archaic. In Isaiah 7.3 you read, “Go forth, pray, to meet Ahaz,” and might be forgiven for thinking God is instructing Isaiah to pray before the meeting. We don’t use pray to sweeten our requests anymore, except for the gossipy pray tell. […] Influenced by Robert Alter’s translation philosophy, the ALV shows a desire to maintain some of the distance between an ancient book and a modern reader. The aim is not, in other words, to render the rough-hewn polyglot lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean into a contemporary equivalent. Success isn’t measured by convincing the reader the Bible might have been written sometime last week. The ‘difficulties’ a colloquial translator might shake his head over are in this case intentional, purposeful. Just as the page layout and the way the books are bound is intended to produce an impression, so is the text of the translation.
As my original interviews with Adam Lewis Greene indicate, he designed the typefaces used in Bibliotheca himself. The text font is Katharos, from the Greek word for clean or pure, suggesting something that has been set apart. The title font, Katharos Archaic, is based on the text face, containing only capital letters and numbers. Based on hand-drawn forms and refined over the course of many revisions, the type resembles to my untutored eye the work of Eric Gill, one of Greene’s typographical influences.
Adam shared an observation with me that is worth passing along, because it illustrates how seriously he took the task of designing this edition from the ground up. A friend of his whose book had recently been published complained that the type, Eric Gill’s classic Perpetua, actually hurt his eyes during extended reading. How could Gill be such a master if his work caused headaches? Well, the sufferer was asking the right person. Adam explained that there is a problem with digital versions of Gill’s typefaces: they are based on the original letterforms rather than the actually printed pieces Gill oversaw.
“He designed Perpetua to be printed letterpress, not offset,” Adam explained. “The impression of letterpress printing causes the ink to ‘quash,’ which gives the letters a visibly more robust appearance, not to mention the added dimension caused by the impression. Gill always accounted for this phenomena in his designs.” […] A number of charming flourishes were incorporated into the font as Adam tinkered with various iterations throughout the production process. I am particularly fond of the elegant ligatures, especially the way Katharos renders the combination ff, as seen in the photo above. Check out “depart from off them,” for example. As I noted earlier, this is a triumph built from small details.
Do take a look at the photos! I got this from MetaFilter, where you will find a link to another rave by Grayson Gilbert, if you want to read more about it. (We discussed Robert Alter here and here.)
the rough-hewn polyglot lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean
What, Biblical Hebrew? Biblical Hebrew poetry?
Shome mishtake shurely. Presumably thinking of Koine Greek. Less wrong then. (But still, “rough-hewn”? Tell it to Luke.)
Yes, I found that odd.
How is that supposed to be non-disturbing? It sure doesn’t work for me. Is it a shibboleth for typographical connoiseurs?
The impression of letterpress printing causes the ink to ‘quash,’
Interesting expression, although the usual form seems to be “ink squash”. I wonder if this is a common issue with digitized versions of old typefaces?
The example in the Wikipedia page shows the effect turned up to quite an extreme level. It should be at a level where you don’t consciously notice it, in the same way you don’t notice kerning – the way spacing varies between different pairs of letters.
Having said that, I may be conflating it with optical margin alignment, and the example on the Wikipedia page may instead be illustrating the stylistic choice where the punctuation is deliberately and noticeably 100% outside the margin. The precise distinction is probably, yes, an argument for the connoisseurs, but what the original article seems to be exclaiming over is the more subtle effect where the punctuation characters are subtly positioned so that the margin looks more even than it would if they were positioned naïvely.
I don’t know about shibboleth, but it is generally seen as a tell of high class typesetting. But as with all things to do with classy typesetting, if you actually do see it – you notice it without looking for it – then the typesetter has blown their cool.
Ah, of course. Thanks!
Is it just me, or does this cause head-scratching for others?
“ The five hardcover volumes are bound in book cloth on a spectrum of shades from dark charcoal to white, the minimalist titles standing out in gold gilt.
source: https://www.lectio.org/blog/2017/6/7/bibliotheca-mon-amour
“J. Mark Bertrand is a novelist and pastor whose writing on Bible design has helped spark a publishing revolution.“
Well, I suppose that explains it. Mustn’t confuse German silver gilt or tin gilt with the real deal.
This is from the MetaFilter link at the end of the original post.
s mobile never dies.
I find the opening quotation mark a good idea, actually, but the opening parenthesis very much not, and on the right side the asterisk probably works but the entire rest doesn’t.
I used to think the relationship between combed and unkempt was obvious to native speakers. I’ve since encountered numerous clear examples of evidence to the contrary.
(Pity. I thought there was an extra joke in “he of bad hair and unkempt toenails, whom we do not like very much at all”.)
I see it comes with a literal bibliotheca – a box for the Bible…
The typeface reminds me of Brill’s linguistic publications (or what I’ve seen of them as PDF). The hanging punctuation seems not to be illustrated; and the right margins aren’t justified anyway (which contributes to the whole “distance from the reader” thing: “this is not a normal book”).
But the stunning part is this:
Did they, like, omit a zero from each? Everything is done expensively in different expensive countries, and then the whole thing costs only about as much as one big specialized science book?
I too liked the opening quotation mark, now that you say it. I think that was about setting the whole paragraph up as a quote, but when the ending quotation mark wasn’t set off in the same way, I lost the thought. An opening parenthesis to set up a parenthetical paragraph might have worked as well.
and then the whole thing costs only about as much as one big specialized science book?
That may say more about science book publishers than about Bibliotheca.
Though, to be fair, Bibliotheca may sell more of these books than, say, the Mouton Grammar Library does of theirs.
I can’t say that I see the appeal myself, but evidently others can.
Rendering the Tetragrammaton as “YHWH” is kind of a cop-out. That’s not an English word. How are you supposed to pronounce it? Taboos aside (and there are good arguments why they should not be put aside), for all other Hebrew-derived proper names of Biblical characters and personages you fill in the vowels that the MT may fail to explicitly specify, right? Thus yielding an English lexeme that’s actually pronounceable, right? “Jehovah” may or may not be based on good scholarship, and Ethan Allen (probably not my kinsman despite a family legend to that effect) may or may not have actually demanded the surrender of the British garrison “in the name of Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress,” but “Jehovah” is at least a cromulent proper name in English. (I can potentially pronounce “Yahweh” but it looks less Englishly cromulent than “Jehovah,” like some bullshit word made up by a nerdy grad student with no Sprachgefühl.)
But I mostly wanted to react to “The text font is Katharos, from the Greek word for clean or pure.” No-Longer-Officially-Grumbly Stu was in another thread the other day talking about the puzzlement of “impurities of her prostitution” in a translation he had at hand of Rev. 17:4. Leaving aside the question of the best Englishing of πορνεία (πορνείας in that verse b/c genitive), the words rendered as “the impurities” are τὰ ἀκάθαρτα. That’s the opposite of more or less the same adjective that the font is named for, being used substantively in the neuter plural, so “the unclean [things]” is the most literal possible translation that’s still idiomatic English. Some reference books will tell you that “unclean” is the literal meaning, with “impure” being a metaphorical extension, but when the referent of the noun being thus described is itself immaterial (as in the “unclean spirits” exorcised by Christ in other NT passages where the same lexeme appears) it might seem as if uncleanness is neither more nor less literal than impurity. If you want to play the Etymological Fallacy game, maybe it means “things that have not undergone catharsis”?
The example in the Wikipedia page shows the effect turned up to quite an extreme level
Indeed; the example creator says:
Probably the caption in the Wikipedia article should say “exaggerated for illustrative purposes” or some such
Probably the caption in the Wikipedia artichoke should say “exaggerated for illustrative purposes” or some such
@mollymooly,
Was that you or some dastardly inept AI spelltwister that contorted ‘article’ into alcachofa, ermmm I mean artichoke?
impurities of her prostitution
In the original Kusaal, it’s dian’ad linɛ yi o tʋʋmbɛ’ɛdin la na “dirt that came out of her bad deeds”, leaving the precise nature of the bad deeds (and, indeed, of the dirt) unspecified: though she is described earlier as a pu’agɔɔndir “roaming-woman”, so I expect we are meant to draw our own conclusions.
Kusaal hasn’t really got a snappy term for “prostitution”, though naturally it is perfectly possible to describe the phenomenon in Kusaal if need be. No Sapir-Whorf here.
In the Mooré, she is a somewhat less euphemistic pʋg-yoaada “fornicator-woman”, and the golden cup is specifically said to contain immoral rãam “beer.” I expect it’s a French thing.
Interesting expression, although the usual form seems to be “ink squash”. I wonder if this is a common issue with digitized versions of old typefaces?
In the case of revivals of old typefaces, it’s certainly an issue. Do you design the type to appear printed as it appeared printed then? Or the way the pristine punches looked (if you’re lucky and the punches survived)? That’s the same authenticity problem revivalists of all kinds run into. Paul Shaw’s Revival Type: Digital Typefaces Inspired by the Past discusses this.
On the other hand there are modern types designed to handle ink spread by ink traps. I think Bell Centennial, designed for small type on newsprint, was used as long as there were phone books in the U.S. (or maybe there still are? I doubt it.)
As to hanging punctuation and optical margin alignment, I love them both dearly. I had a job once designing and typesetting books in InDesign, and one of the first things I would do when creating a style is turn on hanging punctuation. I notice their lack, painfully, in books that try to look fancy by using a beautiful font and nice paper.
That said, they are a luxury of the computer age. Even typographical fops like Aldus and Baskerville and Morris didn’t use hanging punctuation, and optical margin alignment was not practically possible.
Have people read John Barton’s The Word: On The Translation of the Bible? Picked it up last year and I found it a genuine pageturner, which may say the most of all about me. Incredibly thorough but readable discussion of Robert Alter et al but nothing on typefaces, sadly.
Was that you or some dastardly inept AI spelltwister? — swypo
The exact shape of ff used in Bibliotheca isn’t all that rare. For example, here’s an article in the online version (!) of The Atlantic that is full of it. Amazingly, it’s not even a precomposed special character (ff) – it copies and pastes as two separate fs. (Likewise for ffi; I haven’t checked if ffl occurs.) It must all be in the CSS somewhere.
I thought it explicitly specifies every single vowel in the entire text, and that’s why it’s so densely strewn with dots? It’s just the tetragrammaton for which there’s reason to believe the specified vowels are those of the first-turn euphemism instead of the real ones.
No, there are some other cases too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qere_and_Ketiv
Some of the euphemistic replacements made it into the consonantal text, which is how Saul’s son ends up as both Ishbosheth and Eshbaal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ish-bosheth
The general assumption seems to be that the vowel pointing (in codices but not scrolls as noted …) was a fairly late development, although since the earliest surviving MT manuscripts we have are themselves pretty late it’s hard to be sure. It’s certainly far from clear that when Jerome was doing the Vulgare he had access to Hebrew MSS with vowel pointing. Although OTOH Jerome’s proper names of OT figures are often not particularly faithful attempts to transliterate the Hebrew but follow more closely the pre-existing LXX versions of the names.
The Tiberian vowel pointing itself is presumably late, but the tradition it embodies is amazingly reliable. It does reflect changes in the pronunciation since the Hexapla, but they’re very systematic changes, not corruptions due to poor transmission.
My own view (expounded at great length elsewhere) is that the pronunciation underlying the original Tiberian tradition was actually pretty close to Origen’s Hexapla – it’s been misinterpreted in the light of later changes such as loss of /ə/ as a phoneme and loss of contrastive vowel length.
A.Z. Foreman discusses the tetragrammaton and Origen’s Hexapla here (and see the subsequent discussion).
it copies and pastes as two separate fs
Isn’t that just how such ligatures work nowadays? They’re used when displaying, but otherwise (for selecting and typing and searching) they act like the separate characters.
Perhaps this fancy version should come with an annotation explaining Tiberianly that when YHWH is printed it is to be pronounced as /ðə lɔɹd/.
The success of this project reminds me somewhat sadly of one that I think is unlikely to be finished, Dr. Wouter Soudan’s Dodecaglotta, an edition of the Bible in twelve classical languages (Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, Church-Slavonic, German, English, Dutch, French), with a new font for each to accord with one another on the page. So far as I’m aware, he never released anything after the promotional poster, and the website where he covered his methods has disappeared
https://dodecaglotta.gumroad.com/l/dodecaglotta
One of the many things that annoys me about “Yahweh” in modern English translations is its inconsistency: if you’re going all pretend-learned and printing the Name as “Yahweh”, Yisra’el’s great king should surely be Dawid, and his capital should be Yerushalem (not “Yerushalayim”, obvs, if we are going to be all originalist about this,)
Copying out of a PDF, or out of academia.edu’s display of one, routinely produces ff and worse.
Ther’s not singl ъ in this sposd Chrch Slvonic. What givs? And why does the Greek lack accents but have breathings?
I was wondering why it looked like a dual…!
Ther’s not singl ъ in this sposd Chrch Slvonic. What givs?
Oh, it’s worse than that. There’s no ѣ, no і, I presume no ѳ or ѵ (though I’m not going to take the trouble to look) — it’s an attempt to write Church Slavonic as though it were Russian, which is so stupid I hope the whole project sank without trace. Sorry, Wouter.
An archived version of the website goes into his methodology a little more, but I won’t post any further on this given the frosty reception
https://web.archive.org/web/20240221074714/http://dodecaglotta.com/
Copying out of a PDF, or out of academia.edu’s display of one, routinely produces ff and worse.
True, I was mainly talking about browsers displaying HTML documents, like the Atlantic article. PDFs have been generated in many ways over many years, and there’s not much that can be relied on in their behavior when you get beyond display and printing.
I won’t post any further on this given the frosty reception
To be clear, I like the idea very much, it’s just the execution that bothers me. He says “For each of them I have selected the canonical text editions of their respective traditions from the best sources available in the public domain.” Maybe the public domain is unavoidable for financial reasons, but how can I trust someone who claims to use “the best sources available” when the result for Slavic is so wretched?
I was wondering why it looked like a dual…!
The only reasonable explanation I saw for this is that -ayim is a placename suffix, as in miṣrayim and others, the suffix having started out as a genuine dual for appropriate place names, then expanding its semantics.
Gill always accounted for this phenomena in his designs.
Peeving I suppose, but I was surprised to see singular phenomena in this text.
a spectrum of shades from dark charcoal to white
going unmentioned in the article, of course, is the rather heavy-handedly programmatic use of those colors, which progress out of the antient darkness into the savior’s light, mirroring the supercessionist message of the pure white New Testament.
not exactly unpredictable, but still striking!
“this phenomena” is a quote from a phone conversation, it’s not an edited piece of writing. Maybe Greene made a slip of the tongue, or maybe Bertrand misheard him (and maybe he misheard “squash” as “quash”).
Same here. It really is pretty; it calls itself (first of all) a marvel of typography, and, well, it pretty much is.* The unfortunate part is that it’s just typography – just visual art. Near the end of the page, the artist asks for help from people who actually know Coptic, Armenian or Georgian, among others – but that’s really an afterthought.
* Well, the Armenian and the Georgian seem to have horrible mınım problems; but 1) I don’t know if that’s avoidable, and 2) I can’t read them anyway, so I can’t really tell how bad it is.
On the site, a ъ does suddenly show up: the language itself is called ѧзыкъ славенскїй. This is straight-up modern Russian in Ye Olde Butcherede Spellingue (except without ѣ!) and somewhat fancy word order. The letter й didn’t even exist when the OCS Bible was written – and wasn’t necessary, because the language didn’t have closed syllables at all.
I think it should be ѩзыкъ словѣньскыи (definite form… I think).
Just to confirm it's not just you – I found it really striking.
If you buy it without the NT – they let you do this –, it arguably looks prettier.
which progress out of the antient darkness into the savior’s light, mirroring the supercessionist message of the pure white New Testament
I think it’s more
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism
From my own Calvinist actually-supercessionist view, this is a Horrible Heresy. I mean, it’s implying that the Pentateuch is not actually just as much the Word of God as the Gospels. Anathema! Anathema!
It may instead reflect the view (common enough among Such/As read the Bible for its prose) that the history of religion reflects a progression from primitive Israelite tribal superstitions, not to say, barely disguised polytheism, to a successively more enlightened, really modern Advanced Religion.
But as far as I can make out, Adam Lewis Greene himself is quite free of this sort of thing; I dare say that the Unfortunate Implications just didn’t occur to him.
@ktschwarz
Perhaps, but presumably they also didn’t include that he may well have said something closer to “Gill, um, he always accounted for this phenomena in his designs, you know.”
glad for the confirmation, @DM!
and @DE: i think you hit the nail right on the head (so to speak) with “…reflect the view (common enough among Such/As read the Bible for its prose) that the history of religion reflects a progression… to a successively more enlightened, really modern Advanced Religion.” to my eye, that mode allows a lot of different forms of supercessionism and dispensationalism to quietly either remain actively in the mix or enter it, without a lot of deliberate intent from the writers/editors/etc involved. which i think comes back around to that whole modern model of a progression of set stages (whether in religion, state structure, mode of production, or anything else) being basically a transposition of those theological frameworks* into the discourses of (Social) Science.
.
* and sometimes their cousins from non-christian theologies (often in syncretized forms melding them into the christian ones), like the whole Kali Yuga thing in the “Traditionalist” far right, or the weird zionist typological mode that views the period from 1948 to the present as a reiteration of the Book of Joshua (with a dash of daniel’s dreams), or the wild stew of the Theosophical sequence of “root races”.
>I won’t post any further on this given the frosty reception
Lots of things meet frosty initial receptions here for one reason or another, and it shouldn’t deter you from resurrecting what you find useful and interesting about the project, which does sound fascinating.
>The general assumption seems to be that the vowel pointing
Who are you, JOHN W BREWER, and what is your relationship with our venerable commenter J.W. Brewer?
It [dispensationalism?] may instead reflect the view (common enough among Such/As read the Bible for its prose) that the history of religion reflects a progression from primitive Israelite tribal superstitions, not to say, barely disguised polytheism, to a successively more enlightened, really modern Advanced Religion.
It that’s what “it” refers to, then also among American Protestants Such/As read the Bible for the WoG, according to your link (my very own mother was big on end-times, and despairing-to-condemnatory about her son’s refusal to relocate from Sodom):
#
Dispensationalism has become popular within American evangelicalism. It is commonly found in nondenominational Bible churches, as well as Baptist, Pentecostal, and Charismatic groups.[8][9] Protestant denominations that embrace covenant theology tend to reject dispensationalism. According to the system’s critics, most theologians acknowledge that there is no specific sequence of end-times events defined in the Bible. The Scofield Bible has been called “the most dangerous heresy currently to be found within Christian circles”.[7]: 13
#
It that’s what “it” refers to
No, I’m pretty sure (DE can confirm or deny) it refers to this: “the rather heavy-handedly programmatic use of those colors, which progress out of the antient darkness into the savior’s light.”
Well, then heavy-handedly programmatic use of the bible and special lighting effects. Covenant theology seems to be more my kind of thing anyway.
@Hat, Stu:
This was indeed my intention.
My impression is that the intersection between Dispensationalists and Such/As read the Bible for its prose is fairly small.
You can have exciting Premillennial views on the End Times without actually being Dispensationalist, but Dispensationalism pretty much entails Premillennialism, along, specifically, with a vital walk-on part for Jews (in the sense that such people understand “The Jews”); this explains why Trumpodules love Netanyahu.
with a vital walk-on part for Jews
I’ve not yet understood how that came about. For more than a thousand years The Jews were institutional bad guys for Christians, now they’re best mates. Is this a slow-burning Stockholm syndrome involving reluctant Swedes ? How does it look from the other side ? It’s all pretty embarrassing tbh.
My own view is that it’s actually just another mutation of Christian antisemitism.
“Your religion is not false. It’s absolutely right for People Like You! And the destiny of People Like You is to go to Palestine so that you can make our scriptures come true! We really appreciate your understanding! (By the way, when you get there, you’ll find that your own interpretation of your religion is wrong, and you’ll joyfully become Just Like Us!)”
From a Jewish point of view, it has the upside that it probably reduces the pogrom risk. Which is not nothing, by any means …
It’s not an altother new strain in Christianity. It used to be standard to pray for the conversion to Christianity of “thy people, the Jews” (specifically) in both the Roman Catholic Mass and in Anglican Holy Communion. And the idea that mass conversion of Jews to Christianity was a prerequisite for the Second Coming has quite a long pedigree.
I overstated the case: it wasn’t every Mass, but special occasions: specifically (and pointedly), Good Friday:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_prayer_for_the_Jews
Entirely compatible with antisemitism. To say the least.
Christian Zionism is also fully compatible with antisemitism.
The relevant traditional Book of Common Prayer text for Good Friday lumps together (in 16th-century orthography) “all Jewes, Turkes, Infidels, and heritikes” sort of indifferently. I.e., the same blessings are prayed for for all four groups while still reflecting a historical view that those outside the Church came in different genres or flavors worth listing separately.
One assumes that when Oxford University Press made the fateful decision to unleash the Scofield Reference Bible on an unsuspecting world coming on twelve decades ago they did not consciously think that they were promoting a particularly factional or radical viewpoint. I wonder if anyone has dug around in their archives to see what they did think they were doing. It has certainly sold a lot of copies for them, of course.
I am glad to learn that the so-called ALV translation used in the edition under discussion avoided the distressing modern innovation of Capitalized Pronouns for Divine Referents, which I find irksome and distracting in the many recent-ish translations which adopt it.
Huh. I thought the Second Vatican Council had abolished it entirely. I guess it’s only done as part of a full Mass on Good Friday, and… nobody goes to those. There’s a service in the afternoon that doesn’t include Communion or any such prayer.
At least, the 1973 and 2011 versions seem compatible with the Council document we read in school that got out of “nobody comes to the Father but through me” by stating the Jews are already with the Father – they’re his people! I’m not surprised Pope Palpatine wasn’t quite happy with that.
OK then, I am glad to remain fairly ignorant of the details, due to being utterly repelled by the very subject. I should continue to hold my tongue and do the right thing where I can. No frequent high-flyer bonuses for me.
I recommend underground passages instead, like the one between
Grand CentralTimes Square and the Port Authority (that one has poetry on the wall, which you can hurry and ignore or dawdle and enjoy, just as you like).Perhaps Bibliotheca could produce a set with the opposite colour progression, aimed at the lucrative Nietzschean market.
Quotha:
https://www.academia.edu/1494226/The_Hebrew_Bible_in_Nietzsches_philosophy_of_religion
I think hat may mean “the one between Times Square and the Port Authority,” although these days you can with some effort also walk eastward from Times Square as far as Fifth Avenue before needing to ascend to a sidewalk. But perhaps he was translating an old Hebrew guide to Manhattan whose text had been corrupted by scribal error?
Whoops, so I did — corrected!
underground passages
There’s also a technique for invisibility in broad daylight – stay as cool as a cucumber. Nobody notices shagging by a tree in a public park when the participants are not acting furtively or theatrically. This has been demonstrated to be a fact. Jezebel was an amateur.
Separately, the passage quoted by David E. reminds one that Nietzsche’s aphoristic style is better when he’s forced to adhere to a no-more-than-140-characters-per-tweet constraint.
Jezebel was just playing the cards she had. Not her fault if it was wasted on the palace eunuchs and on a man whose very name is synonymous with dangerous driving. (One recognises the type. Overcompensating much?)
Nietzsche’s aphoristic style is better when he’s forced to adhere to a no-more-than-140-characters-per-tweet constraint.
That’s true of aphorisms altogether, surely. They’re executive summaries, full of buzzy quotables. I prefer reading N.’s in-depth market assessments, such as the one from which DE quotes.
The translation of that passage from Zur Genealogie der Moral is not bad at all. The original (with an extra bit added):
#
Ich liebe das »Neue Testament« nicht, man errät es bereits; es beunruhigt mich beinahe, mit meinem Geschmack in betreff dieses geschätztesten, überschätztesten Schriftwerks dermaßen alleinzustehn (der Geschmack zweier Jahrtausende ist gegen mich): aber, was hilft es! »Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders«, – ich habe den Mut zu meinem schlechten Geschmack. Das Alte Testament – ja, das ist ganz etwas anderes: alle Achtung vor dem Alten Testament! In ihm finde ich große Menschen, eine heroische Landschaft und etwas vom Allerseltensten auf Erden, die unvergleichliche Naivität des starken Herzens; mehr noch, ich finde ein Volk. Im Neuen dagegen lauter kleine Sekten-Wirtschaft, lauter Rokoko der Seele, lauter Verschnörkeltes, Winkliges, Wunderliches, lauter Konventikel-Luft, nicht zu vergessen einen gelegentlichen Hauch bukolischer Süßlichkeit, welcher der Epoche (und der römischen Provinz) angehört und nicht sowohl jüdisch als hellenistisch ist. Demut und Wichtigtuerei dicht nebeneinander; eine Geschwätzigkeit des Gefühls, die fast betäubt; Leidenschaftlichkeit, keine Leidenschaft; peinliches Gebärdenspiel; hier hat ersichtlich jede gute Erziehung gefehlt.
#
It’s pretty much a one-star review. I expect he’d title it “Very Disappointing Sequel.”
Especially after all those hints in the first season that more was in the works.
As the Madam said afterwards to the nonagenarian, it was a long time coming.
Demut und Wichtigtuerei dicht nebeneinander; eine Geschwätzigkeit des Gefühls, die fast betäubt; Leidenschaftlichkeit, keine Leidenschaft; peinliches Gebärdenspiel …
This is one big reason why I left the 1960s US for Germany. To get away from self-centered psychobabble.
Well, there were quite a few teaser trailers, but they were retrospectively confirmed as non-canon. (By some, anyhow. The fanbase is split on this.)
Pace the colour scheme, I doubt any flavour of Christian or Jew would rank the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonicals second of the five volumes.
The Heartstopper graphic novel comprises five volumes ! No coincidence. The fanbase is fairly unanimous, but there’s still some squabbling about what should come next, if anything. I’m committing the Netflix series to memory, just in case, like Denzel Washington in The Book Of Eli.
@de
” And the idea that mass conversion of Jews to Christianity was a prerequisite for the Second Coming has quite a long pedigree.”
Is the Scriptural basis for this just Paul’s epistle to the Romans? Or in Revelations 6-13, are the green figs torn away by the wind supposed to be the non-converts, while the converts are the ripe figs saved from the wind (by being eaten or dropping off at a time before the wind)? The fig thing is made explicit in the Apocalypse of Peter, but are endtimers familiar with that text?
The source for the great majority would be Dispensationalism, as mediated by the Scofield Bible, I think.
Darby, the fons et origo of Dispensationalism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nelson_Darby
though a very odd man in many ways, was pretty well up on Christian sources. He was a very clever weirdo*. (Also evidently very charismatic**, in the lay sense.)
In a large part this Dispensationalist influence would have been mediated by the once extremely popular (in such circles) works of the lunatic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Lindsey
Much earlier, it was a popular idea both among seventeenth-century Puritans, and some of their more fringe contemporaries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_of_the_Jews_(future_event)
I was going to cite Marvell’s famous poem of sexual harassment, but I see it’s actually linked from that WP page, so I would gain no kudos for my erudition and culture by doing so.
* Produced his own Bible translation. QED. (Not too bad, apparently.)
** Hence the Exclusive Brethren. (My wife’s family are partly of Plymouth Brethren background, but they’re Open Brethren; despite early historical connections, the history of the Open Brethren is mostly quite different from the Darbyites, especially in Scotland, where to some extent they originated independently; and they’re very different in doctrine and practice.)
From a Jewish point of view, it has the upside that it probably reduces the pogrom risk.
in practice, unfortunately, not at all. it just means that the violent part is focused on non- or anti-zionist jews, typically with full support (and urging-on) from many zionist jews (the recent agitation by Betar US being a particularly loud current example, but only atypical in their explicitly fascist politics; ADL and other nominally liberal groups operate similarly).
the lunatic Hal Lindsey
“He noted again that there is no reference to the U.S. in Bible prophecy.” Where the man’s right, he’s right !
The ongoing collapse of the US is prophesied in Scripture! I’ve been so blind …
Wow, that’s not “that should be plain”, that’s “you’re guessing it already”!
The scheme makes them the fourth volume; the second is “the latter prophets” (the “former” ones are included in the first together with “the five books”).
That’s actually arranged misleadingly in the article. The 2011 version is due to him, too, as shown by this quote from the “Conversion of the Jews” article:
He was just such a traditionalist that he was willing and able to muddle his own goals by bringing as much tradition back as possible…
Thus far, the antisemites who most actively pushed Jews out to Israel have been claiming that they’re “against” Israel (I mean those in the Arab countries*).
People aren’t very logical.
“targeting Jews for conversion efforts” – what about those Jews who have already converted? Is it good for them or not?
@DM:
Following the links from that, I found this letter by St Bernard promoting the Second Crusade, in the course of which he says that the then-popular much cheaper alternative of conducting pogroms in Europe is unacceptable.
(Disturbingly, he actually leans on the deicide trope in his reasoning – though as a reason for not persecuting Jews. But perhaps that really was a more likely way to persuade his target audience than the appeals to basic humanity one might naïvely have hoped for. Meet people where they are …)
Anyhow, Bernard takes it as given that the Jews will be converted – as a group – only after all convertable gentiles. So the association with the End Times is evidently established by 1146.
I suspect this goes back to the early Fathers, but I’m too ignorant to know where exactly. Though you’d have expected Benedict to have cited an earlier authority if there was an obvious one, I suppose.
https://ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/primary-texts-from-the-history-of-the-relationship/bernard-of-clairvaux
Wait. Are there non-convertible gentiles? Perhaps this is that Calvinistic double-predestination stuff? In terms of going back from 1146 to the early Fathers, if this notion (the mass conversion of the remaining Jews occurring, but only in the very final act of the play) doesn’t go straight back to Romans 11:25, it certainly goes back to what could be easily taken as a plausible reading of that verse. If you ask me, part of the problem may have been that certain relevant patristic pundits had perhaps imbibed some naive “sola scriptura” type presuppositions, which led them to be puzzled by things that actually aren’t all that puzzling and thus devise unnecessarily overelaborate and potentially misleading explanations for the non-puzzling phenomena.
Wait. Are there non-convertible gentiles?
Most of us nowadays drive a hardtop. So, yeah.
Are there non-convertible gentiles?
Absolutely. Cathars, estate agents, university Vice-Chancellors …
But I was improvising with “convertable”, on account of English unaccountably lacking a future passive participle. Convertend.
It has been shown that this has profound effects on Anglophone financial planning:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3756
[Trying to locate this, I discover that Chen’s paper has been widely cited and spawned its very own subfield of published pseudoscience.]
certain relevant patristic pundits had perhaps imbibed some naive “sola scriptura” type presuppositions, which led them to be puzzled by things that actually aren’t all that puzzling
Now, now. Augustine was actually quite nice for a hippo.
I don’t know what does conversion of someone “as a group” means (even replacing it with “most of them” does not work) and don’t know if it has anything to do with the “conversion efforts” referred to in DM’s quote: those target people, not their groups.
One of the many historical examples would be Nicholas I’s getting rid of the Uniate Church and making all its former adherents Orthodox; from 1837: Russia’s Quiet Revolution, by Paul W. Werth:
Uniatism first arose in large part as a side effect of heavy-handed and nakedly-political developments in the 16th/17th centuries and then experienced difficulties for the same reasons in some places in subsequent centuries once political power was being heavy-handedly wielded by different secular rulers with a different agenda. Obviously in the interim some pious folks had come to sincerely believe in it for its own sake. In diaspora in North America, where the secular rulers in those days were Protestant and typically magnificently indifferent to the old sectarian conflicts of Eastern Europe, more Uniates (who at that historical point had generally been living under Hapsburg rule before transiting Ellis Island) became Orthodox than the other way round although of course plenty remained with their pre-emigration allegiances intact.
The scheme makes them the fourth volume — I was alluding to the darkness-into-light order mentioned by rozele, which is the reverse of the numerical/more-or-less-chronological order.