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Typing Greek

If you pursue a degree in biblical studies, you will need to learn to type using appropriate typsetting conventions for ancient Greek. Ancient Greek (including the LXX and New Testament) uses the polytonic (multiple-accent) system. For the most part, modern Greek (officially since 1982 ) uses a simplified system called monotonic with the ancient accents reduced to one, and the breathing marks omitted. What is Unicode? Unicode is a system devised to represent all major languages and writing systems (including those with non-Western alphabets like Greek or Hebrew) without having to change fonts to do it (visit the Unicode Consortium for more information, or see the Wikipedia article). The advantage to using Unicode for ancient Greek is that the letters and accents are fully composed (no problems with letter spacing). This also means that language-specific data can travel across the Internet and across computing platforms (PC or Mac) without distortion. Unicode is replacing al...
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The Gospel of Jesus' Wife

Update 2 (May 2014): A Tyndale House scholar, Christian Askeland, thoroughly debunks the authenticity of the fragment as a forgery on the Tyndale House website following the publication of yet another article on the fragment in the Harvard Theological Review . Update: The authenticity of the Coptic text that supposedly claims Jesus had a wife has been challenged by several experts. But this is not at all surprising; that’s par for the course for scholarship: experts release their findings for review from other experts. My colleague Darrell Bock points out that Huffington Post writer Jaweed Kaleem continued the conversation about the Jesus wife text with reports about suspicions regarding its authenticity . And Kaleem isn’t the only one: Jay Lindsay and Nicole Winfield of the Associated Press reported more of the story on the ABC News website. The current decision by Harvard Theological Review not to publish the fragment just yet probably is not the result of controversy—jus...
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AutoCorrect Entries for Typing Greek

Being somewhat of a font packrat, I'm always on the prowl for new Greek fonts. I came across Ralph Hancock's Antioch utility. I've not used the utility itself, but the fonts included with the package are nice. What kept me coming back to his site, though, was the free extras towards the bottom of the page. There's a nice AutoCorrect entry manager for Word on the Windows platform, but none for the Mac side of things. So I found a way to use an Applescript to approximate what Hancock's VBA macros do. The Script Paste this script (without the equal signs above and below) into an AppleScript Editor Window: ===== (* AutoCorrect List Manager by J. W. Johnston Assumes an "=" between the name (left side, i.e., what you type) and the value (right side, i.e., what Word replaces it with) Seems to work best if you work with an unformatted text list. Each desired entry must go on a line by itself, no spaces separating the "=" Use at your own ...
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