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January 9, 2008
In Which I Offer a Modest Suggestion
Jim West has written "What A Biblioblog Isn’t." Jim is reacting to posts by April DeConick at The Forbidden Gospel Blog and Christian Brady at Targuman. Jim makes the point that he and Chris Tilling do not "somehow mystically control who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ of the biblioblogging family (tribe)." They do, of course, control who is and who isn't listed as a bibliobolgger at biblioblogs.com. And whether biblioblogs.com is or is not a canonical list of biblioiblog depends on several definitions only one of which do I want to address here. As far as Jim gives a positive definition of a biblioblog it is as follows, "a biblioblog has as its subject matter the canonical Bible (whether Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox or Jewish) and fields thereto related (like archaeology, textual criticism, exegesis, theology, etc.)." However, as one might glean from the title of Jim's post, he really approaches the issue via negativa;
A ‘biblioblog’ is not, however, a blog which has as its primary subject matter the non-canonical or pseudepigraphal materials simply because those materials have not been found meaningful enough by the community of faith to merit inclusion in the canonical lists.
I won't linger on the question of Zwingli, Luther and company being canonical. To do so might just eliminate Jim's blog from the company of biblioblogs by his own definition.
But there is another, and I think better, more inclusive definition, that would keep Jim among the bibliobloggers and allow April DeConick and others in also. Heck, Abnormal Interests might even qualify. The definition of an eligible post for the Biblical Studies Carnival if applied to dominate themes in a blog itself just might work.
Biblical Studies: Broadly focused on discipline of biblical studies and cognate disciplines, including Ancient Near East, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Christian Origins/New Testament, Intertestamental/Second Temple literature (e.g., LXX, Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, etc.), Patristics, Biblical Criticisms and Hermeneutics, Biblical Studies and popular culture, among other things.
In fact, a definition of a biblioblog, free of excessive caprice, might go something like this.
Any blog that, on a fairly regular basis, has posts that are mentioned in the Biblical Studies Carnivals is a biblioblog.
But then as Jim points out,
Jim Davila, Mark Goodacre, and I have been at this longer than most any other biblioblogger (known to me) so I’m pretty much going to do whatever I wish without worrying too much about what people think of it.
And that's the unvarnished truth.
Posted by Duane Smith at January 9, 2008 7:40 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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