j a m e s f o r s y t h ✡ n e t

Williams has written a very enjoyable and thoughtful apologetic work, published by the ABC only in June of this year. This book is not only a solid defence of the Christian faith, but also traverses great distances when it comes to extending our general knowledge and appreciation of the vast corpus of written material on the subject that Williams only gets a chance to skim across.

Some very compelling cases for Christ’s authenticity are made in terms of being who he claimed to be and also that he clearly existed as a historical figure. On pages 175-6 I was waiting for him to make a point which seemed to me would be natural for him as a lawyer to make, namely, that if others wrote about Christ, rather than he himself, this is more trustworthy testimony. To illustrate. If Joe says “Hi everyone, I’m a really great guy!” we would dismiss him as another person who’s just too full of himself to be paid any attention. However, if Jane says “Hi everyone, I’d like to introduce my friend Joe who is a really great guy!” it causes more heads to be raised because not only is her behaviour unusual, but there could be some measure of truth in what she is saying. Williams doesn’t make this point at all, however, all he had to say on the matter of Christ’s divinity and so on I found to be quite valuable and judicious.

A point that was particularly helpful to me is worth quoting at length because of it’s instructiveness (p174):

Also relevant are the claims that Jesus made about his capacities and authority. The most inexplicable claim, if Jesus was not divine, may be that which He made to scoffers before curing a paralytic: ‘So that you may know the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins…’ (Matthew 9:6; see also Mark 2:5-12). This ‘throwaway line’ amounted to an explicit claim that Jesus could forgive sins committed not against him but against other people. Why would a sane man say a thing like that? The same question arises as regards other statements in the Synoptics (see, for example, Matthew 4:5-7, Matthew 10:40, Matthew 11:27, Luke 10:16). (emphasis mine)

Helpful endnotes and an index are included. Furthermore, Williams has a nice way of reminding the reader of certain points that he has written (and points to things he will write in following chapters) by mentioning them occasionally, especially when there is an overlap in material.

A few minor points that I was disappointed about when reading this book:

* Placing the appellation “St” in front of New Testament characters like Paul, John and Peter is alienating both to non-believer and thoughtful Christian alike. If we are to rightly use the language of the apostolic age, all Christians are both saints (hAGIOI - necessarily in the plural here) and priests (hIEREUS). Thus it is an anachronism - and I say anachronism because it sounds positively medieval - to refer to the apostles as saints.

* Williams gives the reader the impression, possibly quite rightly so, that he is well-read. Given this, his commentary and quotations on Spong and others really should be limited to refutations. You may ask “Shouldn’t we make our agreement known on points where we do agree?”, by all means, but not at the expense of using a more apt quote from a biblical scholar worth actually listening to, rather than the rare occasion when Spong or some other liberal give us the rare pearl of wisdom.

* The section on grace misses the mark by a long distance. I was grossly saddened to see this. For Williams to derive any true satisfaction from both his Christian life and also the writing of this book he really needs to reconsider the depths of the beauty of God’s grace and bring out a second edition with appropriate changes. On page 229 (see endnote) he even points to Philip Yancey’s book “What’s so Amazing about Grace?” as a book worth reading on the subject. Come on, we all have limited time - and definitely not enough to spend on such worthless trash. You can see my unfavourable and quite badly written review on Amazon.

* There’s a typo in a Latin quotation on page 92, and on the first line of page 223.

Walter Starbuck, the main character of Jailbird, has much more control over his life than the main characters in some of Vonnegut’s other novels, notably Paul Proteus in Player Piano and Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse 5, among others. Starbuck’s rising and falling doesn’t really get described in graphic detail… never does he really hit rock bottom nor seem to touch the stars (!) at all. The result feels a little flat. Sirens of Titan sees Malachi Constant go to tremendous extremes - which I personally find makes for voyeuristic, quick reading.

As an Australian, and an ignorant one at that, I have to admit to knowing very little about the Watergate scandal at all. Jailbird whetted my appetite to learn more. Perhaps I’ll have to pick up some good non-fiction on the subject for some more in-depth investigating.

I don’t know whether this says more about the book or about myself, but I have just reread this book after several years and found that I remember virtually nothing from the first reading.

If you want to use Greek to learn, teach or study the New Testament, this book is essential for the long term.

I found the information on consonantal iota (p43f), digamma (p45f), accentuation (p47f) particularly useful. The paradigms and referencing system is also something you’d definitely pick this volume up for. Every word is accented throughout.

A few minor errors (then again it could always be me that’s wrong):

p50- “preperispomenon” should be “properispomenon”

p201- n3d(1) should include KREAS (meat).

p335- ERHMOS is a-3a, but also n-2b, see footnote 3 on p232.

I bought the soft-cover from Amazon, but immediately covered it with contact. It is too valuable to allow to fray.

In short, this is a very handy volume, but usefulness is lessened by reliance on the short contents page and a word index without page numbers to find one’s way around.

Before getting hold of this book I thought it was a survey of the pros and cons of the various Chinese dictionaries available. It’s not. It is a discussion of the language from a lexical point of view. Or of Chinese “lexis”.

Aside from an analysis of Chinese words themselves, this book serves as a fantastic collection of lists of vocabulary, which can be learnt together in sets, aiding memory.

As with many Chinese books of this nature, it may be necessary to annotate it yourself, noting whether any given word is still used in China, especially the area you are in or are planning to travel to.

For a less comprehensive vocabulary guide, but much cheaper if you can find it, is An Introduction to Modern Chinese Vocabulary, published by Sinolinghua, Beijing.

As someone who is long out of high school, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Wuthering Heights (and properly this time!)

One literary critic I read somewhere said that the sheer number of characters is deliberately confusing. Certainly, it doesn’t make it any easier that there are two Catherines. Nor the frequent use of surnames, rather than first names and vice versa, quite interchangably.

I found many of the characters thoroughly odious and of moral outrage. Why Nelly Dean doesn’t just leave them all is a mystery to me.

One thing I found of great help to my understanding of the book was to paste a clearer copy of the family tree to the inside-front cover of the book. I found this on page 308 of The Scribner Companion to the Brontës by Barbara and Gareth Lloyd Evans. The marriages and births are clearer and far more readable than the chart that came with the edition of the book that I own.

I also felt the need to take notes from a number of other literary critical works on the book to get my head around the whole plot, the characters, themes, imagery and Haworth landscape.

Perhaps for the most serious among us there is a concordance to Wuthering Heights! This is great for those doing a paper on some certain theme found in the book, who want to find all the references to that topic all in one place. If you are wanting to find it: A Concordance to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights by C. Ruth Sabol and Todd K. Bender, Garland Publishing, Inc. New York/London, 1984, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities Vol. 428.

Thoroughly recommended.

This review isn’t by me. It’s by accomplished award-winning writer Danusha Goska:

In “The God Delusion,” Richard Dawkins performs an Olympic medal-worthy feat. He writes 400 pages while simultaneously patting himself on the back and blowing his own horn. “South Park”’s satire of Dawkins’ megalomania is better than Cliff Notes, because — unlike Dawkins — when it tries to be funny, it is.

I purchased “The God Delusion” expecting state-of-the-art atheism. Dawkins delivered a silly rant and a self-indulgent hodgepodge. He’s preaching to the atheist choir, who exult “amen” at every burp.

The book is so scattered, so without intellectual discipline, so rife with falsehoods, misrepresentations, and blood curdling irresponsibility, that it is impossible, here, to deliver a thorough review. I can merely pick and choose.

Dawkins quotes letters from persons of faith who are, obviously, obnoxious. This proves nothing. Atheists can be obnoxious (Christopher Hitchens) or mass murderers (Stalin).

Dawkins, like Hitchens, conflates all religions and religious practices. They really do not perceive the differences between Jainism and Islam, between “zakat” and “jihad”. They, thus, disqualify themselves as commentators, except to the most unquestioning of atheist acolytes. Luckily the rest of us, when assessing science, are not so blind - we can discriminate between a Mengele and an Einstein.

Dawkins insists that the foundation of the US is atheist. Dawkins fails to acknowledge that “all are created equal” is a Judeo-Christian invention. It is not Hindu (caste); it is not Muslim (dhimmitude); it is not scientific (eugenics; social Darwinism).

Dawkins, like Hitchens, is a broken faucet of snide comments about anyone who disagrees with him. His put down of Stephen Jay Gould, with its overtones of homophobia, is particularly egregious (55). Dawkins, unlike SJG, does not “bend over”! SJG is dead and cannot respond. Dawkins similarly puts down scientists, including Freeman Dyson — not dead but over 90 — who have accepted the Templeton Prize, calling them phonies and sell-outs. One of Dawkins’ “jokes” depends for its impact on an atheist’s resume being *longer* than a believer’s (281).

Dawkins’ cheap bullying makes you want to put him in the corner for a lengthy time-out, and restrict his cookie and juice privileges. His species of arrogance is no friend of scholarship; rather, it’s the constant servant of brownshirt obscurantism.

Dawkins protests that he doesn’t need knowledge of religion to critique it, because, after all, God does not exist. There is a most excellent London Review of Books essay addressing Dawkins’ aggressive ignorance: “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching,” by Terry Eagleton.

Dawkins flaunts his ignorance in his dismissal of Luke’s mention of Quirinius (93). I don’t have space here to address this — do a Google search of “Luke” and “Quirinius” and you’ll see that Dawkins is pulling the wool over his naive atheist flocks’ eyes.

Religion is persuasive, Dawkins says, “to people not used to asking questions” (92). This statement is so false, ignorant, or blind I’d let it go without comment, but, who’s been asking, “Why am I here” for the past ten thousand years, except people of faith — thus, inventing universities, medicine, philosophy, and science? Copernicus, Mendel, Lemaitre - these religious men’s questions gave us the heliocentric universe, genetics, and the Big Bang theory. Dawkins, and atheists like him, are smugly certain of their every whim; persons of faith ask all the time.

Dawkins divides the world into two mutually exclusive categories: really smart people like him, and everybody else. He dismisses out of hand the fact that many great scientists are or have been believers. He implies that scientists from the past were faking being religious — they were cowardly liars lacking integrity — and he implies that his contemporaries who believe in God are bad scientists and “embarrassing” (99).

A chapter entitled “Why There Is Almost Certainly No God” reports that there can’t be a God because evolution directs biological life — and yet there are evolutionary scientists who are also Christians. As for the anthropic principle, Dawkins argues that any entity that designed physical reality would just be too complex to imagine; so God doesn’t exist because Dawkins can’t imagine him. Dawkins says that multiple universes cancel out God. There is more evidence for the existence of God than for multiple universes. Dawkins argues against intelligent design; Francis S. Collins does a superior job of arguing against ID in his book, “Language of God.” Collins is a Christian. So much for that chapter.

I could go on, but I don’t want to, because this hodgepodge bored me. But this must be mentioned — Dawkins reveals zero awareness of the impact of his ideas on real people who, unlike him, don’t inhabit ivory towers. Ethically, humans are comparable to cows? (297) Parents should not be allowed to teach their children? (326) Tens of millions of innocents were murdered in Germany, Russia, China, Tibet, Cambodia in the real-world implementation of megalomaniacal creeds like Dawkins’. If he knows his, if he cares at all, no awareness of it is shown in this book, which is not so much a deconstruction of God, as it is a hate letter to all of humanity.

The most telling line in the entire book may be, “wouldn’t the designer of the universe have to be a scientist?” (104) Wow, Richard, all I can say is, thank you for designing the universe. We’ve been so mistaken for worshipping anyone but you for the past ten millennia.

I did like two things in this book: Dawkins does a beautiful job of explaining why moths fly into flames (172-3). When reading those four paragraphs, I felt like I was reading a different book. An expert was enlightening me in the most elegant, ego-free way possible, on a very basic question. Dawkins also writes, briefly, about having been molested as a child (316). I felt great compassion for him, and I had to think that he could write an essay on that that would serve him, and others, well.

For anyone serious about studying the New Testament or New Testament Greek, this is the lexicon of choice. Perhaps that which sets it apart the most is its thorough references to early Christian literature at the time. This gives us a fuller understanding of what words actually mean. Too often we are confined to other examples within the canon of Scripture itself for further light on what a word means. Here we are taken much further.

The very informative “Foreword to the Revised Edition” and “Introduction to the Lexicon of the Greek New Testament” are included, and should be read for a greater understanding of how the dictionary works, the history of the lexicon and some tips on New Testament Greek itself.

The head word includes the full lexical form which, for example, means:

a) If the word is an adjective, the inflection/s for each gender of the nominative case are provided.

b) If the word is a noun, the nominative and genitive forms and the article are included.

After the (bolded) presentation of the head word, it is presented in a number of important forms. These are either the 1st person singular of different tenses/moods of the verb paradigms or commonly used forms.

Because of the fullness of the material and the need to save space, many abbreviations are used. It is worth familiarising oneself with the abbreviations by skimming over the “Composite List of Abbreviations” page LIXff before dipping too far into your work.

Possible improvements:

1) Mounce’s categorisation of each word into a given code is quite well known and widely used (these can be found in his Basics of Biblical Greek, Analytical Lexicon and Morphology of Biblical Greek). It would be a great future improvement of BDAG to include these codes alongside each entry.

2) The font used makes kappas and rhos look funny and I personally need to look at a word twice at times in order to be able to tell what it is. A less cursive-style font would look better in future editions.

3) Little/no use is made of the front and back inside cover or back of the book. The back has some sample entries, which, while handy for a bookstore who may want to seal the book to maintain its good condition, it is a bit of a bore to someone who has owned the lexicon for some years. It would be better to include something worth memorising or a few quotes scholars have made about the dictionary itself.

If looking this book up in your library catalogue or any online resource, please note that it will not necessarily help to type in what it is commonly known as - BDAG. This is because it is not officially used as part of the title of the book, despite the widespread usage of this abbreviation.

In my ignorance, found that I knew nothing about The Infancy Gospel of James (which this book is basically about) or later documents based on it. I learnt a great deal. I found it to be very readable, accessible and interesting.

As a Reformed Baptist this book hasn’t changed my convictions at all. I am convinced that the four canonical Gospels are the best records of our Lord’s life that we have available to us. Admittedly that’s not really the topic of the book at hand, which is Mary, his mother.

One gripe I did have with the book, however, was to do with its cover. “How Her Story Was Suppressed by the Church and Hidden in Art for Centuries”. Again the Church (whatever that means, let’s not get into the hurtful debate about whether “Church” includes the Reformed Churches, to which I belong) is made to look like the villain. Many people will see this book in bookshops and libraries and will sneer that “The Church” is at it again, hiding the real truth about Christianity and so on. If authors have any real interest in the glory of God and the preservation of his Church they should produce books with covers which don’t say in big letters “Let’s blame the Church for this one” or “Now it can be revealed, more sins of the Church”.

Come on, in today’s age Church-bashing isn’t exactly trailblazing or revolutionary.

This is a grammar most deserving of its title. It is truly comprehensive in every sense of the word. The grammar is explained along lines that a Westerner with even a pinch of grammatical knowledge can understand.

It is probably a good idea that the examples of erroneous grammar are included, complete with an asterisk to indicate that it is an error. However, I can’t help feeling that they’ll remain in my memory and I won’t be able to tell the difference between a sentence that’s been hailed as a grammatically correct example and one that is incorrect. I can’t really think of any alternatives to the way the authors have done this though.

It would be great if there were just a few exercises at the end of each chapter, complete with an answer key. That really wouldn’t add all that much to the total page count of the book, but would greatly add to its overall usefulness. After all, most of us who actually buy/read this book are students of Chinese who need all the exercises we can get - aren’t we?

Lastly, here are a few shortcomings I found in this book:

On page 46, section 2.14 should be cross referenced to chapter 7.

I’m not sure whether this is actually a mistake or not, but hai2shi0 (or) is explained in section 23.4. But there’s no reference made to huo4zhe3 at all, which is exceedingly relevant.

In the index, on page 417 xiang3 points to a non-existent 8.1.6. It should be 18.1.6 (page 284).

Please note that my comments will reflect my being neither a qualified nor experienced linguist. I purchased this book because I have found guides to the morphology of a language to be a useful approach (one of many) to learning a language. Another “morphology” I found handy in language learning was The Morphology of Biblical Greek by William D. Mounce (ISBN: 0310226368).

Languages can generally be divided into the following units (of ascending size) for the purpose of study: phoneme (sound), morpheme (meaningful unit - word or part of a word), syntax (grammar) and semantics (text/story). This may be modelled in different ways by different theorists. This book is, of course, focussing on the second of these units, that of the morpheme. It looks at words, parts of words, particles and focusses on the very meaning of the concept “word” itself.

I’ve already mentioned my lack of linguistics background. If you are approaching this book as a linguist, you’ll get much more out of it than me, at many more levels. A simple (!) learner of Chinese can also benefit, in the sense that s/he can gain a greater “feel” for the language using linguistics, as opposed to grammar - though the two at times overlap. But read on!

In China I showed a number of native speakers some charts/tables from this book. They were unanimous that they had never heard of quite a few of the example words (usually disyllables). Admittedly, the words may still be used in other areas of China, however, I recommend you proceed with the same caution. Before memorising lists of words from the tables, ensure they are in common usage, at least somewhere in China or a Chinese community. Otherwise you’re wasting your time majoring on minors when it is more profitable to learn words in common use.

I felt a little confused as to what is classified as an affix. In two places (possibly more) there are brief lists (I’ve omitted the characters themselves, but have included the tone number, with neutral tones unmarked):

Page 160: “…bound, affix-type word-forming elements like -tou, -zi, -hua4, -zhe3, -xing4, -le and -men.”

Page 299: “…grammatical affixes: e.g., -le, -zhe [which is rare in modern Chinese], -guo, -de, bu-, and -men…”

I felt that, though this isn’t a grammar as such, some of these categories could have been placed as a chart in an appendix to increase the overall usability of the book. Even better, perhaps a chapter at the beginning to explain some of the linguistic terms (for “gestalt word”, read “compiled word” -ci2) and frameworks. In my opinion, that would enable learners of Chinese to gain so much more from this volume. A chapter like that could be comfortably ignored by linguists (whose purpose escapes me at times - I guess “someone’s gotta do it”).

The author, Jerome “Jerry” Packard, is currently professor of Linguistics and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign).

In writing up this review I must acknowledge that I visited listserv linguistlist, and you’d do well to do the same, either directly or through a search engine with a few appropriate key words.

Not being a linguist I didn’t want to post an unfair review, so depending on your needs: Highly recommended.

My copy was bought in China. Like many academic linguistics texts available there it was produced for the Chinese market and is not meant to be exported en masse outside of China because of the cheaper price. It looks like this: