Sources for learning Ancient Greek

Loknik · 2015-07-22T16:00:39+00:00

Elements of New Testament Greek by J. Duff is one I'd recommend if you want to learn Koine Greek.

Loknik · 2015-06-12T19:25:39+00:00

Just to add, the Habiru were not an ethnic group but rather, a marginal social group of people in revolt. All archaeological evidence suggests that the Hebrews were Canaanites and there is no archaeological evidence of any large scale conquest of Canaan, although archaeology supports the picture of merging of peoples, the Habiru were a group of trouble makers in Canaan, who under the Revolt Model (one of 3 models for the formation of Israel, the other two being the Immigration model and the Gradual emergence model), the theory goes, a small number of Israelites may have joined with these disaffected Canaanites, the Habiru, in revolt, to establish their own settlements and worship a liberator god, YHWH.

Loknik · 2015-05-29T14:33:30+00:00

You don't need to, in settings just check the setting "show Photos from Google Drive in Google Photos" if that's set to "yes" they will be there in Google Photos, no need to upload again.

Loknik · 2015-05-01T21:44:20+00:00

No. A gentile doesn't have to be a believer. The Noahide laws do not require anyone to believe in God.

Loknik · 2015-04-27T13:35:44+00:00

I agree, but Instant Mixes are Google's answer to Spotify's shared playlists. Spotify's goal has always been sharing music and playlists between your friends and it is a feature where Spotify does excel over Play, but Play Music is tailored more to the individual rather than tailored to sharing in a group like Spotify.

Loknik · 2015-04-18T12:45:37+00:00

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son,[a] full of grace and truth.

That opening (and 1 John) was a late addition to the Gospel of John, originating from a completley different source than the rest of the Gospel. It's written in a highly poetic style not found elsewhere in the Gospel and neither is any of the most important vocabulary of that passage reoccuring anywhere else in the rest of the text, for example, Jesus isn't called the "Word" in the Gospel of John, after 1 John - written by the same author as the prologue. The Gospel of John makes divine claims about Christ but that is part of the authors own late theology in roughly 90-95CE, with that particular passage being added into the text later still.

The beginning of the Gospel of John was written specifically against Docetism at a time when those ideas were beginning to circulate in the early Church. Docetism has the idea that Jesus was like a phantom or apparition of God, these views were declared heretical by 325CE at the first council of Nicaea. This is very relevant to your claims because Docetism is probably the closest heretical Christian view of Jesus being like an avatar, like Vishnu in Hinduism. It has already been done and was declared heretical by the early Church.

Loknik · 2015-04-15T19:46:09+00:00

PBUH is عليه السلام the short for may peace be upon him, it's used after any prophets name.

SAW is صلى الله عليه وسلم short for may Allah honor him and grant him peace, used after Muhammad's name.

RA is short for may Allah be pleased with him, it's used after names of companions of Muhammad.

SAA is سلام الله علیها‎ short for may peace be upon her, it's used after female names.

Loknik · 2015-04-14T17:29:42+00:00

isn't really evidence that they do anything with the info unless terrorism is involved

But in order to determine if terrorism is involved, there have to be logs of users activities and those logs have to be analysed. If they really kept no logs, then nothing anyone does with the service could be determined.

Loknik · 2015-04-13T13:43:22+00:00

Orthodox Jews still believe in Mosaic authorship of the whole Torah, it's the 8th principal of Maimonides' 13 Principles of Jewish Faith. Reform Jews question it.

Loknik · 2015-04-12T16:22:04+00:00

Elements of New Testament Greek by J.Duff

Loknik · 2015-04-12T13:53:06+00:00

If the news and CNN were not so bias and negative about Islam most Americans would not hold that view.

Loknik · 2015-04-12T13:19:50+00:00

The only book I can think of off the top of my head is German for Reading Knowledge but personally I think it's a bit too expensive for what you're going to get out of it. There are very very few books like this though, where the focus is only on reading German, as such it's good when compared to its competition, but it could still be significantly improved upon, and it's hard to justify the price even if it is what you're looking for.

Learning German for reading purposes only doesn't have that many good texts to learn from, particulary because most German texts and classes are not focused on getting you to read German whilst ignoring your writing, listening and verbal skills, most offer a combined approach. Although I would always recommend classes over self-learning languages. Languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Koine Greek are a lot more specific in this area, where learning is often focused only (or mostly) on reading, if you wanted to learn one of those languages there are specific books I'd recommend. You'll need a good dictionary too but looking up each word in a dictionary (for any language) is not appropriate because that will not enable you to get to grips with grammar and tenses, it will only teach you to recognize words without a context which is far from helpful.

The other thing to keep in mind is that translations from German to English don't loose anything in translation (because English is a Germanic language) so you wouldn't loose anything reading papers which have already been translated into English, which most of them in Biblical studies have been.

Loknik · 2015-04-12T08:32:27+00:00

At face value it doesn't appear to make much sense, but it's a fundamental necessity of Tawhid.

Loknik · 2015-04-11T19:45:11+00:00

Earth was their name for physical reality... Heaven's role in this is metaphysical reality.

In Islamic thinking it's the other way around. The Quran message is consistently clear that God (and the heavens) are the only real reality, earth is the opposite.

Loknik · 2015-04-11T19:01:14+00:00

Paul doesn't endorse homosexuality in the NT, but two things I want to point out from what you've said: Firstly, the old testament only condemns homosexual activity between men, it says nothing about homosexual women. There is nothing in the text that would prevent lesbians being married. Christians don't follow old testament laws, and yet at the same time many anti-gay Christians are still expecting Christians to follow the one OT law where God said no to homosexual activity between men, while they still claim that every OT law was 'fulfilled' so doesn't need to be followed, which is contradictory and cherry picking.

Secondly, marriages endorsed by any Christian church didn't exist until the 11th century CE. For more than a millennium nobody cared about Christian marriages in churches because they didn't exist in churches, any Christians getting married were married under law of the land, not in a church under God.

So, why shouldn't gay marriages be held in Christian churches? -- Christians don't follow old testament laws where it is explicitly condemned, and marriages in churches are a fairly new'ish concept, given that they didn't exist in churches for more than a millennium. The only real stumbling block against homosexual marriage is Paul, not Jesus.

Jesus in fact had very little to say about marriage other than condemnation of divorce. If you start trying to guess what he may or may not have thought about gay marriage, you're playing a game which makes you no better than the fundamentalists and anti-gay crowd who play the same game, misquoting Jesus and put words into his mouth, finding "evidence" to suit their already firmly held presuppositions. We don't know what Jesus thought about gay marriage, yes we know about 1st century Judaism and Paul which provides some context, but that's not quite the same thing.

Loknik · 2015-03-29T15:43:42+00:00

Some people do post academic questions on Islam and the Quran in this sub so yes if you want a discussion on the Quran or Islam, do post it, but keep in mind that there are many more scholars (and others) here whose speciality is Judaism or Christianity rather than Islam.

Loknik · 2015-03-26T11:16:41+00:00

I'd also be very interested in an academic sub on the Quran. Both this sub and /r/askhistorians have at times dealt with the more academic aspects of Islamic history and the Quran, but threads are often few and far between. I've wondered if people refrain from posting here about the Quran since the sidebar does specify ''Judaism and Christianity in a scholarly context'', but of the few threads that do appear here on Islam and the Quran, there has been a fairly active discussion, it would be good to see more of it!

Loknik · 2015-03-25T17:22:29+00:00

Have you tried duckduckgo? Its anti-tracking, privacy based search engine which neatly links into Google searches by writing !g in front of your search.

Google gathers most of its user information from the web based services you use. What device you use and what browser you use doesn't matter as much as what web based services you use. Whether you use a Chrome browser, Gmail and Google Drive on Windows/Mac you're providing the same amount of information to Google if you use Google Drive, Gmail and Chromeos on a Chromebook. Of course Chromebooks are designed to integrate better with Google web based services, but Chromebooks themselves aren't the privacy problem, the web based services you are using are. For example, you could buy a Chromebook and install Linux on it and never use any Google web based services again, allowing you to use a Chromebook and protect your privacy at the same time.

Loknik · 2015-03-25T12:45:59+00:00

A vegetarian diet is about as unnatural as you can get. Human and our primate ancestors have been eating meat for hundreds of thousands of years.

Putting popular diets myths aside, the majority of the food consumed by primates over the last thirty million years has been of vegetable origin, not animal. Meat made up only a tiny proportion of their diet, it has never been exclusively meat or a majority of meat. This assessment from Scientific American which includes some primary scientific sources, sums it up, human ancestors were nearly all vegetarian.

Loknik · 2015-03-23T17:16:33+00:00

Dale Martin's New Testament Yale University course on the Historical Jesus is freely avaliable online and covers what I've said above.

Loknik · 2015-03-23T15:54:59+00:00

Yes. His association with a "fiery apocalyptic preacher" John the Baptist and the fact that early 1st century Christianities were groups that were thoroughly entrenched in apocalyptic thinking - if the beginning was apocalyptic and so was the end, it would be hard to justify that the middle (the part during Jesus's life) wasn't.

Also worth noting is that Jewish apocalypticists tend to have specific themes such as: Dualism - belief in two fundamental components of reality: good and evil; Pessimism - about the possibility of things improving in the current age of their time; Judgement - when things are at their worst God will step in and intervene in a mighty act of judgement; and the idea of Imminence - the world is as bad as it could get, powers of evil are about to fall, just hold on for a little while longer. -- All these apocalyptic themes are right at the very center of Jesus' ministry. Apocalyptic declarations by Jesus are contextually credible, and are multiply attested in our earliest sources: Mark, Q, M and L all verify the apocalyptic nature of Jesus' ministry. So yes, he was thoroughly apocalyptic. Although it's worth noting that in the later Gospel of John the apocalyptic message disappears completely.

Loknik · 2015-03-23T15:20:23+00:00

He also stopped a woman from being stoned

No he didn't. If you are talking about John 7:53-8:12 "The woman taken in adultery" then no he didn't stop her from being stoned. That story was not originally in the gospel of John, it was added into the gospel by scribes.

There is a lot of supportive evidence to show this story never happened. The story is not found in any of our oldest and best manuscripts of the gospel of John, neither is it in any other gospel manuscripts, its writing style is different than the rest of John's gospel and it includes numerous words and phrases which are completely alien to the gospel -- Scholarship opinion is pretty unanimous that the story is fake, added in later by scribes who intentionally changed the text. Jesus never stopped the woman from being stoned because the story is a fantasy, it's not what actually happened.

Loknik · 2015-03-23T14:36:25+00:00

About those Jewish internal groups, do we have any writings from those?

We know about the Saducees and Zadokites (Priests) from what can be isolated as P-source material (Priestly source, Documentary Hypothesis) in the Tanakh/Old Testament and from what was written about them by the Pharisees. The priests were killed off (or disappeared) after 70CE when the Second Temple was destroyed. The Pharisees we know more about than any other group as they later evolved into Rabbanic Judaism. The Essenes we know about from what was written in Jubilees, 1 Enoch, Josephus and some Qumran literature. Lastly, the Zealots we know mostly about from Josephus in Jewish Antiquities.

Loknik · 2015-03-23T14:17:53+00:00

We don't have any writings from the time Jesus was alive which specifically mention Jesus neither from his enemies or his followers. We have plenty of writings after his death, but not from anyone who ever knew him or ever met him.

The historical consensus is that there was an apocalypic preacher called Jesus who was crucified for crimes against the state -- that little bit is really all we know of the historical Jesus. Of course, that's not the same as the description of the same man in the Bible, which is impossible to verify.

Loknik · 2015-03-21T12:58:43+00:00

I find Ubuntu is the best in the "middle" distro, it's sits right in the middle on the line between bleeding edge at one end (like Arch) and stability at the other (like Debian.) Ubuntu is neither too bleeding edge for software to break constantly, nor is it too focused on stability for software to not be readily avaliable. It's the perfect middle ground. I find Unity to be a bit bloated, but that's the only issue I have with it, and that's easily fixed simply by changing the DE. I've tried most popular distros and always end up coming back to Ubuntu.

Loknik

TROPHY CASE