Hiya,

Welcome and thanks for your ideas re: the Jesus.com.au site. I've been moving
house over the past few weekends, and just starting to settle down again. Here's
a random grab-bag of my current thinking about the site...

#1 -- Translation vs. Interlinear

Richard suggested auto-linking the interlinear at bible.org. To my mind
interlinears were never very good (the one at bible.org is particularly poor for
not using Greek letters) and are now obsolete; they're crippled by the
assumption of word-to-word equivalence and the different organization of
sentences in Greek and English. I think a vastly superior method, esp. for a
website, is to highlight matching phrases (even when they're not continuous).
See the 'GLOSS' (which still suffers from sentence-order assumptions) and
'TRANSLATION' markup tools here:

http://jesus.com.au/help/formatting

I added the DIFF and TRANSLATION blocks yesterday afternoon, and they may change
a bit yet (or require refinement). Just try to add a comment to any block of
text (so register an account) and you'll be able to play with the markup using
the preview.

#2 -- Initial content for the commentary.

I'd like to get a modern translation -- it needn't be perfect, so maybe the
public domain World English Bible -- into the commentary system so that there's
a starting point for ongoing refinement. Then a catena of septuagint quotes
(esp. in Paul, that's my own research interest), then a catena of references to
NT texts in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, esp. pre-200 CE, so up to Tertullian. Not
sure whether to drop in public domain commentaries or reflections; it'd be a
question of finding suitable source matter.

See the mostly illustrative comments at present:

http://jesus.com.au/comment/latest

#3 -- The next major software upgrade will involve two extra objects to which
comments may be attached: lemmas (i.e. Greek root words), and 'tags'. Tags don't
yet exist in the system, though the comment categories are analogous to them.
They'll be a hierarchy of concepts that can be extended and added to any passage
or lemma, then commented on. This will create something like a publicly
maintained Chain-Reference Bible and lexicon, as well as a commentary.

~~

That's the current state of things. I'm particularly interested in feedback from
educators if you know any who might find it handy. All thoughts are welcome.

All the very best,

Nigel.

--
Nigel Chapman, Sydney AU

Home: http://chapman.id.au
Face: http://facebook.com/nigel.chapman
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"When eras die their legacies are left to
strange police." -- Clarence Day

Nigel.