Category Archives: Personal

Rick’s End-of-2023 Roundup

OK, y’all, 2023 was an exceedingly strange year for me. I’ve had four different employers (two full-time, two contract) and it’s been weird. But good. (Very good, in fact).

So I wanted to post a “stuff I did” this year post. It’ll be different, though, because I’ll mention written stuff but I’ll also point you to Github repos with open data (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA) that you can do whatever you’d like to with. I guess I really have been busy.

Publications

Only one publication this year:

“The Memorial of John: A New Translation and Introduction” in New Testament Apocrypha: More Non-Canonical Scriptures, Volume 3. Edited by Tony Burke. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans.

In addition to the conference paper, I had a blog post published at Text and Canon’s web site on Bible versification issues:

How Bible Software Solves Differences in Versification for You

I do have a forthcoming publication from Lexham Press, with a group of three other editors, that I’m really hoping is published in 2024. It is a collection of Pseudepigraphal writings translated from the Greek sources, each with short introductions and bibliography. Hoping it happens soon.

Since we’re here, I suppose I should give an update on the Hermas project as well. To date I have a draft of the Visions together (chapters 1–25) that I’m doing an editing pass on (50K words, about halfway through the edit/review); after that I’ll hopefully start on the draft of the Mandates (chapters 26–49).

Conference Papers

As well, only one conference presentation this year, at the Bible Translation conference in Dallas, Texas:

“Ambiguous Pronouns and Names: Tracking Participants in Biblical Passages using Referent Analysis.” Presented to the Exegesis and Biblical Languages group at the Bible Translation Conference in Dallas, TX, October 17, 2023.

Public Open Repos

And here’s where most of my work this year will show up. As mentioned, I’ve had four different employers this year, two full-time and two contract. I worked for Logos/Faithlife full time through the end of September, 2023. Not able to share the work I did at Logos; it was largely in service of in-development stuff. From October 2023 I’ve been employed with the BiblioNexus Studio. In addition to my full-time work, I’ve been under contract for up to 15 hours per week by Clear Bible, who in the middle of August 2023 was acquired by Biblica. I still work up to 15 hours per week for Biblica.

Stuff I did for Clear/Biblica in 2023:

  • Speaker Quotations: An analysis of various English Bible versions to determine quoted material and the speaker of the material, mapped back to the underlying Greek and Hebrew. As well, a “Clear” form of this data that provides an (automated) consensus view of the quotations in the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament and their speakers.
  • Various updates, enhancements, and corrections to Biblica/Clear’s Macula Hebrew and Macula Greek syntactic analyses, particularly in migrating a bunch of data into the SBLGNT form of Macula Greek to make it publicly available.
  • NT Conditional Statements: An analysis from Steve Nicolle at CanIL (Canada Institute of Linguistics) of the conditional statements in the Greek New Testament as well as statements that use conditional conjunctions but do not adhere to the formal pattern/rules of conditional statements. I converted this data from some spreadsheets into JSON (and some Markdown) to make it easier to integrate in other solutions (e.g. Bible software platforms and other solutions).
  • Textual Alignments: I did some work to migrate textual alignments of various Bibles to openly available sources. Notably, there are alignments of the Lexham English Bible and Young’s Literal Translation to the SBLGNT (for NT, specifically the Macula Greek edition of the SBLGNT) and to the Westminster text of Macula Hebrew for the OT.

Stuff I released via my own Github account in 2023:

30 Years. 362 Months. 1,572 Weeks. 11,009 Days.

Sometimes, things you don’t anticipate sneak up on you. That’s what happened with me.

Many readers know that I work for Logos Bible Software, and I have for 30 years (just had my anniversary).

So it might be a little shocking to tell you that I’m leaving Logos. My last day there will be Friday, September 29, 2023. I’ll start a new job, with a different employer, on Monday, October 2.

Working at Logos has been like a dream. I’ve worked with so many incredibly talented and smart people, and we’ve pulled off some amazing things that, at least from my perspective, I had no right to be involved with. Bible translations. Edition of the Greek New Testament. Lexicons. Text-critical stuff. Analyses of all sorts of the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, and Greek New Testament. Oh, and Apostolic Fathers, and Christian Apocrypha. Not to mention Josephus, Philo, and the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Greek).

It has been incredible. And I am indebted to a large number of people; friends and colleagues (in that order) who will always be dear to me. I’m not going to list them all here, and chances are if they read this they know who they are.

But I do want to mention a few longtime “partners in crime,” starting with Eli Evans. He and I pulled off amazing things that smarter minds wouldn’t even have tried. He’s genuinely an amazing human, and I’m better for having shared over two decades of my life working with him on all sorts of stuff. Thank you, Eli, for the impact your friendship has had on me. (Also, read his novel because it is crazy good.)

Next up is Bob Pritchett. What can I say about Bob? I had the privilege, for nearly 30 years, of working for and with someone who had confidence in me and my abilities (in hindsight, maybe more confidence than I’d give myself). He pushed me, and he sharpened me. And I am grateful.

Another valuable friend is Steve Runge. Steve invests in people, and for some reason he saw fit to invest his friendship in me. And I’ve learned a lot from him, of course about Greek, but mostly about how to be someone’s friend. I’m much better off for our years of friendship.

There are others. Sean Boisen. Isaiah Hoogendyk. Peter Venable. James van Noord. Vincent Setterholm. Mike Heiser. Bill Nienhuis. Colleagues and collaborators who, when we were all together as a group, could each complement the other in various ways such that the whole was always greater than the sum of its parts.

There are so many others, but I can’t even begin to name them. I mean, it’s been 30 years. Thanks to you all.

Now, what will Rick be doing next?

I’ve accepted a job offer from a group called BiblioNexus. I’ll be working with them to create an information infrastructure (a “foundational knowledge framework”) to support minority language Bible translation.

Some great news is that I’ll once again be able to work with longtime friends and colleagues (some former Logos colleagues; some who never worked at Logos) in this effort. In a line I’ve used many times before, and that I stole from Steve Runge, it’s like in the movie “Oceans 11,” when Basher (Don Cheadle) and Rusty (Brad Pitt) are walking away from a failed bank robbery (where Rusty rescued Basher from being arrested to recruit him for another job), and Basher says, “It’ll be nice working with proper villains again.” On that note, I’m thrilled to be “working with proper villains again” and get back into spending the majority of my time writing code to sift original language data to produce information and knowledge that we can use to support the process of Bible translation in minority languages.

Further up, further in!