September Website News

With new academic year due to begin in the next few weeks I thought it would be good to update my visitors on recent and forthcoming developments across the “Theology on the Web” websites.

File Formats for Articles

Over the last few months I’ve been experimenting with different formats for the articles I upload. Since I began in 2001 I’ve scanned, OCR’d and then proof-read all the articles that I’ve placed online. This produces very clear text and very small file sizes, but it does have the disadvantage of being very time consuming as well as introducing typos.

The situation is at present that I have a full-time job in a Christian charity, a wife and three little boys, so website work must be confined to my lunch hour or late evenings. Although I received over a million visitors each year only 4 of these support the work regularly on a monthly basis. The two advertisers who paid for space on the websites have decided not to renew this year. All this means is that while I still hope to do this work full-time on the sites at some point there is no prospect of this in the near future on the basis of current funding levels. If you would like to support the development of the sites I suggest a number of ways of doing so here.

This has led me to change the format of the articles I upload to scanned PDF’s with OCR’d text. These retain the original layout, can be searched, cut and pasted and appear in search engines. They can be produced very quickly (I could scan and place online an entire book in a few hours) but the file size is around 15-20 times larger a word-processed version. A few people have complained about this change, but I would rather have the material available now rather in several years time (if ever) even if the format does not please everyone.

New (old!) Journals Online

I have recently completed the entire 11 volumes of the Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society and will be integrating the articles into my site in the next few weeks. Vox Evangelica (which I began working on in 2006) should be complete by the end of next week. I have recently completed a table of contents for the Theological Students Fellowship (TSF) Bulletin (UK) and a number of these articles are now online. Anvil journal recently allowed me to publish around 27 of its articles and these are appearing as permissions from the authors are received. I am now working on a table of contents for Themelios (1962-1974) when it was published by IFES. I hope to be able to place many of these articles online as well in due course in partnership with Tyndale House and the Gospel Coalition.

Missiology Website

Due to my present workload the launch of this site has been put back until sometime next year.

That’s all for now. Remember to subscribe to the site feeds to received the latest news. Thanks for visiting!

New File Format for On-line Articles - Feedback Requested

One of the constant challenges when placing material on-line is to produce readable text that can be spidered by search engines, produced quickly and is of a small enough file size to be accessed by those in the developing world using dial-up connections. OK - that's a whole bundle of challenges rolled into one!

I was recently introduced to a new file format - Deja Vu (.djvu) which produces files which combine an image with an OCRed text overlay. Deja Vu is superior to the Adobe equivalent in that the files are much smaller and can be produced from images scanned at only 200 dpi.

I have been testing the new format on articles from the Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society. So far I have been able to upload 2 entire volumes in the same time it would have taken to upload about 4 articles using my usual method of Scan & OCR -> MS Word format -> Print -> Proofread -> PDF.

I will probably add PDF's versions in the course of time, but at least something will be available quickly. You will probably need to download a browser plugin to read the articles - a link is included on the page.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Table of Contents Now On-line

With the kind assistance of the Librarian and volunteer staff at the Tyndale House Library in Cambridge I have now completed the table of contents for the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester. The listing runs from the first issue in 1903 up to the end of 1992. Although this journal is still in production, after the early 1990's it ceased to include a significant amount of material relating to biblical studies. For this reason I stopped listing the contents at that point. Over the years the BJRL published many significant articles by such scholars as T.W. Manson, C.H. Dodd and F.F. Bruce.

Articles to Appear in iPaper Format

I plan to upload the majority of articles from now on in iPaper format with the option of also viewing and downloading in PDF. iPaper offers greater flexibility than PDF, requiries less bandwidth to view and works without the need of a browser plugin. Over time I will convert all current PDF to iPaper, starting with those which, according to my logs, consume the greatest bandwidth.

Here is an example of a book in iPaper format.

I would be interested in receiving your feedback regarding this.

Update on Article Translations

Last year I announced that I was looking for volunteers to translate some of the articles hosted on my websites into other languages. Since then progress has been slow, but I know have a few articles available in Filipino, Spanish and Romanian.

Last week I was approached by a retired Baptist missionary who formerly served in Brazil. He has kindly offered to translate around 50 articles into Portuguese to make them more accessible in South America. I have spent the last few days approaching publishers and authors for the neccessary permissions and translation work has already begun. Completed articles will appear on the BiblicalStudies.org.uk website shortly.

"Interpreting the Word of God: FS for Steven Barabas." One chapter to go on-line - please help to choose which one

One of my supporters kindly sent me a copy of the following book in the hope that I would be able to place one chapter from it on-line:

Samuel J. Schultz & Morris A. Inch, eds., Interpreting the Word of God. Festschift in honor of Steven Barabas. Chicago: Moody Press, 1976. Hbk. pp.281.

Moody have kindly given me permission for me to do this, but there remains the problem of deciding which article to use, as all are on interesting subjects. So I am asking my readers to vote for the chapter they would most like to see on-line. Anyone can vote, but I will give extra weighting to those who have read the article and can say why it is still useful today. I look forward to reading the comments. Here is the list of articles:

J.E. Jennings, “Ancient Near Eastern Religion and Biblical Interpretation,” 11-30.

Alfred J. Hoerth, “Archaeology and the Christian Mind,” 31-45.

S.J. Schultz, “Old Testament Prophets in Today’s World,” 46-59.

C. Hassell Bullock, “Entrée to the Pentateuch Through the Prophets: A Hermeneutics of History,” 60-77.

Donald A. Hagner, “The Old Testament in the New Testament,” 78-104.

Gordon Fee, “The Genre of New Testament Literature and Biblical Hermeneutics,” 105-127.

Alan Johnson, “History and Culture in New Testament Interpretation,” 128-161.

Morris Inch, “The Place of the Incarnation in Biblical Interpretation,” 162-177.

Donald Lake, “The Reformation Contribution to the Interpretation of the Bible,” 178-198.

Robert Webber, “Biblical Authority: A Study in History,” 199-216.

Herbert Jacobson, “On the Limitations of Hermeneutics,” 217-237.

Steven Barabas, “Bibliographic Tools of Biblical Interpretation,” 238-272.

Articles in other Languages? That's a Good Idea

I am in the early stages of discussions with someone who is wanting to translate some of the articles from Themelios into Spanish. For some time I have had it on my heart to increase the number of people able to benefit from the material I have online. I currently get visitors from all but about 6 countries around the world (around 1,600 visits a day on http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/ at present), but I am aware that the content is only accessible to those who can read English. I am also aware that I lack the ability to do this myself. I therefore look forward to seeing how this develops and hope that tranlations into other languages, such as French, Portuguese, Mandarin and Cantonese (the list could be extended), might also become a reality. If you know of anyone willing to do this kind of work please let me know [rob(at)biblicalstudies.org.uk].

An Update on the on-line Version of Themelios

I have just heard that the Gospel Coalition have suspended their plans to place back-issues of Themelios on-line. The problem is that the authors own the copyright to their articles not the journal and so they cannot appear on-line without each author giving his/her permission (I was already aware of this from my work on the articles).

Your Help Needed!

I have offered to assist by putting them in touch with the authors I have been in correspondence with. If you are a Themelios author and would like your article(s) to appear on the Gospel Coalition website please email me at rob(at)biblicalstudies.org.uk and send you the address of my contact at the Gospel Coalition. Please pass this message on to any Themelios authors you might know.

Complete Table of Contents for JETS now on-line

As promised a table of contents for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society is now available (here). Until fairly recently the Evangelical Theological Society website offered access to PDF versions of almost all of its back-issues, but now this is restricted to members of the Society only. Many other websites (including some of my own) still contain what are now invalid links to the articles in their previous locations.

FAQ page now on-line

Life is still very hectic for myself and my family. In order to deal more efficiently with the number of questions I receive each week about the articles I upload and so give me more time to work on them I have created a FAQ page. I hope it proves of help.

A Bruce-fest on Theology on the Web

I have recently received permission to reproduce around thirty articles by the late Professor F.F. Bruce orignally published in Evangelical Quarterly and the Bulletin of the John Ryland's Library. I am in the process of gathering copies of the articles together and hope to start work on them later this year. I have compiled a bibliography of F.F. Bruce's works on TheologicalStudies.org.uk.

Journal of Evangelical Theological Society on-line

Volume 12 (1969) through 48 (1995) of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society are now available on-line at the Society's website. This is a tremendous resource and over the next few weeks I will be adding direct links to most of the articles from the relevant pages on biblicalstudies.org.uk as time permits.