May 27 2008

Acts 2

Based on a chal­lenge from the ven­er­a­ble Carl Cam­era:

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Acts 2

The Holy Spirit Comes at Pentecost

1 When the day of Pen­te­cost came, they were all together in one place. 2 Sud­denly a sound like the blow­ing of a vio­lent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sit­ting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that sep­a­rated and came to rest on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues1 as the Spirit enabled them.

5 Now there were stay­ing in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. 6 When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewil­der­ment, because each one heard them speak­ing in his own lan­guage. 7 Utterly amazed, they asked: “Are not all these men who are speak­ing Galileans? 8 Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native lan­guage? 9 Parthi­ans, Medes and Elamites; res­i­dents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cap­pado­cia, Pon­tus and Asia, 10 Phry­gia and Pam­phylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; vis­i­tors from Rome 11 (both Jews and con­verts to Judaism); Cre­tans and Arabs–we hear them declar­ing the won­ders of God in our own tongues!” 12 Amazed and per­plexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”

13 Some, how­ever, made fun of them and said, “They have had too much wine2.”

Peter Addresses the Crowd

14 Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fel­low Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; lis­ten care­fully to what I say. 15 These men are not drunk, as you sup­pose. It’s only nine in the morn­ing! 16 No, this is what was spo­ken by the prophet Joel:

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17 ” ‘In the last days, God says,

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I will pour out my Spirit on all peo­ple.
Your sons and daugh­ters will proph­esy,
your young men will see visions,
your old men will dream dreams.

18 Even on my ser­vants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.

19 I will show won­ders in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood and fire and bil­lows of smoke.

20 The sun will be turned to dark­ness
and the moon to blood
before the com­ing of the great and glo­ri­ous day of the Lord.

21 And every­one who calls
on the name of the Lord will be saved3.’

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22 “Men of Israel, lis­ten to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accred­ited by God to you by mir­a­cles, won­ders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you your­selves know. 23 This man was handed over to you by God’s set pur­pose and fore­knowl­edge; and you, with the help of wicked men4, put him to death by nail­ing him to the cross. 24 But God raised him from the dead, free­ing him from the agony of death, because it was impos­si­ble for death to keep its hold on him.

25 David said about him:

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” ‘I saw the Lord always before me.
Because he is at my right hand,
I will not be shaken.

26 There­fore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will live in hope,

27 because you will not aban­don me to the grave,
nor will you let your Holy One see decay.

28 You have made known to me the paths of life;
you will fill me with joy in your pres­ence5.’

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29 “Broth­ers, I can tell you con­fi­dently that the patri­arch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day. 30 But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descen­dants on his throne. 31 See­ing what was ahead, he spoke of the res­ur­rec­tion of the Christ6, that he was not aban­doned to the grave, nor did his body see decay. 32 God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all wit­nesses of the fact. 33 Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear.

34 For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet he said,

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” ‘The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand

35 until I make your ene­mies
a foot­stool for your feet7.” ‘

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36 “There­fore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you cru­ci­fied, both Lord and Christ.”

37 When the peo­ple heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apos­tles, “Broth­ers, what shall we do?”

38 Peter replied, “Repent and be bap­tized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the for­give­ness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39

40 With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, “Save your­selves from this cor­rupt gen­er­a­tion.” 41 Those who accepted his mes­sage were bap­tized, and about three thou­sand were added to their num­ber that day.

The Fel­low­ship of the Believers

42 They devoted them­selves to the apos­tles’ teach­ing and to the fel­low­ship, to the break­ing of bread and to prayer. 43 Every­one was filled with awe, and many won­ders and mirac­u­lous signs were done by the apos­tles.
44 All the believ­ers were together and had every­thing in com­mon. 45 Sell­ing their pos­ses­sions and goods, they gave to any­one as he had need. 46 Every day they con­tin­ued to meet together in the tem­ple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sin­cere hearts, 47 prais­ing God and enjoy­ing the favor of all the peo­ple. And the Lord added to their num­ber daily those who were being saved.

Acts 2:1–47

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Foot­notes (NIV):

1 Acts 2:4 Or lan­guages; also in verse 11

2 Acts 2:13 Or sweet wine

3 Acts 2:21 Joel 2:28–32

4 Acts 2:23 Or of those not hav­ing the law (that is, Gentiles)

5 Acts 2:28 Psalm 16:8–11

6 Acts 2:31 Or Mes­siah. “The Christ” (Greek) and “the Mes­siah” (Hebrew) both mean “the Anointed One”; also in verse 36.

7 Acts 2:35 Psalm 110:1

New Inter­na­tional Ver­sion

Ccopy­right © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Inter­na­tional Bible Soci­ety [Zondervan]

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May 26 2008

Bible Markup Pattern: A Proposal

(Also pub­lished at God­bit.)

What is the best way to mark up text from the Bible? I’ve been think­ing about this ques­tion for more than a year, and in that time I have sought an answer, or at least a proposal.

If you’re impa­tient, here are the exam­ples: Exo­dus 20, Psalm 23, Matthew 5, and Matthew 6:5–15.

Caveats

Please remem­ber this arti­cle presents only a pro­posal for con­sid­er­a­tion. I am no the­olo­gian; nor am I a renowned expert on front-end code. Nor does every page of every site I’ve ever built have “best” markup, how­ever I do make every effort to do so.

How­ever, it seems to me that–of all texts in the world–it should be impor­tant to make an effort toward best prac­tices in mark­ing up the Bible.

Of course, I wel­come cor­rec­tions and com­men­tary, any thoughts or additions.

Back­ground

Some good work has been done on cita­tion of online Bible quotes, includ­ing BibleRef and OpenBible.info. There are even some Word­press plu­g­ins for BibleRef.

Bibleref is a sim­ple approach to auto­mat­i­cally iden­ti­fy­ing Bible ref­er­ences [in] web pages.

I use and rec­om­mend BibleRef, which is a foun­da­tional pro­posal that focuses directly on the cita­tion, for exam­ple: <cite class="bibleref">2 Tim 3:16</cite>. All of the present exam­ples use the BibleRef cita­tion format.

But I wanted some­thing more com­pre­hen­sive, that would help with mark­ing up entire bib­li­cal texts or even a whole Bible.

Bibleref is part of a gen­eral move­ment toward markup that expresses more seman­tic, rather than pre­sen­ta­tional, element.

So, my ques­tion is broader than cita­tion for­mat: what ele­ments should we use,
as best practice?

What’s “Best”?

When con­sid­er­ing what may be a “best” way to mark up the Bible, sev­eral require­ments or prin­ci­ples come to mind.

First, it means using (X)HTML in a way that is valid, min­i­mal, and seman­tic. In this case, the term “valid” means essen­tially “meet­ing the require­ments set by the W3C of the spec­i­fi­ca­tion selected by the Doc­type of that document.”

“Min­i­mal” refers to adding as few ele­ments and attrib­utes as rea­son­ably pos­si­ble to the text itself, while pre­serv­ing its structure.

And for pur­poses of this arti­cle, “seman­tic” means a few things: using mean­ing­ful ele­ments that match each por­tion of the text, and com­mu­ni­cate its func­tional mean­ing. In other words, if some text is a pri­mary head­ing, use an <h1> (head­ing) ele­ment; if it’s a para­graph, use a <p> (para­graph) ele­ment; if a block quote, use a <blockquote> ele­ment, etc.

The word “seman­tic” also man­dates gen­eral web stan­dards prin­ci­ples, including:

  • no tables for layout,
  • avoid inline styles,
  • avoid frames,
  • avoid numer­ous <div> and <span> ele­ments (espe­cially those with class attrib­utes that mimic other ele­ments, like head­ings and paragraphs),
  • don’t require JavaScript or Flash.

CMS – Friendly

Another prin­ci­ple for my project is to rec­og­nize the ubiq­uity of the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. Most cur­rent con­tent on the web is no longer in sta­tic web pages; rather, it is stored in a data­base and pre­sented dynam­i­cally when some­one asks for it.

So, the four exam­ples I’ve pre­pared are all marked up using the excel­lent Tex­tile syn­tax, the “humane Web text generator”.

Not a Microformat

I sup­port and use Micro­for­mats, but it should be noted that this Bible markup pat­tern is not a Micro­for­mat, and for var­i­ous rea­sons it prob­a­bly never will be.

Cur­rent Practice

I did some research on how some pub­lish­ers and ver­sions are pre­sented on the web, basi­cally by look­ing at as many of these four exam­ples in the four ver­sions that were avail­able on these five sites: Bible Gate­way, Eng­lish Stan­dard Ver­sion, eBible, You­Ver­sion, and WEB Bible.

The markup was about what you might expect from large sites with big con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems. With very few excep­tions, the markup of the pages were all invalid, not min­i­mal, and not semantic.

How­ever, they all at least declared a Doc­type, and com­pared to many enor­mous com­mer­cial sites, most of the markup was rather clean. In fact, almost all used head­ing ele­ments well, and used some arrange­ment of mainly para­graph ele­ments with some class attrib­utes. Depend­ing on the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem, my impres­sion is that much of this Bible text markup could be much improved with­out undue effort.

Thing One, and Thing Two

Some infor­mal study indi­cates there seem to be two basic seman­tic types or “gen­res” of bib­li­cal text.

The first type can be cat­e­go­rized as prose, and includes para­graphs, lists, and block quotes. The sec­ond type may be called verse, which includes poems, songs, and other lyri­cal matter.

I real­ize this may be gross over-simplification, but when con­struct­ing any tax­on­omy there is a ten­sion in select­ing the num­ber of cat­e­gories. In this case, I pro­pose sim­ply two cat­e­gories, which adds seman­tic rich­ness while being sim­ple enough for this intro­duc­tory article.

The two main gen­res in the Bible are nar­ra­tive and poetry.
– Edi­tors’ Pref­ace to the ESV Lit­er­ary Study Bible

Even a sim­ple two-category tax­on­omy can yield pow­er­ful results: pick up a Bible and com­pare Gen­e­sis to Psalms, which con­tain mostly prose and verse respec­tively. It’s obvi­ous they are pre­sented dif­fer­ently, and this basic pre­sen­ta­tional char­ac­ter can be pre­served in the markup.

Exam­ples

As exam­ples of this pro­posed Bible markup pat­tern, it seemed appro­pri­ate to use pas­sages from both Old and New Tes­ta­ments, includ­ing prose, block quotes, and verse.

I selected four texts as exam­ples, which are posted on my blog: Exo­dus 20, Psalm 23, Matthew 5, and Matthew 6:5–15. These pas­sages are also known as the Ten Com­mand­ments, the Beat­i­tudes, the Lord’s Prayer, and … the Twenty-Third Psalm.

Each exam­ple is pre­sented in a dif­fer­ent ver­sion: Exo­dus 20 in the NIV, Psalm 23 in the ESV, Matthew 5 in the WEB, and Matthew 6:5–15 in the KJV.

Overview: The Method

  1. Bible: The first step is sim­ple: a con­tainer ele­ment, such as a <div>, gets a class attribute of “bible”.
  1. Head­ings: The sec­ond step is also easy: Head­ings use head­ing ele­ments, such as <h2>, <h3>, etc.
  1. Para­graphs: Put almost every­thing else in a paragraph.
  1. Block quotes: sur­round one or more para­graphs of a block quote in with <blockquote> and </blockquote> tags.
  1. Verse num­bers and Foot­notes: At first, I thought it would be clever to use ordered lists for the verse num­bers, but that only works if every­one begins all their Bible quo­ta­tions from the begin­ning of a chap­ter. So, verse num­bers are <sup> ele­ments. Sim­i­larly, foot­note ref­er­ence num­bers are </sup><sup> ele­ments with a class attribute of “footnote”.
  1. Verse, Poetry, etc.: As between “prose” and “verse,” I chose to make “prose” the default. If some or all of a pas­sage is verse, then enclose that text with an ele­ment (such as a <span>) with a class attribute of “verse”.
  1. Addi­tional: There are a few addi­tional aspects, includ­ing div ele­ments to enclose multi-paragraph “stan­zas” of verse (see Psalm 23), and the markup of the footnotes.

The Styles

For ease of ref­er­ence, the Bible style infor­ma­tion is embed­ded in the head of the exam­ples, so you can sim­ply view the page source.

In actual use, they should be included in a sep­a­rate CSS file with the other styles for that page. A sam­ple CSS file of the Bible styles is avail­able for down­load.

The Future

Some thoughts for the future:

  • How to markup Selah or a clos­ing Amen? Per­haps class="affirmation"?
  • Ini­tial caps for the chap­ter num­ber, super­sed­ing the verse num­ber of the first verse of that chapter?
  • Per­haps a print stylesheet, for select­ing a slightly dif­fer­ent font stack, or siz­ing the printed text in points.
  • And the one I’m almost afraid to ask, what about class="wordsofchrist"?

Let the dis­cus­sion begin….

This arti­cle is © Mont­gomery 2008. Some rights released with a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

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Aug 12 2007

Matthew 5

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1 See­ing the mul­ti­tudes, he went up onto the moun­tain. When he had sat down, his dis­ci­ples came to him. 2 He opened his mouth and taught them, saying,

3
for theirs is the King­dom of Heaven1.

4 Blessed are those who mourn,
for they shall be com­forted2.

5 Blessed are the gen­tle,
for they shall inherit the earth3.

6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after right­eous­ness,
for they shall be filled.

7 Blessed are the mer­ci­ful,
for they shall obtain mercy.

8 Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God.

9 Blessed are the peace­mak­ers,
for they shall be called chil­dren of God.

10
for theirs is the King­dom of Heaven.

1112 Rejoice, and be exceed­ingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For that is how they per­se­cuted the prophets who were before you.

131415 Nei­ther do you light a lamp, and put it under a mea­sur­ing bas­ket, but on a stand; and it shines to all who are in the house. 16 Even so, let your light shine before men; that they may see your good works, and glo­rify your Father who is in heaven.

1718 For most cer­tainly, I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not even one small­est let­ter4 or one tiny pen stroke5 shall in any way pass away from the law, until all things are accom­plished. 19 Who­ever, there­fore, shall break one of these least com­mand­ments, and teach oth­ers to do so, shall be called least in the King­dom of Heaven; but who­ever shall do and teach them shall be called great in the King­dom of Heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your right­eous­ness exceeds that of the scribes and Phar­isees, there is no way you will enter into the King­dom of Heaven.

21622 But I tell you, that every­one who is angry with his brother with­out a cause789.

2324 leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be rec­on­ciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. 25 Agree with your adver­sary quickly, while you are with him in the way; lest per­haps the pros­e­cu­tor deliver you to the judge, and the judge deliver you to the offi­cer, and you be cast into prison. 26 Most cer­tainly I tell you, you shall by no means get out of there, until you have paid the last penny10.

27111228 but I tell you that every­one who gazes at a woman to lust after her has com­mit­ted adul­tery with her already in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to stum­ble, pluck it out and throw it away from you. For it is more prof­itable for you that one of your mem­bers should per­ish, than for your whole body to be cast into Gehenna13. 30 If your right hand causes you to stum­ble, cut it off, and throw it away from you. For it is more prof­itable for you that one of your mem­bers should per­ish, than for your whole body to be cast into Gehenna14.

311532 but I tell you that who­ever puts away his wife, except for the cause of sex­ual immoral­ity, makes her an adul­ter­ess; and who­ever mar­ries her when she is put away com­mits adultery.

333435 nor by the earth, for it is the foot­stool of his feet; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. 3637

38163940 If any­one sues you to take away your coat, let him have your cloak also. 41 Who­ever com­pels you to go one mile, go with him two. 42

4317, and hate your enemy1844 But I tell you, love your ene­mies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mis­treat you and per­se­cute you, 45 that you may be chil­dren of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. 464719 do the same? 48 There­fore you shall be per­fect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Matthew 5

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Foot­notes (WEB):

1 Isa­iah 57:15; 66:2

2 Isa­iah 61:2; 66:10,13

3 or, land. Psalm 37:11

4 lit­er­ally, iota

5 or, serif

6 Exo­dus 20:13

7

8

9 or, Hell

11

12

13 Exo­dus 20:14

14 or, Hell

15 or, Hell

16 Deuteron­omy 24:1

17 Exo­dus 21:24; Leviti­cus 24:20; Deuteron­omy 19:21

18 Leviti­cus 19:18

19 not in the Bible, but see Qum­ran Man­ual of Dis­ci­pline Ix, 21–26

World Eng­lish Bible, pub­lic domain.

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Aug 12 2007

Exodus 20

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The Ten Commandments

1 And God spoke all these words:

2 “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

3 “You shall have no other gods before1 me.

4 “You shall not make for your­self an idol in the form of any­thing in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or wor­ship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jeal­ous God, pun­ish­ing the chil­dren for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth gen­er­a­tion of those who hate me, 6 but show­ing love to a thou­sand {gen­er­a­tions} of those who love me and keep my commandments.

7 “You shall not mis­use the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold any­one guilt­less who mis­uses his name.

8 “Remem­ber the Sab­bath day by keep­ing it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the sev­enth day is a Sab­bath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, nei­ther you, nor your son or daugh­ter, nor your manser­vant or maid­ser­vant, nor your ani­mals, nor the alien within your gates. 11 For in six days the LORD made the heav­ens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the sev­enth day. There­fore the LORD blessed the Sab­bath day and made it holy.

12 “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giv­ing you.

13 “You shall not murder.

14 “You shall not com­mit adultery.

15 “You shall not steal.

16 “You shall not give false tes­ti­mony against your neighbor.

17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manser­vant or maid­ser­vant, his ox or don­key, or any­thing that belongs to your neighbor.”

18 When the peo­ple saw the thun­der and light­ning and heard the trum­pet and saw the moun­tain in smoke, they trem­bled with fear. They stayed at a dis­tance 19 and said to Moses, “Speak to us your­self and we will lis­ten. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”

20 Moses said to the peo­ple, “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.”

21 The peo­ple remained at a dis­tance, while Moses approached the thick dark­ness where God was.

Idols and Altars

22 Then the LORD said to Moses, “Tell the Israelites this: ‘You have seen for your­selves that I have spo­ken to you from heaven: 23 Do not make any gods to be along­side me; do not make for your­selves gods of sil­ver or gods of gold.

24 ” ‘Make an altar of earth for me and sac­ri­fice on it your burnt offer­ings and fel­low­ship offer­ings2, your sheep and goats and your cat­tle. Wher­ever I cause my name to be hon­ored, I will come to you and bless you. 25 If you make an altar of stones for me, do not build it with dressed stones, for you will defile it if you use a tool on it. 26 And do not go up to my altar on steps, lest your naked­ness be exposed on it.’

Exo­dus 20:1–26

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Foot­notes (NIV):

1 Exo­dus 20:3 Or besides

2 Exo­dus 20:24 Tra­di­tion­ally peace offer­ings

New Inter­na­tional Ver­sion

Ccopy­right © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Inter­na­tional Bible Soci­ety [Zondervan]

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