Davide's Notes

This is my first attempt at phrasing. My experience so far has been that this is a useful device, for several reasons:

• it forces you to work on the Greek text. This has the benefit of helping to consolidate points of grammar, meaning of words, etc.
• it might help to see literary devices, theological points, and the overall context (to some extent, at least).
• it is a slow process, dynamic, and not necessarily converging all the time. This reflects, it seems to me, the attitude one should have toward reading God's word. Haste is not helpful, and it's good to recognize that this is and should be hard work, like in all meaningful relationships.
• it forms a basis for further meditation on the text.
• it is personal. (where personal hopefully does not mean arbitrary.)

I am (more or less) following the phrasing method outlined in Mounce's A Graded Reader of Biblical Greek. Here, I am experimenting with colors and styles to see if they help me in some way. For example, in the passage below I put terms in direct opposition in italics, or I used the background color to group together verses sharing something in common (for example, 1:6.8.10 all have a negative connotation). Suggestions from readers of this blog are welcome, of course.

On the technical side, the use of an HTML editor facilitates the effort enormously. As I blogged a few months ago, I use the open source editor NVU (available for Linux, Mac, and Windows), which by the way has very recently reached the important milestone of version 1.0.

Note to Bloglines users: it turns out that Bloglines does not always preserve indentation in the table below (I don't know about other blog readers/aggregators), so the table is best looked directly on the website.