Origins of b-greek
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Nov 20 15:00:07 EST 2002
At 7:28 PM +0000 11/20/02, Mark Goodacre wrote:
>I'm doing a bit of research on the last ten years of the e-lists for
>a paper to be given on Saturday at the SBL Computer Assisted Research
>Section entitled "Studying the New Testament by Email: The
>Pleasures, the Pains and the Prospects for the Academic E-Lists". I
>only joined b-greek myself in 1997 (I think) and there are two
>questions I haven't been able to find the answers to quickly when
>working through the archives. If anyone happens to know the answers
>to these without looking them up, I'd be really grateful. Perhaps
>this should be off-list?
>
>(1) When did NT-Greek become b-greek?
It was established in August 1991 by David John Marotta, as you rightly
noted, as "NT-Greek"
Here's the blurb of the notification of the change:
Date: 11 Apr 94 15:46:29 EDT
From: David John Marotta <djm5g at virginia.edu>
To: New Testament Greek Mailing List <NT-Greek at virginia.edu>
Subject: NT-GREEK changed to B-GREEK and moved to listserver
>
>(2) When I joined b-greek it already had the policy about focusing on
>issues connected with Greek language rather than, more broadly, the
>exegesis of the New Testament. A look at the early years of the
>archives makes it clear that originally a variety of topics were
>discussed. At what stage did the policy change? Was the change
>driven by the an excessive number of posts or by something else?
Essentially in 1996; in the latter part of that year David John Marotta
selected a staff to moderate B-Greek and made Edward Hobbs the chair; a
first FAQ was hammered out and narrowed the focus pretty sharply to issues
concerning the Greek language and Greek text; as I see it, two factors
pushed B-Greek in this direction: (1) a considerable influx of subscribers
who were in earlier stages of learning Greek and raising the sorts of
questions one might expect in these stages; that shifted the focus toward
linguistic aspects of Biblical Greek; (2) more general lists for Biblical
interpretation and for specific areas of Biblical study--Synoptics,
Johannine Lit, Pauline studies, etc. emerged; this shifted the focus away
from the more general scholarly questions concerning NT or Biblical studies
toward narrower focus upon Biblical Greek texts and Biblical Greek
language. Another major factor in narrowing the scope of discussion was the
realization that flame wars arose chiefly from the fact that list-members
range across such a broad spectrum of faith-commitments that consensus upon
hermeneutical and theological issues was impossible; consequently it was
agreed that list-discussion could be most fruitful upon issues of language
and legitimate possibilities of interpretation of the Greek text. A survey
of list-members conducted in September of 1997 indicated broad approval (at
least among respondents) for the policies governing the list.
That's a pretty broad statement, but I've checked back over archives--and
we do have partial archives going back to 1991 and the beginning.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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