Geek 101 on the Dividing Line

Critical Editions of the Hebrew and Greek Texts

In a few of his debates, James White held up and referred to a critical edition of the Bible. He explained that it contained both Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament with all the variant references in the critical apparatus.

What is the actual title of this, and where may I obtain a copy? Well, there are... The primary one that I have held up is called Biblia Sacra, and it's published by the United Bible Societies. And it is a...

I had made... I had had this made before the United Bible Societies made theirs. Back in the 80s, I would take... I had two of them made, actually. I knew a man here locally who was a Jehovah's Witness, who did bookbinding on the side, and did a good job.

You know, leatherbinding, the whole nine yards. And I had him bind... One was a UBS text with the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the other was an essay on with the Biblia Hebraica. And he'd have to trim the page sizes to make them fit, because they weren't cut the same size.

But I had them made, and then UBS finally came out with Biblia Sacra, which I believe is still available. I assume it is. We don't carry it, but... And it would be the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, and...

Yeah, that would be the Nessie Holland in the New Testament. I don't have it. I didn't bring it in here with me. But I have it in the other room in a very nice Renaissance art leather cover. So that's the critical edition.

And then, of course, now you can get the reader's edition. And I heard about... I haven't checked this out for myself yet, but I actually heard about a reader's edition that might have some critical notes in it.

Somebody mentioned it to me. I haven't bothered looking it up yet. So if that's out there, that would be quite interesting. Of course, I'll be perfectly honest with you. Other than looks and certain circumstances...

And some of you are going to be mad at me for this. I'm sorry. It just happens. But since I got my iPad, that's all I've preached from. I almost never carry paper texts anymore. And there's a lot of reasons for it.

With accordance on the iPad now, I've got a huge library. I've got the CNTTS, I've got Metzger, I've got Comfort. I wish I had. And if I would just spend a little time on it, I could have the Nessie Holland and the Biblia Hebraica apparatus on my iPad.

I've found a way to do it. I've got a couple books. And I could link them. I could have them as notes in both Olive Tree and Accordance. Because I can copy them and PDF them and stick them there. I could do it.

I just haven't gotten around to getting the thing all done. But it's real simple. There's a very, very practical reason. Aside from the fact that it's thin and it's easy to carry and all the rest of that stuff, it doesn't get beat up when you put it into your bag.

And I don't care what book you get, even if you have it in a really good cover, it's going to get damaged being slid in and out of bags. And you're trying to stuff stuff in and you end up messing up the page edges.

They just weren't designed for that kind of amount of traveling that I do. But the real practical reason is simply this. It's easier to read. It's easier to read. Any book that's going to be small enough to carry, the font size is going to be pretty small.

And so either I have to drag out reading glasses anymore, I'm pushing 50, or the wonderful thing is, now you sit behind me in church, and I'll bet you, you can look over the pew. And on Sunday morning, we're in Romans chapter 2, right?

And what I've been doing is I've been bringing up Codex Sinaiticus in Accordance. And I'll bet you, from sitting behind me, you could see the Greek. And probably read half of it, because I have the font so large.

As you know, my wife has been using her Kindle a little bit in church. And so she, on Sunday morning, was glancing over your shoulder, trying to compare what you were looking at with what she was looking at, and the quality and things like that.

So, yeah, you can see it from that far away quite easily. But I do want to, as an aside, you really make pushing 50 sound so much older than it really is, since I'm already there, you know. You just want to, you know, it's not quite as bad as your...

I don't know, like I said, yesterday morning, you looked really tired. Anyway, so, just simply getting back to the point here. Since I've gotten my iPad, that is what I use, because the fonts are... Can you imagine how big Biblia Sacra would be?

Now, Biblia Sacra is a thick book already. Can you imagine how... It's already that thick. Okay, now make it large print with the font size that I use on the iPad.

It's not the size of the old family Bibles.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, it would be huge.

All it does is reflect dust, probably about that size.

It would be absolutely huge. So, that's why I've gone that direction.

Listening to Books While Riding and Studying

Now, you may have the other email that I sent over on the subject that's along these lines, and that is when you're writing...

Oh, I don't have that. Yes, I do need to do that. Since we're doing a geek segment here, I forgot to... I don't even have my computer here. I left it... Right now, ironically, my main MacBook... I have a MacBook Pro in front of me.

It's my first one. My second one is at home, the one that I'm using now, the current edition. Well, relatively current edition. It is recording a very important book for me off of my Kindle, and it was recording all night.

This is a long book. I mean, I don't know how many hours this thing is going to take to get through, but it's going to take hundreds of miles of writing to get through. But it's recording right now. So, people keep writing in.

I have talked about it. There's a video. I think I did a video, but I haven't thrown it all together. I keep mentioning these things, and it's driving people insane. We get lots of contact from people saying, James keeps talking about listening to books while writing or converting this book.

How's he doing this? Because there's a lot of people who have long commutes. They have long drives. Not necessarily what I'm doing. Long bicycle riding. Currently averaging like 220 miles a week on the bike, and that's about 12, 13 hours.

I'm redeeming that time. That's when I do my study. That's when I do DL prep and all the rest of that stuff. So, how do you do that? Well, here's the two ways I have discovered that have made it possible.

First of all, I'm using an iPod Nano. It is not the current edition of Nano. I am not happy with the fact that they have come out with a new edition of Nano and gotten rid of the kind that I have. I'm going to need to try to find some of them on eBay before they disappear, because they've now gone to a touchscreen.

Stupid idea, because I'm an athlete, for crying out loud. And what's it going to be like in August when I'm riding and I am absolutely covered from head to toe in sweat trying to use a stinking touchscreen?

Yeah, well, my nose is soaked at that point. I can't even do that. What are you talking about? So, I mean, that's just dumb. Literally, I'm going to have to go find. I'm going to have to get some... Anybody got a 16 gig of the old Nano?

So that when this one croaks, because it does get wet. I've got it in a nice plastic cover, but even then it gets wet. I use the iPod Nano. Why the Nano rather than the Shuffle? I used to use the Shuffle.

Real simple. The Nano allows you to press the button and you have slower, normal, and faster. So I can get through an 8-hour book in about 5 hours and 45 minutes on faster. All right? So that's what I'm using.

And a good brother in the Lord just sent me, getting arrived this week. Remember last time I mentioned I had to turn one of the books off because I was going downhill in the wind. I couldn't hear it anymore.

Someone sent me a link to earphones that will seal out the wind noise. I threw it on my personal list. There's a couple people who found my personal list and they're on their way. So thank you very, very much.

Now I will get to listen even downhill into the wind when I'm listening to these books. But how do I get... Let's help the truck see you. Yes, well, I do always wear the rear view mirror. I look like the geek with the rear view mirror, but that is very important to see the traffic coming before they see you.

Anyway, that's one thing. But how do I get it in MP3 format? Two ways. Last year or the year before, one of the two, I had a book review I had to do. And I was sitting around going, man, it's going to take me forever to get through this book, and I've got to get through that one.

I was getting frustrated and a little stressed. And all of a sudden I remembered, wait a minute, I have that on my Kindle. So I could listen to it. And as soon as I realized I could listen to it, Kindle...

Now you have to be careful when you buy a book, look at... It'll tell you, is voice activated on this? Because some of the... At first, everything you got on Kindle, the Kindle would read everything to you.

Then they realized, that's going to kill all audio book sales. So they started deactivating on certain of the books. So you got to look and make sure that your Kindle will actually be able to read it to you.

But the Kindles from Kindle 2 onward, I have a Kindle 3, Kindle 2 and 3 can both read the text to you. The Kindle 3 I think has a few extra voices and things like that. Even it can read faster if you want it to.

You can even choose speeds on that too. I don't do that. I speed it up on the iPod. Because if you do it fast on the Kindle and fast on the iPod, now we're talking Mickey Mouse. Now it's a little bit difficult to follow.

Especially if there's anything technical in the book. So what you can do, and this is how I did the Siljander book, is I bought the book, I take it home, I plug it into the input of my MacBook Pro, I have a book called Maxim, M-A-C-S-O-M-E, Audio Recorder.

There's all sorts of free or cheap audio recording software programs out there for Windows or for Mac. It doesn't matter. You just put it in the input of your laptop or whatever. And I start it when I go to bed.

And I hit record in the thing, and I hit start speech on the Kindle, and chapter 1. The nice thing about this program is it breaks up into one hour segments. So each hour it saves a new audio file. So right now that's what's going on at home, is it's recording this book for me.

Then what I do is I take those and I dump them into a Wondershare video converter, which also does audio. And if I want to, I will then recombine that into one file or just leave it that way, whichever it is.

I take that from AAC to MP3, or I could even record in MP3. Then I throw it in iTunes, turn it into an audio book, put it on my iPod, and it's ready to go. Make sure to use it as an audio book for one simple reason.

You can check the box that allows that once you stop it, it will restart at the place where you stopped. Because some of these are like 6, 7, 8 hours long. And if you don't do that, then you have to sit there fast forward to try to find the thing, duh, where you were.

So, that's how I do it with Kindle. But, but,.

That's just the first way I found it. Did you have a question, sir? Because I'm not done yet. First, it's Maxim? M-A-C-S-O-M-E. And then it's Wondershare? Is that what you said? I use Wondershare.

This is all Mac stuff. But people will, yeah. And then rolling over into iTunes. Right. This episode of Geek Class has been brought to you by Alpha Omega. It is not yet done. This isn't even done yet.

Because then I discovered something even better. And that is Text Speech Pro. Text Speech Pro for Mac. And I think it's the same folks that do Dragon Naturally Speaking for Windows. I think. I could be wrong about that.

I'm not sure about that. But, anyway. This is a program where you can take any PDF, Word document, HTML, RTF, text file, and think of how much stuff is out there in that format now. Archive .org. All these places.

Older books. For example, if you want to have any shot of my endorsing your book, or even looking at your book, you've got to provide it to me in PDF. You've got to. Why? Because I can take it, dump it into Text Speech Pro.

It's just a matter of copy, insert. Once it's in Text Speech Pro, I can select a voice. I've purchased two voices. One's an American voice. One's a British voice. For example, when I did Christopher Hitchens stuff, I put it in the British voice.

Because it sounded like Christopher Hitchens. Why not? You say export to sound file. Export to MP3. And it takes whatever you put in there. Now, I have found that there's sort of a limit. If you put a 300 page book in there, it's probably going to choke on it.

I'd say I could probably do about 100 pages at a time. That's around what I've found. I think it depends on how many page breaks there are and line breaks and stuff like that. Now, the Kindle has to record in real time.

So, I have to leave it running overnight for eight hours so I can get eight hours worth of reading stuff. Not so with Text Speech Pro. You put 100 pages into Text Speech Pro, export it, and in about five to seven minutes, maybe, you will have a fully usable MP3 sitting on your desktop that is a very understandable.

Now, people say, oh, it's that computer voice. I can't stand it. There are some bad computer voices. There's no question about it. Text Speech Pro, as long as you buy one of the voices, a purchased voice will be better than a non-purchased voice.

They actually upgrade them the whole nine yards. It is amazing how clear and understandable. Yeah, will they mispronounce words? Yes. Are sometimes the mispronunciations humorous? Yes. I played for you.

That was actually my Kindle. Remember I played the Kindle speaking in tongues when I was doing the Gnostic stuff back before the debate with Price last year. Is it fully understandable and non-annoying to listen to this for six hours or something?

Yes. You really can get used to it. It really is that clear. And so you're talking PDFs, Word documents. Just think of how much stuff is becoming available in those formats that you can then just select it, dump it in.

That's how I get a lot of my Logos stuff. Select it. What you do, here's the trick. In Logos, you can select the font size on the screen. You can make it super small. That way you can select a bunch of it at once.

And then you sit there and hold it. And it scrolls down and you get tons and tons of stuff into your buffer. And then you copy it into TextSpeech Pro and export to MP3. Once it's there, you bring it into iTunes.

Remember, make it an audio book so that it will remember where you are. There's a little thing to tick that says remember position. And you throw it on the iPod. Obviously, my current iPod Nano is only eight gigs and I have to keep pulling stuff off because I have so much stuff on there at any one time.

And that's how you do it. So there you go. That's... I think that's pretty much everything. All the little tricks and stuff that I've learned to be able to do that. And you're right. That email wasn't sitting in my thing.

I just hadn't put it into this particular list. It came after I made this list up. So that's how you do it. Thank you for joining us on Geeks R Us on the dividing line. What's that? AOTech. Well, AOTech.

Some people wouldn't say it was overly technical. But that's how you do it.