Just a Reminder
This month’s Biblical Studies Carnival will be hosted here at Ketuvim. Be sure to submit your choices for BS 42, which will hopefully hold the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
To submit a post either 1) use the Biblical Studies Carnival email, or 2) email me at myurl AT gmail.com, or 3) send me a tweet, or even 4) make submissions by commenting on this post.
Since my specialization is ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible, postings on the Jesus festschrift (aka the New Testament) are especially welcomed.
Morning Devotions
David Hayward‘s recent comic “Morning Devotions” ring so true some mornings:
How to Cheat TurnItIn and How to Cheat the Cheaters
After my post yesterday I started poking around the interwebs for plagiarism. I googled two things: 1) free online plagiarism checks that use Google’s algorithms to help me find content on the web, and 2) guides on how to trick SafeAssign and TurnItIn. My searches came up with both.
PlagiarismDetect.com is a website that, with a free registration, will scan documents for plagiarism not only against the web generally, but also blogs, books and .pdf’s. Very nice. However, I’m really not sure what the motives are of the administrator or what they intend to do with this vast treasure trove of undergrad papers, so I only scan questionable paragraphs rather than whole papers. The whole website could be a front for a paper mill operation for all I know!
More interestingly, I ran across a thread on Chronicles of Higher Education Forum on how to cheat TurnItIn. I recommend everyone check out the thread not only because it provides information on what to look for, but also for sheer humor. Apparently a panic-stricken and highly confused student posted a comment asking for help on gaming TurnItIn at around 5:00AM a few weeks back. Nothing like asking professor on how to cheat!
Of course, this would all be much easier if either students stopped plagiarizing or I stopped caring that they did. However, I don’t think either is likely to happen anytime soon.
TurnItIn vs. SafeAssign
During the usual semester-end mad dash to finish grading I became dissatisfied with the limits of my university’s plagiarism software. We had been using TurnItIn but mysteriously switched to SafeAssign in the middle of the 2008-9 year. The net result of this change from my end was that I went from finding 2-3 cases of plagiarism per semester to zip, zero, nada. What’s going on here?
Now, it is possible that somehow word has gotten out that I find and punish plagiarists, that I consider academic honesty one of the sacred trusts that academicians have been assigned to guard and protect, that violating this fundamental tenant of Western civilization is tantamount to destruction of society, that plagiarism is letting the terrorists win. But I doubt it.
Rather, I’ve begun suspecting that TurnItIn was just better at catching these kids than SafeAssign. As a philologist, I’ve gotten pretty good at hearing a change in voice. P vs. H; J vs. E, Joe vs. Wikipedia, it’s all about the same. Running some Google searches has turned up some problems this semester that SafeAssign has missed, but still nothing as useful as good old TurnItIn.
Has anyone else noticed this problem?
Greek Myths and Mesopotamia online
I just randomly discovered that Scibd has Charles Penglase’s Greek Myths and Mesopotamia: Parallels and Influence in the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod online. Better yet, log in and you can download the pdf for free. Very nice.
Patriot’s Bible Smackdown
Greg Boyd has posted a review smackdown of The American Patriot’s Bible: The Word of God and the Shaping of America. Very nice. Here’s a taste:
* The Lord’s statement that Moses “is faithful in all My houses” (Num. 12:7) calls for a boxed quote from Grover Cleveland about how the teachings of Christ “results in the purest patriotism…”
Really? Oddly enough, Christians for the first three centuries of the church were persecuted for being unpatriotic. They wouldn’t pledge allegiance to the emperor or fight to defend the empire. Now Jesus becomes the champion of patriotism. Really? Does this hold true for Russians, North Koreans and Iranians, or just Americans? And how on earth did we leap from a verse about God’s “houses” to the topic of patriotism in the first place? Really?
Update: I should give equal time and note those reviews that take a more positive view of this Bible, like this one on Amazon by K. Owen entitled Liars or just ignorant reviewers?:
Please fellow christians do not believe the liberal nay sayers who are bashing the fiber of this wonderful book.Even those reviewers who claim to be Christians can not be believed or trusted. The devil is hard at work in these people and it is nothing new. People have been disputing the Bible since the day it was written.
Hard to argue with that logic.
Nefertiti Bust a Fake (?)
In the continuing topsy-turvey world of archaeology, two scholars are now claiming that the famous bust of Nefertiti is a fake. Martin Gayford reports in an article at Bloomberg:
Queen Nefertiti (c.1370 B.C.-1330 B.C.) is one of the most famous figures of the ancient world, and all because of a single work of art: a limestone bust owned by the museums of Berlin. Hers is one of the best-known faces in art, enjoying almost Mona Lisa status. Last week it was reported that two separate authors, the Swiss historian Henri Stierlin and Berlin-based Erdogan Ercivan, believe it is an early-20th-century work.
How crazy a world is it where folks are asserting that the Shroud of Turing is real and that the Nefertiti bust is a forgery. Wild.
(HT: Dr. Claude Mariottini)
Vatican says the Shroud of Turin is Real (?)
I don’t particularly make a hobbyhorse of relics. If folks want to venerate a gold-encrusted hand supposedly belonging to John the Baptists, or a splinter of wood allegedly from the Christ’s cross, that’s there business. However, a recent story in the Times on the Shroud of Turin gave me pause:
Knights Templar hid the Shroud of Turin, says Vatican
Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years.
The Knights Templar, an order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a man with a beard, long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to Vatican researchers.
[snip]
However her [Dr. Barbara Frale’s] study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.
There are of course problems in this line of reasoning. Just because a young Frenchman observed a ritual of veneration in 1287 doesn’t mean that the Shroud was real. Nor, in fact, does it even necessitate that the Shroud today is the “long linen cloth” that was being venerated then. There are a lot of dots but not a lot of lines to connect them.
Last year at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting, Antonio Lombatti gave a paper entitled “Jewish Burial Practices in Second Temple Period, the Shroud of Turin, and the Media” (see my previous post on the day here). He compared burial practices and cloth weaves found in the Shroud of Turin with archaeological remains from the time of Jesus in Palestine. His results: the Shroud employed burial practices alien to Second Temple culture and the weave of the fabric indicates it’s from medieval Europe, not 1st century Palestine. (For other data on why the Shroud’s historicity is untenable see Lombatti’s blog, especially this post.)
I feel the need to conclude by noting that Lombatti’s data does not conflict with Frale’s findings. The veneration of the Shroud neither proves nor disproves it’s authenticity. All it proves is that by the late 13th century the Shroud was perceived to be authentic.
Happy Star Wars Day
Biblical Studies Carnival XLI is up
James F. McGrath has posted the Biblical Studies Carnival XLI over at his blog Exploring the Matrix. He has definitely gotten into the carnival nature of the event complete with a side show of freaks. Very humorous.
Next month’s carnival (42) will be hosted here at Ketuvim and feature a mostly harmless guide to the bibliobloging in May.
Ketuvim: the Writings of James R. Getz Jr. 