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Bible API

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Re: Bible API

#271

Post by jacksonastone »

ars wrote: post #259
bjourne wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I understand what you mean? Jesus was known as a rabbi and well-versed in the Scriptures. I don't think he was misconstruing the text he was citing. Here he is contrasting his view of justice ("turn the other cheek") to the legal norms of the time under which feuds and exacting revenge were commonplace. My main point is that Jesus was probably not the first one to use this form of argumentation. He likely im…

The meaning for the "eye for an eye" verse is well known, it's talking about proportionality in justice. It's a pretty strange choice to use when talking about "turn the other cheek". > to the legal norms of the time under which feuds and exacting revenge were commonplace. But that's exactly what "eye for an eye" attempts to stop. It's instructing people to seek appropriate justice, and not just attack people who hur…

I think more so what Jesus is calling Christians to do is to be forgiving of others in the way God is forgiving to man. Which can often be more difficult of a thing to do than to always seek proportional judgement. I do not think in other words his reading of that verse is all that different from yours.

Somewhat related to this conversation but this reading is clear in my view if you continue to read what Jesus says in this passage :)

Re: Bible API

#272

Post by goto11 »

memling wrote: post #233
goto11 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of Christians reject the virgin birth. You can say they are not "real Christians", but they could say the same about you.

this sounds as plausible as saying that a lot of atheists believe in god. maybe it's a thing? but it's hard to imagine dropping someone in nicea in 380 and suggesting this. words mean things: Christians believe in more than the virgin birth but certainly not less.

Liberal Protestantism generally does not consider the virgin birth a critical article of faith. You can believe it if you want but it is not heretical to not believe in it.

Re: Bible API

#273

Post by seemslegit »

jtbayly wrote: post #267
seemslegit wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several chapters in Job with the first verse being roughly "And X replied, saying" with the rest of the chapter being their reply. Still very much a full sentence that identifies the speaker.

I was thinking of Job 3:2, which, in some modern English translations is simply rendered “He said:”. But the Hebrew is more complete.

King James version also gets it right, but even "He said:" is a complete sentence.

Re: Bible API

#274

Post by bjourne »

ars wrote: post #259
bjourne wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I understand what you mean? Jesus was known as a rabbi and well-versed in the Scriptures. I don't think he was misconstruing the text he was citing. Here he is contrasting his view of justice ("turn the other cheek") to the legal norms of the time under which feuds and exacting revenge were commonplace. My main point is that Jesus was probably not the first one to use this form of argumentation. He likely im…

The meaning for the "eye for an eye" verse is well known, it's talking about proportionality in justice. It's a pretty strange choice to use when talking about "turn the other cheek". > to the legal norms of the time under which feuds and exacting revenge were commonplace. But that's exactly what "eye for an eye" attempts to stop. It's instructing people to seek appropriate justice, and not just attack people who hur…

> The meaning for the "eye for an eye" verse is well known, it's talking about proportionality in justice.

> It's a pretty strange choice to use when talking about "turn the other cheek".

The phrase "an eye for an eye" puts an upper bound on retributive justice. That is, if you have been fouled, this is the maximum amount of punishment that you are allowed to inflict upon the perpetrator. Don't do as Lamech and kill the one who wounds you because that is not proportional.

Consider the context of Jesus speech. He was speaking to peasants in the Galilee for whom eternal feuds must have been commonplace. They must have been aware of the harmful effects of seeking revenge to everyone involved but unable to put an end to it. That is why one of his examples is a slap. There is and was no legal recourse for slap except for slapping back. Jesus asks his followers to "let it go."

Re: Bible API

#275

Post by biolurker1 »

flatfilefan wrote: post #242
biolurker1 wrote: post #227

How can a programmer believe in god is beyond me.

How cannot he when the “logos kyrie o teos” is mentioned e.g. in Iesekiel as the self -description of the divine, meaning roughly “the master of putting thoughts into words”. Doesn’t this sound like a very description of a programmer to you?

I publicly bet $100 that you are not employed as a medior or senior developer. It just can't happen, you need greater mental capacity for that. My account will be banned probably but that's just insane what's happening in HN lately

Re: Bible API

#276

Post by frobozz »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #151
wcarey wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, having read the whole of what you wrote, the reason not to do both is that atomization promotes an epistemology that does grave violence to Christian belief. God's self revelation could have been a math textbook: a collection of independent propositions related by logical necessity. But it's not. His self revelation is a person who has a story and who tells stories. When we atomize the scriptures, we're implicitl…

The verse structure's practicality as a reference mechanism far outweighs its downsides. It's a bit of a stretch to indict the verse structure for the general decline in Biblical literacy in Christians. It's entirely possible to quote a verse with correct contextual interpretation that conveys its meaning; if we're looking for a culprit for declining Biblical literacy I'd be much more apt to blame loose translations…

I would blame nefarious church leaders who should know better but deliberately misrepresent the scriptures to their own end. The verse structure does facilitate this.

For example: Leviticus 18:22 seems quite popular amongst homophobes, but I don't see many of them killing adulterers (20:10) or burying blood (17:13), plenty of them oppress foreigners (19:33) and hate their gay relatives (19:17). They don't seem to be as keen on burning people who engage in a sportsman's double (18:14) as they are about waving "God hates fags" placards.

I'd be surprised if the same people who picket gay weddings and funerals chain themselves to combine harvesters with Leviticus 19:9 placards, or harass people going to real estate agents' offices with Leviticus 25:23 signs.

Re: Bible API

#277

Post by elldoubleyew »

stephenhuey wrote: post #160
elwell wrote: post #148

Not sure if I'm more surprised about the support for Cherokee or JSONP.

Yes, fascinating - it was translated into Cherokee back in 1860. According to Wycliffe Bible Translators, 3384 languages have some Scripture translated for them. Of those, 698 have the complete Bible and 1548 languages have a complete New Testament.

Mostly unrelated, but I did a summer internship for Wycliffe my sophomore year of college. We created an app that allowed non-technical speakers of a more obscure language to review and make suggestions on draft translations of scripture [1]. It would actually tie their native language translation to a "bridge language" (usually english) and then also show the original Hebrew/Aramaic which they could reference through a built in dictionary. As a language nerd it was a really interesting project to work on.

AFAIK the app is still being used in the field and maintained (my internship was over 4 years ago). This was a rare case of hiring interns to build something and it actually working out.

[1] https://www.translationcore.com/

Re: Bible API

#278

Post by Jaruzel »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #254

I don't understand the utility of an API for this beyond APIs generally being fun to build. All of the work is in formatting the data to be machine readable, and each bible is <5mb. If you needed this, you could also just download the open source bibles it uses and crawl it yourself which is surely superior in 99% of use cases.

I wondered the same thing. Surely a useful API is for data that changes, and the recipient doesn't want to manage the content themselves? An API for searching static data seems only useful as a learning exercise.

Re: Bible API

#279

Post by tekknik »

duemti wrote: post #221
davidwparker wrote: post #191

A decade ago (!) I worked on parsing bible searches. https://www.davidwparker.com/2010/03/04/parsing-bible-search... It was a neat little project at the time, but due to copyrights, I didn't get as far as I would have liked... I had planned on making a `diff` tool for bible verses between versions.

Well, this is the reason there are so many versions. Copyright on the best seller book of all time.

Copyrights didn’t exist when most were written (not many people use NIV versions) so what are you on about?

Re: Bible API

#280

Post by tekknik »

davidwparker wrote: post #191

A decade ago (!) I worked on parsing bible searches. https://www.davidwparker.com/2010/03/04/parsing-bible-search... It was a neat little project at the time, but due to copyrights, I didn't get as far as I would have liked... I had planned on making a `diff` tool for bible verses between versions.

Most people read KJV, which version are you trying to use where copyrights exist?
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