@JackDouglas Ah, you know what happened here, at C.SE we had defined exegesis as including both translation and interpretation. I thought that it was a subset! My original answer here (just now edited) shows that as well.

@Richard so if you agree we should keep exegesis, does it now follow that almost every question should be tagged hermeneutics, exegesis or translation?

@JackDouglas I've always agreed that we kept exegesis. I was just throwing that argument out there for the sake of having something to vote on. ;)

As far as those three tags... It seems like there was one other big group, but I can't remember what it was.

Oh.. Factual. Stuff like "When was Job written?" That doesn't fall into those categories, but I believe it should be on topic here.

Also, historical interpretations "How did Pre-Christian Jews interpret X?".

(bad example)

ah yes, facts was mentioned

you got there first

But yes, I can easily see exegesis, hermeneutics, and translation being our top three.

Is there a posh word for "textual analysis"/dating techniques?

Oh, probably. Let me see if google will enlighten me. ;)

or perhaps historical could be an umbrella for both

Oh, what about manuscript

That could.... be confusing. nevermind.

have you visited this site?

Theopedia? Yeah, it's been useful for C.SE ;)

perhaps just criticism

on a technical site the normal negative connotations might not matter

Let's see what the other questions already there have.

well, there's source-criticism, text-criticism, redaction-criticism, canon-criticism, historical-criticism, etc

i don't think they need to be in one big group

you might call it "higher criticism"

Aah... here it is:

It has the tag authorship

I kind of like that. It covers both the date and the person who authored the book.

though text-criticism is not strictly higher criticism

interesting... it's tagged authorship, but the author is really a consequence of the dating

perhaps it should keep 'authorship' and add 'text-criticism'?

in an ideal world :)

i don't think text-criticism is really relevant to that question

source criticism as a field really covers both author and date

Ultimately, with tags, it boils down to this: What do people use? (Not "What will they use?" or "What should they use?") We can try to set standards for tags, but people will put tags on there that we don't expect and questions will slip by that we can't control.

text criticism is more about how errors in manuscripts, etc

@Richard excellent point

The best we can really do is create tag synonyms so that people are forced towards a certain tag usage (interpretation -> exegesis)

If someone comes asking "What's the meaning of X?" they probably won't think exegesis. They'll probably think meaning.

@Ray ok, agreed

@Richard that is what synonyms are for isn't it?

I'm thinking from a prescriptivist point of view, but it sounds like you're saying that we should be looking more from a descriptivist perspective

I agree. I think we should make authorship a synonym for source-criticism

@JackDouglas Right, exactly!

I mean we are using them to steer how people tag

@Richard I'm in favour of that

@Richard Perhaps dating as well

though some "dating" questions would surely be off-topic

@Ray and some might be text-crit :)

like that base-64 iPhone "translation" question

@Ray I thought about that, but every time I think about dating, I come up with "Should I date a hermeneutics expert?" :P

@JackDouglas good point

@Richard you don't mean it shouldn't be a synonym though, right?

Oh, I don't have an opinion on it. It makes sense to make it a synonym.

If I was a mod right now, I'd make it a synonym since I can't see any reason not to have it.

So is the thought to have individual x-criticism tags, or one big biblical-criticism tag?

Also, I love talking about tags, since I recently learned how to make the fun tag thingy show up

ha

grin

@Ray I think you are right on that too

@Ray I think the individual tags are better. I particularly like the source-criticism tag. It is useful to catch a lot of the "factual" questions that we haven't been able to easily group.

keep the individual

So: Exegesis, Translation, Hermeneutics, Source Criticism, History.

lets have some mods soon so synonyms can be set up :)

I thought Richard was a mod.. he has a diamond

I'm a chat mod. :\ Not too useful for synonyms, though.

A moderator on any SE site is a moderator across all chat rooms.

@Richard + text criticism, redaction criticism, form criticism, etc

see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

@Ray Good point. So it still boils down to:

Hermeneutics, Exegesis, Translation, and Factual.

Factual itself includes all the criticisms (source criticism, etc), plus the historical.

@Richard hmm... well i don't like "factual" as a tag

@Ray No, I'm thinking more of broad categories of questions.

@Richard Is there any "historical" topics not included in historical criticism?

Regarding tags, there's going to be a huge, wide, varied list of tags. We're not going to be able to list them all here. ;)

fair enough

I wonder if we should list these categories explicitly in the faq

"The primary goal of historical criticism is to ascertain the text’s primitive or original meaning in its original historical context" Given that definition... history of hermeneutics would fall into history, but not historical-criticism

@JackDouglas That may be of some use. Once we get moderators, we can edit that first section of the FAQ.

Hermeneutics, Exegesis, Translation and (biblical-)criticism

@Richard Good point; hadn't thought of history of hermeneutics

However, that also seems like an edge case to me

the hermeneutics tag would probably be enough on its old in that case

What Jack said works for me

@Richard There's also historical exegesis. (per the reply)

@Richard you @ed yourself?

he's that famous

LOL. It took me a few seconds to figure out what "@ed" meant. ;)

Yeah, you can use :<post number> to reply to your own message.

@Richard Some guy named ed just got pinged

You probably know this, but if you click on the arrows, it will take you to that post. I replied to that message that I was referencing (to make it easier for you guys to follow my logic).

Oh, I followed. Doesn't mean it didn't deserve a light ribbing

;)

@Ray just in case you don't know - you can only ping people who've chatted here before

unless you are richard

flex

LOL :P

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