I'll go ahead and explain here the other proposals I made. gender and women (6 each, 1 with both) are used kind of haphazardly; most of the gender questions are about women. These seem like one bucket, not two.
I suggested middoth as a synonym for rabbinic-interpretation. (The one question with the former also has the latter.) I'm suggesting synonym rather than just dropping middoth because if you start typing "middoth" you'll never hit "rabbinic-interpretation" (no substring match), so synonym seems the way to go here. (That's also the reason for women & gender.)
The last is to merge ancient-near-east (5 questions) into history. Won't most of our (early) history questions be about the ancient near east anyway? This seems like an unnecessary distinction. And, as with the synoptics tags, you would want to also tag those as history for bucketing reasons...
None of which means I'm right about any of these (obviously I think they have merit :-) ), but since the "suggested synonyms" path isn't the way to go, this seems the next-best place to bring them up.
@JackDouglas thanks. For future reference, do you prefer chat or meta for these? All of these suggestions came up "while I was doing other things"; it's not like I was on a synonym hunt. So they're likely to come up one at a time, wherever that happens.
@MonicaCellio I think the synoptic problem deserves it's own tag. It's along the same lines as the documentary hypothesis, but has the advantage of being a clear problem to solve rather than conjecture.
@MonicaCellio This is the critical question. I think it's possible to ask questions about the way the synoptic gospels understand a text that are not related to the problem of how they were written. These would likely fall under the heading of "Historical Jesus" questions, which are perhaps off-topic.
@JonEricson thanks for explaining. I think Jack already acted on my suggestion, but there were only four synoptics-problem questions and probably some of the synoptics questions should have been that, so if you undo the synonym there'll be a little cleanup but it's managable. (I think there are only about 20 questions in all.)
I'll go ahead and explain here the other proposals I made. gender and women (6 each, 1 with both) are used kind of haphazardly; most of the gender questions are about women. These seem like one bucket, not two.
BTW, I see you're doing some retagging to delete deprecated tags. Did you get told to do that instead of burninating? (It's just that this will bump ~200 questions to the front page if we have to do it that way.)
I broke the synonym between translation and translation-approaches. Some questions need the second tag:
What distinguishes an excellent concordance?
What is morphological analysis, as it relates to Bible study?
Why didn't the Septuagint translate 'ahabah to eros?
The difference is that the q...
@JonEricson as for the ones I listed, they will need to have tags added (mostly greek, but possibly sometimes others). So those will bump; can't be helped. I guess since they're listed in that question we don't need to block on that for burnination; we still know how to find them.
@Soldarnal "history" is a broad concept, but as a bucket for a set of questions here it's more narrow (50ish right now). Do we have a lot of history questions (however tagged) that aren't specifically about the ancient near east? If we have both tags when would we use which?
And "history" has I'm guessing pretty low SEO value
Especially compared to more specific tags
@MonicaCellio I'd say most people consider Alexander's conquest to end the "ancient" period of the near east. Which means that tag would not apply to any of our historical questions concerning New Testament historical context.
SEO value is a good point. When we're a mature site, with more questions, I can see having the specialized tags. And I can see having them as a supplement to the more-general "history" tag. But while specificity is great for SEO, it's terrible for browsing -- you have to (a) know about all the specific tags and (b) look them up singly to see all the questions. So it's a trade-off...
@Soldarnal I can see that. (I haven't checked; does the tag wiki contain that info?)
@MonicaCellio I think the more specific tags actually facilitate better browsing. If I'm researching the culture of Jesus' day, do I really want to see questions about flood epics in cultures contemporary to Genesis?
@Soldarnal I think we have a reasonable model with the book and (sometimes) sub-book tags, e.g. we have genesis but also creation, noah, and a few others. I use the book tags all the time (to find questions I might be able to answer but haven't yet), but somebody interested specifically in the flood could zoom in on that. Maybe we should do the same with history. I hadn't thought of it before becuase we only have about 50 questions there total so far.
2
But I can see both general historians (say, first-years) and specialists in particular eras wanting to browse, and I don't want to shut out the former until the count gets ridiculously high. (Or the tag just doesn't make sense for us, like exegesis.)
But all that said, this is an opinion, not a strongly-held truth, which is why I proposed the synonyms in the first place (requires multiple votes) and then brought it up here.
@JackDouglas Just went through them quickly right now. Looks like there are some relating to periods post-dating the historical context of the Bible (e.g. about Augustine)
@Jon are you willing to consider changing your meta question a bit
I want to delete my answer and upvote your top answer, but I'd prefer the question to indicate that it is not about answers that partially show their work, just those that don't show it at all
@Jon, Jack and I were chatting about this elsewhere. His answer about annotations seems like it overlaps but doesn't completely fit the current question, and splitting between "doesn't meet at all" and "meets some but not all but still useful" seems like it would help clarify things.
@MatthewMiller: I've been thinking about gender relations in the gospel of John. I asked a question that might serve as a model for your woman-at-the-well question (version 2.0):
Very early on, John tells a story that is unique to his gospel:
On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” An...
I have an answer (that I got from a Tim Keller sermon), but I need to remind myself of the details. The key to the question is focusing in on the textual issue that is the crux of the problem.
@JonEricson there: now your rep is no longer a round number. :-) (Well ok, it's still round, but less round.)
Something must be lost in translation. I'd like to know if mom is complaining, just observing (idle chit-chat), asking her son to do something about it (what he apparently infers), or what...
@JonEricson no no, we have to get you to a point where you're willing to DV and (eventually) post bounties again. Now you've got a few DVs, at least. :-)
it's been fun. but this is getting exceedingly stressful and i can't really back off of the temptation to attempt to defend myself. in the absence of self-control, i want out.
please feel free to contact me since you moddy types have access to my email account.
@MatthewMiller this is a long-standing problem with the site that won't soon be resolved. it's a theology question. i'd rather see hermeneutics questions. i'd rather see the hermeneutical process than theology. theology is On Topic for Christianity.SE
i dont dislike the question ... i dislike the question for this site
but i'm in a distinct minority
and i'm crumbling under personal pressure and yet i can't ignore BH.SE. it's like a trainwreck that i can't stop looking at. every time i try to re-engage it happens.
@JonEricson @JackDouglas @Caleb @Ray ... changed my mind ... can you please suspend my account? i may want to come back after a cool-down period. right now i need some help with not flying in and carpet bombing answers and questions ... especially when i've put actual effort into them and they're dismissed out-of-hadn
@MatthewMiller struggling to see how that's lit crit
@JackDouglas @JonEricson ... let me know if i need to do anything else for a ban/suspension/whatever. as i said, this is public, formal permission to contact me via email using your moddy-type powers. someone star this message so that it's public and they don't get in trouble
@swasheck I'm on a call-in meeting, so I can't do anything right now. I think we all need a pow-wow to figure this out. I definitely know the feeling of needing a break. Please see also:
Since I'm the only moderator not campaigning for the next round, I thought I'd take a moment to share my thoughts of the last 20 or so months during which I've been a pro tem moderator. I hope it's mildly interesting, and semi-useful for the new team, whoever they may be, and I wish them the bes...
@swasheck Ah ok. For some reason I thought you might have studied at DTS where he teaches. He's one of my favorite commentators, so I thought I'd ask if you've ever met him, that's all.
@swasheck I hope your break is relaxing, and hope to see you back at some point.
I broke the synonym between translation and translation-approaches. Some questions need the second tag:
What distinguishes an excellent concordance?
What is morphological analysis, as it relates to Bible study?
Why didn't the Septuagint translate 'ahabah to eros?
The difference is that the q...
