Geek

The first blog I ever visited on the web was introduced to me in the Hugh Nibley Ancient Studies Room of the BYU library by a friend who goes by the web name of LxxLuthor. This is a very clever name.
This slight variation on Superman's arch nemesis' name contains the abbreviated form of the word Septuagint.

The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (known commonly as the Old Testament). Legend has it that seventy translators completed the translation in seventy days, hence LXX (70 in Roman numerals) is the abbreviation for Septuagint. In more extreme versions of the legend, all seventy translators spent those seventy days independently translating, and when they compared their translations they all matched word for word. Talk about miraculous.

My friend has aspirations of becoming a Septuagint scholar. I think he can pull it off.

Anyway, the blog. That's what this was going to be about. The blog is called Faith Promoting Rumor, and it is written by a group of LDS graduate students and recent PhD's. I like to read this blog because it reminds me of some of the things that I studied in school, and I tend to learn a lot from it.

Recently one of the bloggers posted about (in general terms) some of the presumed politics of the BYU Religious Education Department.
I'm writing about this because an interesting conversation took place/is taking place between a commenter and some of the bloggers concerning qualifications for doing exegesis on the New Testament. The commenter has some good points, but does not use capitalization, and by way of invitation one of the bloggers said this to the commenter (by the way, the point of this entry is that I'm a geek):

What I’d like to propose is that you do a guest blog for us. I am sure our readers would be quite interested in an exegetical reading of a passage from a good, rousing pagan text according to the methodologies, etc., etc., of folks who do your sort of work.

Will you consider it? You’ll need to develop a testimony of capitalization and then put it into practice, but I think that’s the one constraint we’ll need to agree on…