Beginning immediately, the NET Bible Revolution blog will become a team effort! Posts will rotate among various members of the NET Bible Team who work on the NET Bible translation and notes. Preparations are underway for the Second Edition, and some of the posts will concern modifications and improvements to the text and notes for the Second Edition. My Assistant Project Director and Editor, Dr. Mike Burer, will be coordinating the blog posts as well as contributing frequently himself. I will also try to post occasionally as time permits.

Last week, thanks to my wife who frequently listens to NPR on the radio, I came across an amazing story which aired on Morning Edition on April 6, 2009. For years linguists have insisted — following on the very good authority of Ferdinand de Saussure, considered to be the father of modern linguistics — on the "arbitrariness of the sign," that is, that the series of letters that make up a word, and the word the letters make up, are arbitrary and by convention.

One of the changes in the works for the next edition of NET Bible concerns the agreement of the subject and verb in Luke 1:10: Current NET reads: "Now the whole crowd of people were praying outside at the hour of the incense offering." At first glance this seems incorrect, because the English subject ("crowd") is singular and yet the verb ("were") is plural. But in this case, when a collective noun like "crowd" is used with a singular verb, the group is acting in concert.

Earlier today I happened to check one of the administrative pages for the NET Bible website and added up the downloads for all the various free versions of the NET Bible available from the bible.org website: the HTML version, the Word doc version, e-Sword version, etc. I was surprised and pleased to note that in just under two years 273,578 free copies of the NET Bible in various forms have been downloaded.

Hopefully I will be able to start posting again after a 3-month pause. This pause was due to (1) my wife’s recovery from major surgery in mid-May, and (2) 5 summer school courses in 10 weeks, including one D.Min. course on Computer Tools and Internet Resources for Biblical Exegesis, a course I have taught for some 6 years now with my friend and associate Matt Blackmon, now on the faculty of Lancaster Bible College in Lancaster, PA, who for the last two years has flown to Dallas for a week to teach the course with me.

Over the past several decades there has been a lot of debate over the philosophy of translation of various recent English versions of the Bible. Generally this has centered around the two extremes of literal or word-for-word on the one hand (which has also been called "formal equivalence") and paraphrase on the other hand (formerly known as "dynamic equivalence," though today terms like "idiomatic translation," "closest natural equivalent," or "functional equivalence" are often used instead).

Last week Logos Bible Software announced the alpha release of the Mac version of their software. It is now available for download at http://www.macbiblesoftware.com/. Because this is an alpha release it’s not recommended for downloading to your primary machine, and no support is provided, but for those who just simply can’t wait and must be on the bleeding edge of technology, it’s now available.

A great timesaver for Bible students who want to find things quickly on the web has been posted by Dr David Instone-Brewer, Senior Research Fellow in Rabbinics and the New Testament at Tyndale House, Cambridge, UK. Check it out at www.tyndalehouse.com/toolbar. This toolbar is a free addin for IE or Firefox for PC and Firefox for Mac (no other browsers supported yet).

I have just completed an interview on the NET Bible with Andy Cheung of Midlands Bible College, UK. They have posted the interview online at http://www.midbible.ac.uk/content/view/124/.