The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Peter Kirby
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Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Post by Peter Kirby »

The Bible Criticism Search Engine is back up, unabridged and fully indexed!

http://bcharchive.org/

I've also made a copy of the virtual server. Takes up the whole 30GB for the server, archives, and search database.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Peter Kirby
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Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Post by Peter Kirby »

There are now a lot of pretty pictures of using the search engines up on my blog:

http://peterkirby.com/full-archives-ear ... earch.html
I recently mentioned the search tools available here:

http://bcharchive.org/

And they have already improved greatly.

The historical archive of the Biblical Criticism & History forum has been reindexed and checked so that it is indeed complete and unabridged.

The greater Blogosphere search function has been expanded with more websites and upgraded with “refinements,” which let you drill down by category into “biblioblogs,” “forums,” “books,” “articles,” “google-books,” “jstor-articles,” “resources,” or “websites” with just the click of a link.

Last but not least, an Early Writings search function has been created to allow you to use a Google custom search engine over online translations of early Jewish and Christian texts, which themselves are tagged for search refinement as “Early Jewish Writings,” “Pseudepigrapha,” “DSS,” “Talmud,” “Early Christian Writings,” “Apocrypha,” “NHL,” “Church Fathers,” or “Gnostica.”

Please have fun with these new toys! Let me know if you have any suggestions.
http://bcharchive.org/
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Peter Kirby
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Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Post by Peter Kirby »

Google's custom search engine does weird things.

This isn't that weird, but Wikipedia dominates all results by relevance so I might want to take it out again (going back and forth there). Then again I don't know. Maybe I just need to figure out how to give it a relevance penalty.

It doesn't return more than 4 results for a search exclusively on jstor.org, so I had to remove that feature.

For whatever reason very little of Google Groups (i.e., Usenet) is part of the actual index, but some of it is.

It doesn't go into yahoo groups or facebook groups or archived webpages, which is probably just following robots.txt orders.

But it also loooooves to return just 4-9 results for common words ("love") while giving you more for more obscure searches ("agape").

You also get more results if you add more words to the search ("love you"). But not "love a the," so I guess it's something to do with stopwords.

But if you did the search with Google itself with some site: or inurl: operators, a lot of these problems disappear.

This is acceptable for the blogosphere search, but I think I'm going to want to replace the "early writings" search someday with a truly custom solution (maybe gigablast again). It's infuriating that Google doesn't just execute the search the way you expect it to, especially when you know the documents are in the index.

I may also have to make a dump of the important Yahoo groups. It's a treasure trove there, just waiting to be zapped by some oblivious exec at yahoo. Some of the e-lists with archives hosted by universities have gone to the digital dustbin already.

On a related note, gmail silently deleted my very old e-mail last year (like 7 years + or something). Be careful out there!
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Peter Kirby
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Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Post by Peter Kirby »

My working theory on the weirdness is that Google generates a search list normally, with N entries, and then applies the filters. If it fails, it throws up 4 to 40 pages from the filters. But our sites aren't in the top N.

I believe something like this explains the weird results for common single word search terms. Some kind of cache.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Post by Peter Kirby »

Great success!

http://bcharchive.org/

For the "Early Writings" search engine, I've learned that you need to use a _maximum_ of 10 domains if you want to get a complete and unabridged search. So I've deleted the one-off sources of texts (with the intent of bringing them into one of my sites by copying them at some point) in order to get under the magic number 10. Results are looking much more comprehensive now!

Also I've spoken the magical incantations to the great Google gods and the other search engine (for biblical criticism) seems to be working as it should also.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Post by Peter Kirby »

Has anyone here tried the Google custom search engines?

http://bcharchive.org/

What do you think?
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
Clive
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Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Post by Clive »

My first search result !
Originally Posted by stephan huller View Post
Hi Clive

I fully agree. There is a tendency among some in this forum to attack our sources because they don't make "sense.". I think this idea of men coming to baptism with the fresh blood stains of self-mutilation explains the entire context of early Christianity and why it was vehemently opposed by the third century establishment
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Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Post by Clive »

And for those interested in astrotheology! http://bcharchive.org/2/thearchives/showthread6ce9.html
I must admit the discussion here is interesting. As to Christ being the same as Chronos there is very little evidence to suppose that Jews in the 1st century were so enamored with Hellenism that they merged their belief with a single unified God with the hellenistic Chronos. You stand a much better chance of merging the LOGOS from John 1:1 with the Christ figure than you do of Chronos. Philo provides us a much better image of this philosophical merging than merging Chronos with Christos.

If you believe this merging is possible you haven't read much about the Hasmonean revolt or understood the cultural problems the Jews were facing in the 1st century. Hellenism was a constant sore spot for Jews (how much to compromise with Greek philosophy and still remain "Jewish") By the second century CE the Jewish Temple was gone and the party that WAS willing to compromise with the Greeks, mainly Sadducees, lost their place and meaning.

Philo is an excellent example as to how Jews merged Hellenism with Jewish belief. When the Emperor attempted to erect his statue in the Jews Holy Temple this Jewish Hellenist was indignant right along with the strictly orthodox Jews.

Christ does mean anointed. However to slavishly adhere to meaning apart from context is stupid. Example: "I am President." The President is the leader of the United States but he also could be the head of any group or organization. So when I claim that "I am President" the context of the statement MUST be taken into consideration other wise no matter what I say I'm lying because "objectively" President means: Leader of the United States. My goodness where did you people learn about history and how to do it? Just because a person might have carried the title "Christ" which translates to "anointed" it does not follow that the person was claiming the same title that Christians give to Christ or Jews for the messiah for that matter.
finally
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slevin
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Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Post by slevin »

Thanks Clive, for the idea here.

http://bcharchive.org/2/thearchives/showthread88f9.html

I entered, (thanks, Peter) into the search engine, Clive's suggestion, Astrotheology, and came up with a lovely thread, from five years ago, with interesting points made by Toto and mountainman, and a potentially, even more substantial post, by spin.

My reason for citing this, today, though, despite the intrinsic interest in the topic, and in the search capabilities, is to draw attention to spin's chart, which does not show up, at least, not on my computer.

Perhaps I lack the necessary prerequisite programs on my computer, to be able to read the chart, and observe it, as a chart.

This is what I observe:
[T2]{r:bg=lightgray}{c:bg=slategray;ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Type of Jesus
|
{c:ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Status
|
{c:ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Characteristics
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{c:ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Published Proponents
||
{c:bg=#80C0C0}Maximal
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Existed in real world
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The gospels are seen as reliable documentary evidence and record the known events in the life of the man who started the religion.
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Joseph Klausner, Birger Gerhardsson
||
{c:bg=#80C0C0;b-b=2,dashed,black}Historical
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Existed in real world
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Literary records--gospels, church fathers and even pagan sources--contain vestiges of real world knowledge of the man who started the religion. The record is problematical, but there is a man behind it.
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Borg, Crossan & Jesus seminar
||
{c:bg=#80C0C0;b-b=3,double,black}"Accreted"
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{c:b-b=3,double,black}A core preacher existed
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{c:b-b=3,double,black;bg=#D0E0FF}Jesus was the product of various sources including knowledge of a real person, as can be found in "Q".
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{c:b-b=3,double,black}G.A. Wells
||
{c:bg=#B05070;b-b=2,dashed,black}Transformed
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{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Did not exist
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{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Jesus was the product of corrupted retelling of events relating to Julius Caesar. Under Vespasian the story was developed into a new religion.
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{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Francesco Carotta
||
{c:bg=#B05070;b-b=2,dashed,black}Fictional
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{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Authorial invention
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{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Jesus was the product of purely literary activity. Flavian emperors constructed a new religion with the aid of Josephus in an effort to try to gain control over the Jews.
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{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Joe Atwill (1, 2)
||
{c:bg=#B05070;b-b=3,double,black}Mythological composite
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{c:b-b=3,double,black}Authorial invention
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{c:b-b=3,double,black}Jesus was the product of mainly pagan mythological elements, be they solar myth (Acharya S) or dying & resurrection myths of Osiris/Dionysis (Freke & Gandy).
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{c:b-b=3,double,black}Acharya S, Freke & Gandy
||
{c:bg=DarkOrchid;b-b=2,solid,black}Supernatural
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{c:b-b=2,solid,black}Existed in supernatural world
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{c:b-b=2,solid,black}Origin as a purely theological development, Jesus performed his salvific act in the supernatural realm, but later became reified.
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{c:b-b=2,solid,black}Earl Doherty
||
{c:bg=RoyalBlue}Traditional
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Unknown (tradition doesn't permit clarification)
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Tradition doesn't distinguish between real and non-real. It merely takes accepted elements ("accepted" -> believed to be real) and passes them on with associated transmission distortions.
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[-]
||
{c:bg=RoyalBlue}Jesus agnostic
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Unknown
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Due to the nature of available information there is insufficient evidence to decide on the existence of Jesus.
|
Robert M. Price
[/T2]

I congratulate spin, for taking the time and trouble to make this chart, I am sure it must be lovely, wish I could see it as a chart, and wonder, if it is strictly a problem of mine, if so, not to worry, else, if it is also a problem for others, then, maybe there is some magic switch inside the google search engine, which must be thrown, in order to observe charts as charts!!!!

On a more cheerful note, how about spin's reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_of_Abonoteichus ?
Wasn't that interesting? I really enjoyed reading the whole thread, but especially this rejoinder, outstanding.

I did not know anything about either Alexander himself, nor of Lucian's hostility to him, nor of the fact that coins were minted, and statues prepared, for this charlatan, in mid second century CE.
Wikipedia wrote: Lucian admired the works of Epicurus, a eulogy of which concludes the piece, and whether he was the master of fraud and deceit as portrayed by Lucian, he may not have been too different from other oracles of the age, when a great deal of dishonest exploitation occurred in some shrines.
Host of questions now arise: Why didn't Lucian expose the Christians as frauds? Why didn't Lucian write about Paul, and his many churches, surely far more numerous than this chap, Alexander of Abonoteichus???? Should we understand that lucian did not mention them, because the Christians of that era, did not criticize Epicurus? Or were there simply no Christians, and no Paul around, at the time of Lucian?
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