Stephen Smith doesn’t look like a mad scientist, because he’s not one. Not really. He’s not even a code guy by training. But he has packed the room at BibleTech, an occasional gathering of coders, hackers, publishers, scholars, and Bible technology enthusiasts. And the standing-room-only crowd is starting to turn on him. No pitchforks and torches. But for once in this collegial, tight-knit retreat, you can feel the tension growing.
They’ve seen his experiments before. You might have, too. He’s the guy who wrote the code to quantify what folks on Twitter gave up for Lent and how the fasts change from year to year (forswearing swearing is up, dropping alcohol is down). He figured out what Bible verses went viral after Osama bin Laden was killed, or at any other time (chances are good that “I can do all things through him who strengthens me” and “For I know the plans I have for you” are doing really well right now), and the most popular saints and mountains in American church names. (Mt. Pisgah beats out Mt. Nebo. And Lutherans almost never call their church “First Lutheran”””though “First” is a fifth of Presbyterian churches.)
If someone releases a new API (code that lets applications interact with each other), or if Google unveils a new tool in beta, or if a new dataset is published online, it’s a fairly safe bet that Smith will try to connect it to the Bible. In 2012, Stanford University published a Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. Smith used it to calculate the time and cost of each of Paul’s missionary journeys.
[blockquote]”There are about 30 modern, high-quality translations of the Bible in English,” Smith announces to the BibleTech group. “Can we combine these translations algorithmically into something that charts the possibility space of the original text?”[/blockquote]
I don’t think so. While they can be combined algorithmically, the result won’t chart “the possibility space of the original text.”
In this era, we already have the best versions of the original texts. And the modern translations have been based on these, or their close predecessors. Variants in English word choice generally reflect the theology of the translator, or (more commonly) a consensus of the theology of the translation committee.
Still, an interesting exercise. Do the computer work of a problematic passage, have bona fide Hebrew or Greek scholars compare the output to the original.