BiblioBlogging issues

Some readers of this blog may have discovered that there will be a special session at the SBL Annual Meeting devoted to Biblioblogging. If not, you can read more about it here.

This event is not supposed to be focusing on Philo of Alexandria, but he will surely be mentioned, as I am one of the bloggers to participate in the discussion panel. I don't know how much time each of us will get in the discussion, and as I am not one of those fast-speaking-native-firstlanguage-English speakers, but a slow speaking Norwegian, I'll post some of my ideas about the future of Bibioblogging here. You are welcome to add your comments in the comment field below.

I was first a little surprised by being counted among the bibliobloggers and invited to this panel. On second thoughts, however, My Philo of Alexandria blog certainly deals with matter closely related to the study of the Bible as Philo himself was an expositor of the Scriptures, and his works are interesting for just that same reason.

My own blog came into being in relation to my Resource Pages for Biblical studies. The PaleoJudaica blog had been on the web for some time, and so had the New Testament Gateway blog, and a few others. I planned my Philoblog to be a place where I could present and discuss issues relevant in the world of Philo studies, and to gather and present material on the web on Philo. My first aim has been only partially fulfilled; there has been little discussion. After some time it became more and more a blog of collecting and presenting relevant links and news from the ongoing Philo research, both printed matter and websites.

There are several reasons for this; the main reason however, being my lack of time for just these things. Hence I focused more and more on updating it as a channel for presenting news in the fields of philonic studies. I try not to post on my personal life; I have two other blogs dealing with that (you can find them on my homepage), and I certainly do not write about Zwingli, but I focus on Philo and related issues within New Testament research.

Furthermore, I will not try to define what is or who is a biblioblogger. I do think the name just is there, and it needs no clear-cut definition. What I would like to focus on is some of the issues related to keeping and managing such a blog, and what I would like to see in the future.

The blogs now included among the 'biblioblogs' are very varied; the only common denominator seem to be that they in some ways deals with issues related to the Bible. Some are more academic than others, some are often rather personal diary-like. I will presume these aspects receive various responses from the readers. I made a little test among my colleagues in Stavanger at my present institution. I gave them a list of those blogs represented here in this panel, and asked them to have a look at, and – if possible - to tell me what they thought about the phenomenon of blogging, and what they would like to find. The answers I received varied from a confused professor asking: “What is a blog” to more informed responses. These latter focused on the scholarly content and thus usefulness of reading them, and explicitly said that postings of a more private nature would keep them away from visiting these sites. I am asking myself this: is our willingness and even interest in reading about personal experiences due to the fact that several of us have a feeling of knowing each other so much that it become natural to also read about personal issues and family events? If a blog is presented as scholarly, and not of the diary kind, I think we should be more restrictive here.

I do think some of the issues worthy of further discussion are closely related to something I brought up quite early on my blog concerning the keeping of comprehensive websites as, for instance, the New Testament Gateway and my own Resource Pages for Biblical Studies. At that time I called them megasites (see more on the discussion here). The fields of studies comprised by these sites, and the amount of studies published are so vast that it is becoming impossible for one person to be updated on all parts of, for instance in my case, Philonic and New Testament studies.
Hence I made two suggestions, and these, I think, are quite relevant also for the future of effective biblioblogging:
1. I would like to have more discussions of the prospects and problems of establishing a range of scholarly weblogs that deal seriously with various sections of the field of biblical studies and related fields.The focus of the megasites, or as here; the blogs, should be narrowed down from the comprehensive Biblical, Old - or New Testament to focus on individual Scriptures or group of scriptures. Good examples here are already the Evangelical Textual Criticism, Hypotyposeis, dealing with the Synoptic Gospels, the PastoralEpistles.com, dealing with the socalled Pastoral letters. But do we have any blogs dealing specifically with Old Testament groups of texts, or with the Pauline letters, the Johaninne writings, or the catholic epistles?(There might be some I don't know about yet; for those not mentioned here, please forgive me..)

It might be both possible and interesting – for the time being - to run and to read blogs that are biblical focused in such a wide way that they comprise not only biblical studies, but also biblical related movies, personal travels, and inputs from Zwingli. But not, I am afraid, in the long run. I would predict that those running such comprehensive blogs will sooner or later have to (re)consider narrowing their focus or splitting up their blogs into several. Some have already done that.

2. Secondly, I would like to see more blogs not only having a more narrow focus, but also to be run by several bloggers. I do have a co-blogger on my Philo blog; unfortunately he has not been able to be as active as we both wanted. And I would like to have others joining me. Some of the new blogs mentioned above, in fact, have several bloggers. And I do think that is something that will prove itself rewarding.

The blogs are here to stay. But if they shall continue to gather interest from the scholars around the world who do not know the bloggers, and don’t want to know too much about them personally, but of their research the blog should be more narrow, and be driven by several bloggers in companionship.

I hope I am not killing the interest in the varity of Bible related blogs as we have it today. Let the wild flowers blossom! But for the sake of the future; let us also consider if there could be some more co-ordination among some bloggers, and thus be more able to build up a handful of biblical blogs focusing strictly on the scholarly research of the Old and New Testaments and related fields. It is not a question of either- or. We need both.