Life of Jesus by David Strauss

[Brendan Fattig]

*Life of Jesus* by David Strauss, translated by George Eliot: a longer
term project that I'd like to do before I attempt to conquer William
James' *Varieties of Religious Experience*. While I've played around
with various nonfiction works this will be my first one (unless you
count Gandhi's autobio, but that's still a narrative work and not that
different from a novel). Thus, some questions up front.

transcription:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/64037

scans:
https://archive.org/details/lifeofjesuscriti00straiala

repo:
https://github.com/brendanny/david-friedrich-strauss_the-life-of-jesus_george-eliot


1. *Life of Jesus* is usually presented as "The Life of Jesus,
Critically Examined" but the original half title is "The Life of Jesus".
Do we want to demote "Critically Examined" to a subtitle? (i.e. title:
"The Life of Jesus"; subtitle: "Critically Examined")
2. Author name at LOC (and on the title page) is his full name, "David
Friedrich Strauss", and that's what I've gone with as author name.
3. Keep Otto Pfleiderer's "Introduction to the Present Edition"?
4. Keep Strauss' untitled latin preface as is?
5. Both prefaces to the first German edition and the fourth German
edition are signed "The Author". Should I change those to "Strauss" to
match his Latin preface (or choose some other name variant)?
6. How do we want to semanticate the divisions? (see abbreviated
contents below)
- Sections go from § 1 to 152 without any numbering restarts
- Introduction and conclusion do not have chapters
- First, second, and third parts have chapters that restart numbering
at each part
7. Roman numerals for chapters but keep sections numbers decimal?

My thought is to keep all § 1 to 152 as h4s, intro/parts/conclusion as
h2s and chapters as h3s (this would mean skipping directly from h2 to h4
in intro/conclusion). Is that appropriate?

Also, what document division semantics would be most appropriate for
each division: part, chapter, subchapter, division, section, subsection?


Contents:
- Introduction
- § 1–16
- First Part
- Chapter 1
- § 17–19
- Chapter 2
- § 20–22
- ...
- Second Part
- Chapter 1
- ...
- ...
- Third Part
- ...
- Concluding Dissertation
- § 144–152


--
—brendan

[David]

If I could chip on in #1 only (it edges on to my "day job"), my recommendation would be to retain as the full title: *The Life of Jesus Critically Examined", no comma. This is how it is normally referred to in modern scholarly work such as this one. The "Critically Examined" bit was crucial to its thesis, and to omit it (IMO) would verging on mis-titling.

Just my take, of course! FWIW, etc....

David / Fife, UK

On Sunday, 8 December 2024 at 19:58:08 UTC Brendan wrote:

*Life of Jesus* by David Strauss, translated by George Eliot: a longer
term project that I'd like to do before I attempt to conquer William
James' *Varieties of Religious Experience*. While I've played around
with various nonfiction works this will be my first one (unless you
count Gandhi's autobio, but that's still a narrative work and not that
different from a novel). Thus, some questions up front.

< . . . >

[Alex Cabal]

OK. David would you like to manage this with Vince reviewing?

I think this will be very difficult.

Go with David's advice re. title.

Cut Pfleiderer's intro.

Can you find a PD translation of the Latin preface? If not, cut it.

Keep signatures as is.

Since these are numbered as "sections", and we go up to 150, let's stick
with decimal numbers.

David, thoughts on sectioning?

[Brendan Fattig]

On 2024-12-08 17:15, Alex Cabal wrote:
> OK. David would you like to manage this with Vince reviewing?
>
> I think this will be very difficult.
>
> Go with David's advice re. title.
>
> Cut Pfleiderer's intro.
>
> Can you find a PD translation of the Latin preface? If not, cut it.
>
> Keep signatures as is.
>
> Since these are numbered as "sections", and we go up to 150, let's stick
> with decimal numbers.
>
> David, thoughts on sectioning?

Thanks, David. I appreciate the input. I'll go with the full title.

It will be challenging :)

The PG transcription is amazingly thorough. Every reference to a bible
verse is linked out to biblegateway. Every link has alt text. Every
correction they made to the scan is tagged. All hebrew and greek has its
latin transliteration in the tag. etc etc I almost feel sad removing the
spans that I won't need.

divs galore, though.

Hardest part will be xml parsing correctly to convert the footnotes to
endnotes.


1. For section headers, do we want to stick with title casing? I think
for this work, title casing these wouldn't make sense and I would rather
sentence case. See the casing that PG used for their ToC.[1]

2. Do we want all 152 sections to appear in the ToC, or only have the
higher level chapters/intro/conclusion in the ToC?

3. Do we want to expand all abbreviations of references in text and
endnotes? (and modernize bible verse references of course)



[1] https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64037/pg64037-images.html#toc


--
—brendan

[David]

Well, I'll do my best! :| Hopefully more experienced producers will frequently be looking over my/our shoulder(s).

Sectioning

The expected structure would be:

Introduction

Part I

  Chapters 1,2,3...

Part II

  Chapters 1,2,3...

Part III

  Chapters 1,2,3...

Concluding Dissertation > Subtitle: The Dogmatic Import of the Life of Jesus

The 152 numbered §§ would be subchapters in their own sections; I'm not sure what that implies for ToC.

If so, then: h2 = Intro/Part/Conc; h3 = chapters; h4 = §§subs, and my GUESS is this last marked up like (example at PG):

<section id="section-1-1-2" epub:type="subchapter">
  <hgroup>
    <h4>
      <span epub:type="label">§</span>
      <span epub:type="ordinal">18</span>
    </h4>
    <p epub:type="title">Natural Explanation of the Narrative</p>
  </hgroup>
  <p>...</p>
</section>

Question: Could the ID be rather `section-1-1-18`, where "18" corresponds to the label/ordinal? That would simplify matters, but I'm not sure what's permissible here. (My *hunch* is that so long as ID's are unique, transparent, and sensible, there might be a bit of leeway...)

Brendan's questions:

#1 - titlecasing for §§? My take differs here: they will be *titles* of sub-sections, so I expect that titlecasing would be called for.

#2 - is determined by markup, I take it? On that assumption, if markup like the sample above is used, I suppose that is automatically in the ToC.

#3 - bible refs get modernized, yes. Scanning through notes, my own sense it that expanding all the abbreviations would be a nightmare. You would also be needing to make editorial decisions about the form of the expansion. If we're able to just leave abbreviations as they've been since 1848, that would be preferable, IMO.

Original languages/Hebrew: Also: scanning through some "original language" quotes, the Greek looks in fine shape, but the Hebrew has some errors. I can help with those. There's not a lot of Hebrew in the SE corpus; what little there is looks like it's *usually* marked up:

<span xml:lang="he">יהוה‎</span>

sometimes including ` dir="rtl"` as well. I'm not sure if this should be normalized? (Unlike Greek, no italics should be involved!)

I would welcome confirmation or otherwise of any of the above! This is going to be a very demanding production, no doubt about it.

D.

[Weijia Cheng]

For the subchapter ids, why not simplify it and make it subchapter-1, subchapter-2, subchapter-3 etc. up to subchapter-152 since it is a sequence that runs throughout the entire book independent of the higher level sections? I did the same thing with the chapters of The Kural which also has heterogeneous internal structure between sections.

[David]

Thanks, Weijia - I was wondering that myself, but couldn't find any precedents. I had in mind the "Recomposability" samples, but numbering 1 through 152 would make excellent sense.

D.

[Vince Rice]

Also, whether the subsections are in the ToC is determined by whether h4 or header is used. If you want them in the ToC, use h4; if you don’t, use header. If you use header, you don’t need all the tags, just the text.

On Dec 9, 2024, at 8:20 AM, David <djre...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Brendan Fattig]

Regarding casing. My concern was when the section headers start to look like 

"Chronological relation between the visit of the Magi, together with the flight into Egypt, and the presentation in the temple recorded by Luke"

or

"The predictions of Jesus concerning his death in general; their relation to the Jewish idea of the Messiah; declarations of Jesus concerning the object and effects of his death"

or asks questions like

"How soon did Jesus conceive himself to be the Messiah, and find recognition as such from others?"

that title casing would be distracting and as this work is much more academic then the general SE work, we might prefer to go with whatever the standard is in theological circles. But as my own experience is from math/physics works, my idea of what the standard should be is definitely biased. 

Regarding sectioning. I would rather mark up all of the §§ as <section>s. My question was whether or not having 170 entries in our ToC was something we'd be concerned about considering our target readership. Either way, I would keep the §§ tagged I think because of references in endnotes and in text to other §§. But as Vince says, go with <header>s or sticker with h4s?

—brendan

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[David]

Titlecasing - might look odd to a mathematician/phycisist, but not to a historian. :) There are plenty of examples of long titles like those in our corpus. And if it's a *title* (and it is), it should look like one. I stand to be corrected, but this looks like the way to go.

Sections - so let's go with Vince's suggestion of `header`, then, rather than `h4`. That makes sense.

D.

[Vince]

Giving them ids to use in links is a completely separate issue tagging them with label and epub:type and the rest that are required for build-title and build-toc to do their things.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/a73d45fb-9580-4c47-8976-559b752c9aa4%40email.android.com.

[bre...@fattig.net]

Looking at the long title cased titles: *shudder*

Point taken though, title casing it is.

> Giving them ids to use in links is a completely separate issue tagging them with label and epub:type ...

Yeah, I realized right after I sent that that it wouldn't matter for linking purposes.

Okay, any thoughts on this markup:

<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:non-fiction">
<section data-parent="part-2" id="chapter-2-5" epub:type="chapter">
<hgroup>
<h3>CHAPTER V.</h3>
<p>THE DISCIPLES OF JESUS.</p>
</hgroup>
<section id="subchapter-18" epub:type="subchapter">
<header>

<span epub:type="label">§</span>
<span epub:type="ordinal">18</span>

<p>Natural Explanation of the Narrative</p>
</header>
<p>Lorem ipsum odor amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam aenean curae ligula pulvinar morbi mattis potenti magnis. Ullamcorper egestas dolor quam blandit rhoncus per. Sem nascetur faucibus metus duis ex in, sodales in mauris. Morbi ridiculus ipsum blandit arcu primis ultrices. Eros efficitur sem arcu metus neque viverra fringilla ultricies. Justo neque sagittis ex tristique elit lacinia pretium lacinia.</p>
</section>
            <section id="subchapter-19" epub:type="subchapter">
<header>

<span epub:type="label">§</span>

<span epub:type="ordinal">19</span>
<p>The Nineteenth Section</p>
</header>
<p>Lorem ipsum odor amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam aenean curae ligula pulvinar morbi mattis potenti magnis. Ullamcorper egestas dolor quam blandit rhoncus per. Sem nascetur faucibus metus duis ex in, sodales in mauris. Morbi ridiculus ipsum blandit arcu primis ultrices. Eros efficitur sem arcu metus neque viverra fringilla ultricies. Justo neque sagittis ex tristique elit lacinia pretium lacinia.</p>
</section>
</section>
</body>

[bre...@fattig.net]

Sorry. Accidentally clicked post before editing that down. Heres an easier to read one and attached is what that looks like in firefox

<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:non-fiction">
  <section data-parent="part-2" id="chapter-2-5" epub:type="chapter">
    <hgroup>
      <h3>CHAPTER V.</h3>
      <p>THE DISCIPLES OF JESUS.</p>
    </hgroup>
    <section id="subchapter-18" epub:type="subchapter">
      <header>
        <span epub:type="label">§</span>
        <span epub:type="ordinal">18</span>
        <p>Natural Explanation of the Narrative</p>
      </header>

      <p>...</p>

    </section>
    <section id="subchapter-19" epub:type="subchapter">
      <header>
        <span epub:type="label">§</span>
        <span epub:type="ordinal">19</span>
        <p>The Nineteenth Section</p>
      </header>

      <p>...</p>
    </section>
  </section>
</body>

[David]

It looks like the subchapter header needs `<p>...</p>` wrapper for the spans, and the `<p>` with the title would (this could use confirmation; Github code search for this is proving tricky) needs title semantics. Otherwise, it's looking good (IMO) (even the titlecase ;-)).

If I'm wrong, I'm fairly confident correction will be swiftly administered!

D.

[Vince]

No all-caps; use CSS to format it how you want it. As I mentioned, if you want to use header, you don’t need the tags. It can just be

<p>§ 18</p>

(Alex may need to confirm that; the only example of a plain <header> in the SEMoS section on headers doesn’t have anything to tag, but I’ve never used them on a plain header.)

As David mentioned, the chapter hgroup needs all of the semantics you have in the header. And we don’t keep the word “chapter."

<Screenshot 2024-12-09 at 11.14.04.png>

[Brendan Fattig]

If anyone wants to see where its at so far: GitHub

Particularly, subchapter semantics for Intro/Chapters/Conclusion. I’ve not added any attributes to the subchapter headings, but as Vince said, I’ll add an `epub:type=“title"` attribute for the title of each subchapter.

Don’t look at the endnotes, I’ve not done anything with ‘em yet :-P

So far, I’ve split it up into document divisions and titlecased all headers. (Finally (structurally) resembles an SE epub! :) )

Its at a point where I was able to build a draft epub without endnotes and noticed some things:

• When close to the end of the page, the subchapter headings are separated from their text. I’m not sure if this also happens with h#s/hgroups or not. Is this something that could be fixed in CSS? (see pic)

• Subchapter headings are closer to the previous subchapter’s text than their own text. The only CSS I’m using is from SEMoS 7.2.10.8. (see pic)

• Both prefaces are titled “Preface” with subtitles “To the [First|Fourth] German Edition”. So, they are both in the ToC as “Preface”. Should I promote the subtitles to make them “Preface to the [First|Fourth] German Edition”?

Here’s the ToC as it is now (pic):

Thanks everyone for the help! I’ll do the endnotes tomorrow (probably). And *then* we’ll be able to get to discussions about the content.

—brendan

[David]

Thanks for this, Brendan. At least to my eye, the structure the ToC has produced is what we're after.

I'll need to call in others for help with the CSS *spacing* issue: it looks odd to me, too, that the heading should be closer to the preceding text (it's separate from) rather than the following text (that it belongs to), but there may be going on here than I realize.

As for the "keep-header-with-following-text" matter: I doubt that there's anything that can be done about that. Of course, these will fall at completely unpredictable places, and there isn't (AFAIK) a "link" thing like there is in a "word processor" to keep contiguous elements together.

It seems this is gathering some momentum, anyway. :)

D.

[Alex Cabal]

Use a browser's CSS inspector to see how the margins on those headers
are calculated. You can always add or adjust margins to make them look
correct.

On 12/10/24 10:54 AM, David wrote:
> Thanks for this, Brendan. At least to my eye, the structure the ToC has
> produced is what we're after.
>
> I'll need to call in others for help with the CSS *spacing* issue: it
> looks odd to me, too, that the heading should be closer to the preceding
> text (it's separate from) rather than the following text (that it
> belongs to), but there may be going on here than I realize.
>
> As for the "keep-header-with-following-text" matter: I doubt that
> there's anything that can be done about that. Of course, these will fall
> at completely unpredictable places, and there isn't (AFAIK) a "link"
> thing like there is in a "word processor" to keep contiguous elements
> together.
>
> It seems this is gathering some momentum, anyway. :)
>
> D.
> On Monday, 9 December 2024 at 23:36:27 UTC bre...@fattig.net wrote:
>
> If anyone wants to see where its at so far: GitHub

> <http://github.com/brendanny/david-friedrich-strauss_the-life-of-jesus_george-eliot>

>
> Particularly, subchapter semantics for Intro/Chapters/Conclusion.
> I’ve not added any attributes to the subchapter headings, but as
> Vince said, I’ll add an `epub:type=“title"` attribute for the title
> of each subchapter.
>
> Don’t look at the endnotes, I’ve not done anything with ‘em yet :-P
>
> So far, I’ve split it up into document divisions and titlecased all
> headers. (Finally (structurally) resembles an SE epub! :) )
>
> Its at a point where I was able to build a draft epub without
> endnotes and noticed some things:
>

> * When close to the end of the page, the subchapter headings are

> separated from their text. I’m not sure if this also happens
> with h#s/hgroups or not. Is this something that could be fixed
> in CSS? (see pic)
>

> Screenshot 2024-12-09 at 16.30.34.png
>
> * Subchapter headings are closer to the previous subchapter’s text

> than their own text. The only CSS I’m using is from SEMoS
> 7.2.10.8

> <https://standardebooks.org/manual/1.8.1/single-page#7.2.10.8>. (see pic)
>
> Screenshot 2024-12-09 at 16.48.10.png
>
> * Both prefaces are titled “Preface” with subtitles “To the

> [First|Fourth] German Edition”. So, they are both in the ToC as
> “Preface”. Should I promote the subtitles to make them “Preface
> to the [First|Fourth] German Edition”?
>
>
>
> Here’s the ToC as it is now (pic):

> Screenshot 2024-12-09 at 16.57.00.png
>
>
> Thanks everyone for the help! I’ll do the endnotes tomorrow
> (probably). And *then* we’ll be able to get to discussions about the
> content.
>
> —brendan
>

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[bre...@fattig.net]

How about just css to simulate an `hgroup > h4 + p`? (core.css already defines a `text-align: center;` rule for header. Is it necessary to do so again in local.css as the SEMoS provided css specifies?)

/* simulate hgroup in header */
header{
font-variant: small-caps;
margin: 3em 0;
}

/* simulate h4 in an header */
header > p{
font-size: 1em;
}

/* simulate h5 in an header */
header > p + p{
font-size: .83em;
}

header > *{
font-weight: normal;
margin: 0;
}

header > *:first-child{
font-weight: bold;
}

header > p{
text-indent: 0;
}

[David]

That should work. And we never duplicate CSS rules! If it's defined in core.css, no need to repeat in local.css.

D.

[bre...@fattig.net]

All 2250(!) endnotes and noterefs have been renumbered, backlinks added and hrefs corrected. (`renumber-endnotes` so helpful)

Any recommendations on what to start with first? I won't run semanticate because there will be way too many false positives at this point.

I'm thinking I should start with modernizing bible verse references. I will need some guidance on how to handle the various types of references. For example, what would be the correct modernization for each of the following (and particularly, how to handle f. and ff.)?:

• “According to Mark and Luke, we must presume that the Baptist gave credence to this sign; according to the fourth Gospel, he expressly attested his belief (i. 34), and moreover uttered words which evince the deepest insight into the higher nature and office of Jesus (i. 29 ff. 36; iii. 27 ff.); according to the first Gospel, he was already convinced of these before the baptism of Jesus. On the other hand, Matthew (xi. 2 ff.) and Luke (vii. 18 ff.) tell us that at a later period, the Baptist, on hearing of the ministry of Jesus, despatched some of his disciples to him with the inquiry, whether he (Jesus) was the promised Messiah, or whether another must be expected.”
  
• “According to Matthew, indeed, they did not so find him, and Jesus appeals (v. 4) only to his former works, many of which they had seen, and of which they might hear wherever he had presented himself.”
• “In chap. vi., Jesus represents himself, or rather his Father, v. 27 ff., as the giver of the spiritual manna.” [This is at the beginning of a paragraph but referring to Gospel of John.]

Thanks!

—brendan

[David]

Okay, here we go. We'll save the `f.` and `ff.` cases for last.

1.`his belief (i. 34)` ->  `his belief (1:34)`

2. "...and Jesus appeals (v. 4) only..." : you're going to have to be careful with these `v. ` refs, because that's not chapter 5, of course: it's referring (in context) to Matt. 11:5.

One plan of attack would be to deal with these first.

• There are (it looks like) 288 of them. Of these, 63 are preceded by a book name, so would need to be expanded to, e.g., "Ezra 5:2" (from `v. 2`). This regex catches all the book + ref instances `([A-EG-Z][a-z]{3,}) v\. ([0-9])` (that avoids the false positives of e.g. "From v. 7"; there are no biblical books beginning with "F" fortunately.) You can change those to "* 5:n" in one go. [I use VSCodium which lets you review all the results of your regex in a side-panel from which you can then de-select; I'm sure other editors would do the same.]
  
• Then you're left with your ` v\. ([0-9])` instances, and these all would go to: " <abbr>v.</abbr>". [N.b. Most instances of "v." as abbr in the corpus mean vide, but there is at least one which seems to use "<abbr>v.</abbr> for "verse". I'm not sure what else we would use for this.] It probably *shouldn't* be expanded, since there are at least a couple instances where it means "verses".
  

3. "In chap. vi., Jesus..." : again, there are a mix of "chap." instances followed by simple chapter number (as this one), and chapter AND verse. I expect these need to be handled differently:

• This finds the ch+vs instances: `chap\. ([ivxl]{1,})\. ([0-9])` My recommendation would be to omit "chap." in these cases, e.g. `chap. xviii. 12` -> "18:12".
• Then you are left with the examples which give only chapter numbers. These will take some eye-balling, as you have cases like `Luke (chap. i. and ii.)`. Whether to expand or to leave "<abbr>chap.</abbr>" (we have quite a few in the corpus)? To have parity with `v.` (assuming that is retained), my sense is also retain the "chap." abbreviation.

4. "f./ff." Yes..... "f." always means "next following verse", so that COULD be expanded to the next verse number: e.g. "Dan. x. 15 f." -> "<abbr>Dan.</abbr> 10:15–16". There would be 218 (roughly!) to deal with.

BUT "ff." means "following unspecified set of two or more verses, as many as makes sense in context". I make it there are 441 of those. You'd be on a hiding to nothing to attempt to expand those: it would be almost complete guess-work in any case.

So! If "ff." is retained (examples in corpus), do we retain "f."? That would seem to make sense, although "f." in the corpus isn't typically used this way.

That's my take, anyway, subject to Alex's corrections/refinements/etc.

D.

[David]

P.s. - seeing this back, two things:

1. Don't (ever) trust my regex! :) e.g. `([A-EG-Z][a-z]{3,}) v\. ([0-9])` needs to be supplemented by `([A-EG-Z][a-z]{3,})\. v\. ([0-9])` to find books with abbreviated titles.

2. It looks like we don't generally put a no-break space (U+00A0) after things like "chap.", but I wonder whether things like "v.", "f." and "ff." (if retained) should get a no-break space between abbr and following number? Up to EiC, of course!

D.

[bre...@fattig.net]

Finally able to get back to this after graduating/moving/job seeking.

With a fresh look, these § "titles" look a lot more like bridgeheads than proper titles (I promise this isn't just to get out of titlecasing lol). Walks and talks and all that: these subchapters should be formatted as bridgeheads. 

[David]

To be fair, that does look very "bridgehead"-like. I can't stop just now to check others; if you're convinced that other "§" heads look like that, then let's go with bridgeheads.

D.