[sword-devel] apocrypha

[Chris Little]

> > 1) Should it be added now?  I would just be the addition of another
> > testament to our current canon.  It couldn't be turned off easily.  We
> > could just wait until we start working on 1.7.
> 
> That depends on how easy this would be.

I could probably throw the changes into the canon.h and a few other files in a matter of hours, but it would be a total hack.

> There should be a way to query which books are available. At the Moment BT
> uses a workaround (checks for nt and ot files and displays / hides the
> corresponding books). As we are in the 1.5.x tree api changes are possible,
> right?

I thought about this a bit after writing my first message and here are my thoughts.  There should be a way to define which books are in a Bible along with their order.  And the list of possible books should be able to grow.  So, books 1-66 are Gen-Rev.  Books 67-86(?) are apocrypha.  BUT... for the KJV, for example, we would define the order as 1-39 then 67-81 then 40-66 (and 82-86 are books not included in the KJV at all, so they're omitted from the list).  We could do this as a simple integer list in the .conf file.  Or as a more complex one if we want to do parsing, such as "1-39,67-81,40-66".  It allows for all the different ordering standards that we might locate, such as the standard Hebrew ordering of the Tanakh.

  
> > 4) What about the additions to Esther & Daniel?  Should they be included
> > in the apocrypha as alternates to the canonical books or should their
> > additions be added as additional books (AddEsther, Bel & the Dragon,
> > Susanna, Pr. Azariah, and Pr. Manasses)?
> 
> We should definitely not include them into the CANONICAL books. There must
> be
> a distinction. And users must be able to turn off apocrypha completely, as
> many won't accept them.

I've got to disagree with you here, at least in part.  I think if someone looks up Daniel chapter 13 in the Vulgate, they ought to receive Daniel chapter 13 and they shouldn't have to look it up as Susanna chapter 1.  (Though, if we do verse mappings well, they should be able to look up Susanna chapter 1 and be redirected to Daniel chapter 13.)  It's not our part to reinterpret the author's works, so we should simply present them as they were created to the best of our ability in order to maintain document integrity.  If a person is going to be offended by the existence of the Apocrypha in a translation, they probably shouldn't be reading that translation in the first place.

The KJV is going to present an interesting issue. :)  On the one hand, I feel we should only distribute the KJV with the Apocrypha included since that is how it was presented by its authors.  On the other hand, I don't really feel like answering the complaints we will get for doing this.  (At least with the KJV there is no Daniel chapter 13, only a Susanna chapter 1, and likewise the other additions to Daniel & Esther are segregated from their canonical cousins.)
 
> The changes in the frontends are not the problem, but imo in sword. I am
> not
> sure if somebody could code all this stuff in a short time so that it
> would
> go into 1.5.x.
> Maybe it is better to prepare this well and wait until the 1.7.x branch is
> started?

I tend to agree with you.  A hack could be done quickly, but a really good implementation is what is needed here.  And there's a lot more work that needs to be done to even support adding Apocrypha support in a proper manner.

--Chris