Miscellany

Every modern Bible tells Timothy to “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture.” Neither public nor of Scripture is in Paul’s Greek — and for fourteen centuries not one interpreter read the verse that way. A history of the phrase: from a Wittenberg classroom on 2 March 1528, through Balduin’s rejection and Bengel’s two undefended words, into the English Bibles between 1901 and 1946, and onto the convention floor of 2026 — with the Missouri Synod’s own record of who has read the lessons, from a 1950 memorial to the resolutions still open today.

Read the essay, with full notes: news.collver.biz
Typeset PDF (32 pp.): misc.collver.biz

On a Sunday in July 1861 the Union army broke at Bull Run, and the explanations traveled faster than the casualty lists. Dr. William Passavant announced the true cause in his Pittsburgh paper: the battle had been fought on the Sabbath. The reply from St. Louis ran one dry sentence — and then, when Passavant accused the editors of misquoting him, they printed his entire document in translation and closed with a doctrinal verdict signed in initials. An essay on fast-day sermons, false doctrine, and the habit of repenting of other people's sins.

Read the essay, with crops from the original Fraktur pages: news.collver.biz/a-rebuke-of-conscience

From the CHI digital archive project: chi-archive.collver.biz

In 1845, a St. Louis compositor setting Der Lutheraner seated one letter upside down, and the word Gnade — grace — went out to the subscribers as Guade. Nobody caught it for 180 years. How hand-set type worked, how a turned letter happens, and how an AI correction pass that was taught to fix its own mistakes and respect everyone else's found it. From the essay at news.collver.biz.

Where does the general confession and absolution actually come from — and is the “Declaration of Grace” a lesser gospel? From the medieval Offene Schuld through the Nürnberg controversy of 1533–1540 (including the absolution formula Luther wrote in his own hand, February 1540) to the Dresden court chapel, the Missouri Synod’s 1856 agenda, and page 203 of Lutheran Service Book.

Read the essay, with full notes: news.collver.biz
Typeset PDF: misc.collver.biz/unto-each-one.pdf
The Wittenberg letters, German and English: misc.collver.biz/wittenberg-opinions-parallel.pdf

How I got an open-source model to read my drafts aloud in a passable version of my own voice — for free, on my own machine. The ElevenLabs-cost itch, the fight to fine-tune Chatterbox, why some text-to-speech recites while the rest improvises, and the little CPU model that finally worked. Read, fittingly, in that very cloned voice.

Read the full post: https://news.collver.biz/teaching-a-laptop-to-read-in-my-own-voice/

Try the live demo: https://voice.collver.biz