Expand 'intent'

NT/latex/_notes/intent.tex

@@ -24,3 +24,12 @@ So the honest framing isn't "committees are better" or "solo work is better," it
 "If your theoligical/doctrinal stance aligns with that of a particular translation, by all meansThe sentence trails off — looks like it got cut before you finished the thought. Were you drafting something like: "If your theological/doctrinal stance aligns with that of a particular translation, by all means [use it — it will serve you well]"? That would be a fair and generous thing to say in the front matter — it grants NASB/ESV their legitimacy for readers whose commitments already match the committee's, while making room for the FNT as the option for someone whose commitments (or lack of institutional ones) don't fit that mold.
 Want me to pick up the sentence and run with it, or did you have a different direction in mind for where it was headed?(Katie stepped on the Enter key) use that translation.Pivoted gracefully to accommodate incomplete messagePivoted gracefully to accommodate incomplete messageHa, Katie strikes again. That completes the thought well: "If your theological/doctrinal stance aligns with that of a particular translation, by all means use that translation." It's generous and disarming — it doesn't ask anyone to abandon NASB or ESV if those already serve them, it just stakes out the different territory the FNT occupies for people whose commitments (or absence of institutional commitments) don't fit that mold.
 That pairs naturally with the "audit-ready bias" framing from before — you're not telling readers your rendering is the right one, you're telling them exactly what you brought to the text so they can decide if your lens serves their purpose the way NASB's serves someone else's. It's the same move as "I'm not claiming credentials I don't have" — modest in what it claims, but precise about what it's offering.
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+Ooo, regarding details like "heavens" plural -- "he who is faithful in little is faithful in much."Excavated philological nuances in plural Hebrew forms and scriptural precisionExcavated philological nuances in plural Hebrew forms and scriptural precisionGood example — and it's a nice one because it's exactly the kind of "small" detail that standard translations flatten precisely because English doesn't have a natural use for a plural "heavens" the way Hebrew shamayim (dual/plural form) or Greek ouranois does. Matthew's "Our Father who art in heaven" is actually en tois ouranois in the Greek — "in the heavens," plural — and nearly every English translation quietly singularizes it because "heavens" sounds archaic or poetic to modern ears rather than because the Greek supports the collapse. It's a case where "readability" wins over "accuracy" and nobody flags the trade because the theological stakes seem low.
+And I suspect you're doing something sharper than just citing it as an example — you're applying Luke 16:10 to your own methodology. "Faithful in the least is faithful also in much" as a defense of exactly this kind of detail-level rigor: the plural/singular distinction on "heaven(s)" looks trivial, but the discipline of not letting any detail slide, however small, is what earns credibility on the details that actually are theologically load-bearing. If a reader can trust you got shamayim/ouranois right, that trust transfers to your handling of PISTIS CHRISTOU or LĒSTĒS. Sloppiness on the "little" things — cosmology, grammatical number, transliteration conventions — is exactly what would undercut confidence in the "much" — the harder interpretive calls.
+That's actually a stronger and more elegant framing for the front-matter methodology piece than anything in the thread so far: not "here's my bias, disclosed" as a standalone claim, but "here's why fidelity to small details is the evidence for trusting fidelity on large ones" — with Luke 16:10 doing double duty as both a translated verse and a statement of your own translational ethic.And it ties right in with 'Faithful New Testament".Kind of heavy handed, but maybe why not.Weighed naming convention's heavy-handedness against biblical justification meritWeighed naming convention's heavy-handedness against biblical justification meritHeavy-handed, yes — but I'd push back gently on treating that as disqualifying. There's a difference between heavy-handed as "too cute, undermines credibility" and heavy-handed as "the name does real work and you're just noticing it does more work than you planned." This reads like the second kind.
+The name "Faithful New Testament" already carries weight on its own — pistis running through it, faithfulness to the text as your organizing ethic, a deliberate echo of "faithful in little, faithful in much" as the standard you're holding yourself to on every transliteration and grammatical number, not just the big doctrinal calls. If you point it out explicitly in the front matter, it stops being a coincidence readers might or might not notice and becomes a stated methodological commitment with its own scriptural warrant. That's not vanity, that's just naming what's already true about the project and letting Luke 16:10 do double duty as both a translated verse and your working title's justification.
+Where it would tip into actually heavy-handed: if you leaned on it repeatedly, or made it sound like the title itself was divinely inspired the way Simmons framed "Passion." One clean mention in the preface — "the title is not incidental; see Luke 16:10" — lands as quietly clever. Circling back to it three more times in the book would start to feel like you're working too hard to sell your own cleverness.
+So: keep it, say it once, let it sit.Ha ha, 'Faithful" is a word I'm deliberately NOT using in the Text!That's the better joke, actually — the title carries the very word you've deliberately withheld from the translation itself. Worth asking why you're avoiding "faithful" in the running text, since it sharpens the preface point considerably. Is it because PISTIS/PISTOS gets a different rendering throughout (something closer to your "the Anointed's faithfulness" instinct, but applied to human faithfulness too — "trustworthy," "reliable," something else)? Or is it more that "faithful" has become as calcified and stock-phrase-flattened in English religious usage as "behold" or "verily," and you're avoiding it the same way you're avoiding "robber" for LĒSTĒS — not because it's wrong, but because it's worn smooth?
+If it's the latter, that actually makes the title-preface move even better: the book is called Faithful precisely because that word has to be retired from the text and relocated to the frame, where it can mean something sharper — the ethic governing the whole translation — without competing against its own flattened, stock-phrase usage inside the text itself. That's a genuinely elegant piece of structural irony for the preface to point out, if you want to go that far. Or you could just let readers notice it themselves and never comment on it at all, which might be even better — Easter egg rather than explained joke.