Category Archives: Review

A book that can wait

The earliest confession of Christian faith — κυριος Ιησους — meant nothing less radical than that Christ’s peace, having suffered upon the cross the decisive rejection of the powers of this world, had been raised up by God as the true form of human existence: an eschatologically perfect love, now made invulnerable to all the violences of time, and yet also made incomprehensibly present in the midst of history, because God’s final judgment had already befallen the world in the paschal vindication of Jesus of Nazareth.

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Eerdmans, 2003), page 1

There are several problems here:
1.) It is a stretch to call κυριος Ιησους “the earliest confession of Christian faith.” A title and name do not a confession make.

2.) It is not “Christ’s peace” that suffered rejection upon the Cross, but Christ Himself. Nor was this “peace” raised up, but Christ Himself was. A work in which an “Eastern Orthodox theologian” loses focus on Christ on page 1 is not promising.

3.) “…an eschatologically perfect love, now made invulnerable to all the violences of time, and yet also made incomprehensibly present in the midst of history…” — buzzwordy blather. That “incomprehensibly present” is a classic. How would you comprehend it to note its presence were it incomprehensibly present? Incomprehensible polysyllabic pseudo-postmodern piffle is more like it. I can see how this book gained so much attention, now!

4.) “…because God’s final judgment had already befallen the world…” — uh, no, it hadn’t, nor has it yet, but it will someday, when there’ll be no mistaking that it is God’s final judgment.

5.) “…in the paschal vindication of Jesus of Nazareth.” — Wrong. In the theology of the Orthodox Church “Jesus of Nazareth” didn’t need “vindication,” being God and Man. The statement smacks of adoptionism.

Five strikes in one sentence on the first page. This book can wait.

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The Boundless Garden

This boundless, magnificent garden formed by the deep furrows of the waves, bordered by the caves and rocks of the sea, its surface mirroring the dome of heaven, is no ordinary garden. Just as Yannios’s garden-plot, softly caressed by the sea-breezes which crease it into seductive, innumerable lines, as on the forehead of some king’s lovely bride displaying a capricious temper, so the liquid garden of the sea, the unpredictable sea, displays a childish temper and obstinacy, at times furious and at other times seductive. The sea is the garden, and Yannios’s donkey, plunging ‘its feet among the coll petals which waved and rustled around its hooves’, is no ordinary donkey but a little boat: when he tethers it to a post, he is actually securing it in some spot of the harbour, and when he untethers it he is taking it into the sea in order to harvest his ‘vegetables’, ‘cauliflowers and melons’, ‘the fruits of his labour’, fruits de mer, as the gastronomically-informed French would have it.

Homer is invoked from the beginning of the story with his comparison of the waves of the sea with the waves of undulating wheat in an unharvested field. Elsewhere Homer has compared the foamy waves of the sea with a flock of little white sheep. Although not of the same etymology, the affinity between skáros, the sleeping quarters for a flock of sheep, and skarí, the name usually given to a large boat, evokes in modern Greek a common homophonic derivation between terms referring to the worlds of both land and sea. A similar analogy can be seen between skáfos (skiff) and skáfi (wash-tub), confirming the ancient association where the lines between the two elements are blurred. This correspondence can also be seen in Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ (oinops pontos), and in the representations on Attic vases of Dionysos sailing on a boat whose mast is a grape-covered vine seemingly growing out of the ship’s hull. The land enters into the sea and the sea into the land. Papadiamadis takes this correspondence one step further by turning the sea into the land. In a horizontal sense, the expanse of the sea is the garden and in a vertical sense the dome of heaven is mirrored in the sea; the sun at the end of its laborious course plunges through this dome to rest at the bottom of the sea, and the moon grows ever more radiant over it and the distant light of the Pleiades sparkle in its unexplored depths.

This is an ancient, primeval garden that dates ‘from the beginning, from the creation of the world’, and contrary to the assertion of Bacon according to whom nature is an open book in which everyone can read the history of creation, this primeval Homeric garden is ‘an open book written in hieroglyphic characters’ that ‘you cannot read . . . unless you are a seer’. The antiquity of the garden is further emphasized by the hieroglyphic characters in which it is described as well as the cryptic sayings of Homer, who is then conjured again become those ‘hieroglyphs’, literally ‘sacred engravings’, are compared with the ‘”emblems of sorrow”, the cracked lines engraved on the naked skulls of the dead, of which it is said that although they indicate the fate of the dead person, you cannot read them unless you are a seer . . . and anyhow it is too late then, since the dead man’s life is over.’ Unless this passage is read in an eschatological way it is totally devoid of meaning. How can anyone read the engravings on the skull while the person is alive? The engravings, like the hieroglyphic characters, have no useful purpose since the reveal the fate of the dead person post mortem, when nothing can be done about their life. It is the same with the scriptural garden. Death cannot be read in the garden of Eden which is full of life. But in the fallen garden, which is marked by death, the remnants of this once living garden can be read eschatologically, for the emblems of sorrow are there for all to see and interpret.

Yannios’s hardships have revealed to him the meaning of exile from the living garden; the garden that he finds in the sea is but a vestige of the original garden of life; it is a garden that is harvested with toil, with the sweat of one’s brow, that yields its once living fruits as dead ‘vegetables’—all the sea-urchis, oysters, octopuses—as a reminder that in the fallen garden it is necessary to consume dead matter in order to live. And it is this garden which is rife with the ’emblems of sorrow’ for the seer who knows how to decipher their meaning, one which is inhabited and epitomized by the solitary, sorrowful figure of a woman, her head covered with the black scarf of mourning, whose body is coated with weeds and scales as with a coat of skin (see Genesis 3:21), the ‘oyster-covered bride with shells for eyes’, who becomes unmarried Yannios’s ‘unbedded’ companion, the once living garden that will threaten to engulf the life of a drowning child and spew it out as dead matter. It is for all these reasons that the book, albeit open, retains its eschatological meaning hidden within its sacred engravings, and must be read as signs of the Kingdom of God, of our exile from this Kingdom which will be given back to us. For the unfortunate Yannios, who has suffered so much in this exile from the lost garden, the meaning of the earthly garden has already been revealed as in ‘a book written in shining capital letters, clear, intelligible . . . .’

An explanatory endnote from editor Lambros Kamperidis on Alexandros Papadiamandis’ short story “Black Scarf Rock,” in The Boundless Garden: Collected Short Stories, volume 1 (Limnia, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey, 2007), available here.

The stories of Alexandros Papadiamandis are brimming with what has been called “bright sadness.” What else is there to say, but, “read them”? Though we will not enjoy in this volume (except vicariously through such notes as above) the elaborate intermillennial wordplay of Papdiamandis’ Greek which defies labeling much less translation, we can still appreciate his mastery of the short story format. These stories are certainly gems. Whether we call them pearls from the deep or peas from Yannios’ boundless garden, they are beautiful. This collection is a labour of love for those involved, and their loving selection of the best of Papadiamandis’ myriad stories is appreciated, leading more of us to love this author.

The volume is beautifully printed on smooth, creamy paper, a delight to the touch as well as the eyes, and the softcover is a gently textured thick paper, something like watercolor paper, actually. Publisher Denise Harvey has done a wonderful job in not only producing a beautiful selection of stories in translation, but a beautiful book. This first volume of English translations of Papadiamandis’ stories is also volume seventeen of Harvey’s Romiosyni Series, a series of apparently English works (whether translations or originals) involving the history, culture and ethos of post-Byzantine Greece. I’ll certainly be looking for more of the volumes of the series, myself, if this volume is any indication of the quality of the others. My thanks to all involved.

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Orthodox Study Bible redux

Orthodox bloggers Felix Culpa and Esteban will both be commenting on the Orthodox Study Bible in coming days. I recommend you to check their blogs for their insightful critiques. I think this will be the last post of mine dealing more than in passing with the new Orthodox Study Bible. I’ve noted a few more problems with this Bible, two of which are “deal breakers” which, for me, means it will join its predecessor and various other study Bibles to collect dust. This is unfortunate, as some of the translated texts are done quite well. The problem is that not all of them are, and that the presentation in this volume inadequately reflects the nobility of the subject matter. Let us cut to the chase!

On Tobit. There are two texts of Tobit, the short text as found in the majority of manuscripts (Hanhart’s GI, found in Codices Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, and others, as well as represented in Jerome’s admittedly half-hearted Vulgate translation), and the long text (Hanhart’s GII, found in Codex Sinaiticus with lacunae, and a few fragments otherwise, but well-represented in the Old Latin translation). The GII text is universally recognized to the be the older of the two, with GI representing a later reworking of the text. In such a case, the presentation of both versions or the longer alone (perhaps with an indication of which passages are lacking in the shorter version) would be preferable. While it is known that the text of Codex Alexandrinus is the Old Testament in favor on Mount Athos, and so the shorter version of Tobit will be preferred there, there is no canonical statement finding for either ancient text. The fuller text does tell the story better, however, and for that reason alone it might be preferred. But it appears that the Revised Standard Version was the boilerplate for the Orthodox Study Bible in the books called anaginōskomena (“readable”) among the Orthodox and “apocrypha” generally, and the RSV used the shorter text. Again, the NETS actually provides translations of both texts in parallel, as it does for the case of all such divergent texts in the Septuagint tradition: in Iesous (Joshua), Judges, Esther (giving the Old Greek and the Alpha text, which is a bonus!), Tobit (the GII and GI texts), Sousanna, Daniel, Bel and the Dragon (all three have both Old Greek and Theodotion). The approach of NETS is preferable.

Regarding the notes in the OSB, I thought I’d take a look at something which would naturally have occurred to a good editor: to make certain that the points made in the separate articles about various texts were also included in the notes to those texts. Here too the OSB earns a failing grade. Take, for example, the article “Types of Mary in the Old Testament.” Firstly, why just “Mary” and not a properly Orthodox reference like “Champion of the Faithful” or “Mary the Theotokos”? How about even “Mary, Mother of God”? This OSB, however, is actually directed at Protestants as a conversionary ploy, not at Orthodox, so one couldn’t possibly call her what Orthodox actually call her in what is supposed to be their own Bible! Secondly, of the eighteen Scriptural references given in the article on Mary, ten are not represented in the notes to those texts. That is, at those points in the notes, where a reader is most likely to be looking for information on how the Orthodox Church reads the verse, there is no notice that these various ten verses are read to reflect Mary the Theotokos. Even aside from this, and it really is unforgivable, Isaiah 7 and 9 are not included in the article! How can the primary prophecy of the Theotokos in Isaiah 7.14, recognized even in the Gospels, not be included in an article on the subject? That’s laughable! Likewise, there are many other references which were not included. The author of the article could simply have sat down with an annotated copy of the services for the Orthodox Church’s Feasts, like The Festal Menaion put together by Bishop Kallistos, and made a list of all the Scripture readings and allusions therein and made sure the editor would ensure appropriate commentary in the notes for each. This would’ve taken mere minutes, not hours or days. In addition to this shortcoming in this particular article, there is another more editorial shortcoming: the text of no article fills the page dedicated to it. It appears that the font of the articles was changed along the line somewhere so that it is smaller and no longer fills the page. This is sloppy. The extra space could’ve been used to better the articles.

Randomly flipping through the OSB, I found that a number of notes are problematic in historical or factual matters. A note to Isaiah 22.1-5 indicates “Jerusalem fell to the Assyrians.” This is not the case. A note to 2 Kingdoms 15.7-12 (the text of 15.7 begins “Four years later…”) reads “After four years (the LXX has “forty”)….” So, this quite apparently answers our question as to whether this is a translation of the Septuagint or not. Clearly it is not! It is guided by other motivations, which allowed some of the translators to adjust their text toward the Hebrew. This is not in itself a bad idea, but it is not what the Old Testaement of the OSB (or rather the “St. Athanasius Academy Septuagint™” [sic]) proclaims itself to be. The note to Judith 1.1 places the entire book in the wrong light: “This opening verse is anachronistic in that the father of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebopolassar, destroyed Nineveh in about 607 BC.” Aside from the error that Nineveh was not destroyed in “about 607” but in 612 BC, with no “about” about it, and the oddly spelled Nebopolassar rather than the standard Nabopolassar, this misses the entire point of the book in its parabolic masking of various historical characters with names drawn from the rest of the Old Testament, of which Judith is a part. Nineveh represents Seleucia, and Nebuchadnezzar the Seleucid king, and so on. Reading this as a straight historical account is as much a mistake as reading it as an entirely allegorical one. Bad form! A relatively good note appears at Daniel 5.2: “St. Jerome remarks that ‘vice always glories in defiling what is noble.’ He sees in Belshazzar’s blatant misuse of the holy vessels a type of the misuse and twisting of Scripture by heretics for the purpose of drawing others into false doctrine and worship.” Now that is an excellent patristic note, at least. Yet there is no way to find out where St Jerome elaborates on this, as there is no reference to his undoubtedly pithy statement on the matter. It would perhaps have been preferable to leave out the vast number of inane notes in preference for more substantial patristic quotations which included references to the works (at the very least!) in which they appear. But I tire of this.

There are some very good translations in the OSB Old Testament. Isaiah and Job are quite well done, as is Jeremiah. I haven’t delved too much into others, as this edition is not conducive to reading. Most of the Prophets suffer from the serious drawback that their texts are not presented (I kid you not) in poetic scansion. The lines are all run together as though everything in them were prose. And the density of this font in combination with the close line spacing and the horribly thin paper (with its subsequent bleedthrough) makes for very uncomfortable reading indeed. For me, this is one of the “deal breakers” I mentioned above. For whatever reason the verses weren’t presented in poetic format, the verdict is the same: poorly done indeed!

Add to this the occasion that the very complicated issues of verse numbering in various books have received the least useful solution in this OSB: that of creating a versification unused by anyone else, and probably not even by all the annotators in the volume! This is the other “deal breaker” I mentioned. This is wholly unacceptable and unjustifiable. A better solution, again, is presented in the NETS: the versification of the standard editions is retained, and the versification of the Hebrew text is indicated in small raised parentheses.

Readers will need to follow the progress of the other Orthodox Septuagint translation projects in order to eventually obtain a decent Orthodox translation of the Church’s Old Testament. The OSB is not that. In the meantime, I would continue to recommend the NETS. While it may not be a perfect translation (which translation is?), it is an academic translation geared toward usefulness as a tool in better understanding the underlying Greek texts, and it is of a vastly higher consistent quality than is the OSB. If a reader wants to read a contemporary English translation of the Septuagint, then the NETS edition is the one to read.

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Two Septuagints

After so long a time, we now have, within the space of a year, two complete English translations of the Septuagint, the Old Testament of the early Church, and still the Old Testament for Orthodox Christians. One is a scholarly edition, the New English Translation of the Septuagint, published by Oxford University Press and typically referred to as NETS ($19.80 at Amazon; thanks Iyov!). I’ve written about this translation previously. Now there is also the St Athanasius Academy Septuagint, the trademarked (!) name of the Old Testament included in the new Orthodox Study Bible: Ancient Christianity Speaks to Today’s World published by Thomas Nelson Publishers (the New Testament translation included is the New King James Version, which was likewise the “boilerplate” used as a guide to the translation of the Septuagint, in a role analogous to that of the NRSV for NETS). The OSB is available in both a hardback and something called ‘leathersoft’ editions. As I’ve already described the NETS, I’ll now briefly review the new Orthodox Study Bible (henceforth OSB) and proceed to a comparison of these two welcome translations.

First, as is patently indicated by its title, the OSB is a study Bible intended primarily for an English-reading Eastern Orthodox Christian audience and other English readers with an interest in Orthodoxy. At the bottom of each page are notes of varying lengths, though tending toward brevity, rather like those of the Oxford Annotated Bibles. There are various single-page study articles interspersed throughout both Testaments, covering subjects like Ancestral Sin, Sacrifice, The Tabernacle, Types of Mary in the Old Testament, and so on. There are likewise a number of different full-color pages including reproductions of various icons, which the Orthodox are well-known for. A number of different articles and helps are likewise included: Acknowledgments, Special Recognition, an introduction, a page listing the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant Old Testaments, a page of abbreviations of patristic authors and materials used in the notes, “Overview of the Books of the Bible” by Bishop Basil (Essey) of Wichita and Mid-America, “Introducing the Orthodox Church,” “The Bible: God’s Revelation to Man” by Bishop Joseph (al-Zehlaoui) of Los Angeles and the West, “How to Read the Bible” by Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia, a “Lectionary” which is not precisely the actual liturgical lectionary of the Eastern Orthodox Church but is intended for a devotional reading schedule, a glossary of terms and phrases used in the notes, pages of morning and evening prayers, indices to the annotations and study articles, the traditional list of The Seventy Apostles (see Luke 10), and a set of full-color maps. Throughout the OSB, each book of the two Testaments is given an introductory section including Author, Date, Major Theme, Background, and Outline. All this indicates therefore a volume of satisfying heft, and of a great variety of resources typical of study Bible of our day and age.

Continue reading “Two Septuagints”

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Plato: Complete Works

Have you been looking for a complete set of the works of Plato in a modern translation? I had been for a long time, and somehow had not run across Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, with associate editor D. S. Hutchinson, from Hackett Publishing Company. I managed to run across it in a real bookstore, in person! This hefty tome of over 1800 pages includes all the authentic and spurious works organized according to the canon established by Thrasyllus of Alexandria. That is, the works that Thrasyllus considered canonical are arranged in nine tetralogies (groups of four), with a further eight dialogues (Definitions, On Justice, On Virtue, Demodocus, Sisyphus, Halcyon, Eryxias, Axiochus; all of which Thrasyllus considered spurious) and a set of epigrams outside the number. Of course, several of the dialogues included within Thrasyllus’ canonical tetralogies are now recognized as spurious, and other dialogues have their authorship by Plato under discussion. The Letters and Epigrams are of similarly mixed authenticity. (As an aside, the nine tetralogies make me wonder if their number nine was the source for Plotinus’ Ennead, with Plotinus drawing an even greater import from this peculiar arrangement of Plato’s works than is intended. It’s a possibility anyway.)

In any case, this is a nice volume to have, particularly when running across an obscure reference to one of the very hard to find spurious works. The translations are perhaps a little too contemporary for my taste, but they’re effective for reading and getting the gist of the Greek, which is notoriously difficult but rewardingly beautiful with Plato. The footnotes are clear and not too digressive, clarifying quotations and allusions to other works of the period, which is very helpful. This is something that has been restricted to the more expensive editions, so it’s quite nice to have it all at hand in one book. And though the book is too large for reading without a desk, it’s well-bound, using “Bible paper” which is sufficiently opaque to avoid bleed-through and its consequent eye strain. The only thing I found lacking in this volume was an alphabetical list of the works. The Thrasyllan canon’s order is not one that I suspect most people are familiar with, so having an alphabetical table of contents in addition to the regular one would’ve been nice. I put one together myself in a few minutes anyway, so it wasn’t that big a deal.

Anyhow, I recommend the volume. It was a work of love by those involved at Hackett Publishing, the publisher of earlier more extensively introduced editions of most of the translations included in this volume. We should all thank them for their dedication and consideration in putting together such a very useful volume.

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A Little Eliot

Out and about last Friday, I stopped by my favorite Berkeley bookstore, Black Oak Books. After making my usual rounds, through Christianity/Theology/Biblical Studies, Archaeology, Judaica, Classics, and Middle Ages, I popped by the Poetry section, which has lately been shrinking somewhat alarmingly. To be honest, the whole store has a kind of resigned feel to it these days, a “get it over with” mood that’s not encouraging. Rumors abound among Berkeley’s litterati that its time has come, to generalized dismay. Regardless, I managed to find a great little book there.

It’s Eliot: Poems and Prose, from the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series, published by Alfred A. Knopf. This little (4.5 x 6.5 x .75″) hardback comes complete with dustcover and register (the bound-in bookmark). The paper is creamy and smooth. The sewn binding is perhaps a little too tight, but sure to loosen comfortably with age and use. Best, the whole thing fits easily in a coat pocket.

For a T. S. Eliot fan, there’s a fine selection of his work in here. The editor, Peter Washington, receives my admiration, particularly for his choice to include some of Eliot’s essays. The poetry contents are those of three collections: Prufrock and Other Observations, Poems 1920, and The Waste Land. I think perfection would’ve been achieved by including Four Quartets, but, as the old Mohammedan rugmaker said, perfection belongs to God. The essays included are: Reflections on Vers Libre, Tradition and the Individual Talent, Hamlet, The Perfect Critic, The Metaphysical Poets, The Function of Criticism, Andrew Marvell, and Ulysses, Order and Myth. And index of first lines follows the essays.

As I mentioned above, I’m happy to have a selection of Eliot’s prose in such a handy little book. But I’m even more happy to have both The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land in one such handy and pleasantly read volume.

The Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series includes quite a number of volumes, all of which are listed here by author. For people who’ve created such great little books, their website is unfortunate. It’d be ideal to have a table of contents available for each of those volumes on their individual pages. As you may’ve noticed by clicking the link above to the Eliot volume, the pages are rather bare-bones.

Nonetheless, I can at least recommend the Eliot book for one’s winter pocket.

Dare to eat the peach!

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I’m rather in love

My copy of A New English Translation of the Septuagint arrived yesterday. For those of you unfamiliar with this particular translation, edited by Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright, you might want to browse through the website of the translation project, and read, in particular, “To the Reader of NETS”, the introduction to the translation as a whole. The introduction was updated this year, so it differs slightly from the older version from the website, and from the version of the introduction included in the Psalms volume published in 2000 by Albert Pietersma, which is apparently out of print. I’ve been following the project since the appearance of the website a number of years ago. With luck, the commentary series based upon this NETS translation, also described on the website, will proceed apace.

The book itself is very well-made. It’s hardcover, with a “library binding,” and slightly larger than the Psalms volume, yet only about one inch thick. This is due to the use of fine, yet reasonably opaque, “Bible paper.” The text is approximately 10pt, and double-column throughout the Biblical text, with the front matter and introductions to the individual books being single-column. The binding is such that the book lies open flat even very near the front and back covers, in addition to which the inner margins are sufficient that one needn’t hold down the pages to keep text from falling into the gutter. Unfortunately, the other margins are quite small, and will not facilitate annotation. Perhaps a less economical edition in the future will remedy this. I confess that it would be quite nice to have a NETS edition Bible of the same production quality as the leather-bound Oxford NRSV Bibles, which are always exceedingly well made.

Now to the truly extraordinary aspects of this new translation of the Septuagint. Students of the Septuagint will be aware that several of the Biblical books are known in two versions (in whole or in part) in Greek, with the divergent texts being published and annotated in both the Rahlfs handbook edition and in the G

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Paradise Besieged

By the grace of God I am a Christian, by my deeds a great sinner, and by my calling a homeless wanderer of humblest origin, roaming from place to place. My possessions consist of a knapsack with dry crusts of bread on my back and in my bosom the Holy Bible. This is all!

It’s a simple thing, this first paragraph of The Way of a Pilgrim, but it led a Jewish friend of mine to convert to Orthodox Christianity, forsake the world for ten years of his life as a fanatical novice monk in a monastery of the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos, and eventually to write of these experiences and more in his book, Paradise Besieged (also at Amazon), his name being Richard John Friedlander.

Alternately funny, sobering, and sublime, his witty musings on monasticism in particular, and on Orthodoxy in general, should be required reading particularly for those starry-eyed converts to Orthodoxy busily memorizing the canons of The Rudder while growing their beards and hair long(er) and affecting an accent. His not too shocking revelation is that monks are human, just like the rest of us, and that monastic life is a different one than ours in the world, but not necessarily a holier one. It is a lifestyle which is less distracting from the cultivation of holiness, arguably, but life on Mount Athos is not the living embodiment of the ninefold ranks of the angelic forces glorifying God continually in an Edenic manicured park in which beatifically smiling monks stroll gravel paths in the evening discussing the Areopagitica. There are wolves on the prowl nightly on the Holy Mountain, feasting on the unwary. Real wolves, with real prey. Likewise, as in the rest of the world, sin exists there, failure and complacency, selfishness and pride. There is no escaping those on this wide earth, however far you may travel. Even so, the monks there experience the divinization of theosis as we do in the world, with saints there as surely as elsewhere, all by the grace of God. Richard brings to mind that we could all do better. At least that’s what leaps to my mind!

Throughout the book are short passages when, turning from the anecdotal, Richard lets slip with the sublime:

When Francis of Assisi said, “It is more important to love than be loved,” I believe he meant this: If you can love unconditionally, then, it won’t matter to you if you are loved in return: In loving, you are loved. You did not love expecting a reward; you experienced love in the giving of love. If your love carries expectations, however, you won’t know you are loved even if you are. The will to survive becomes the need to love. Pretty much the same can be said about understanding: you will experience understanding of yourself only as you attempt to understand others. And if your focus is on understanding others, then it will not matter if they understand you. Will you succeed? The monk prays only to have the desire to have the desire to pray. The inability to love others of their own kind may be one of the reasons so many find their bliss in the love of Christ.

I recommend Richard’s book wholeheartedly. While it may sound at first as though it’s simply a critique of various failings here, there, and everywhere to do with the center of Orthodox monasticism, it succeeds on a deeper level, particularly on reflection. It doesn’t hurt to know him personally as an intelligent, witty, very well-read and entirely urbane gentleman. Keeping that in mind, it’s a memoir examining, in part, the personal shortcomings of a life half a lifetime past, but with lessons for all of us today, particularly as commentary on where we Orthodox too easily permit those shortcomings to take hold and become the routine, or even the goal, thinking all the while that somebody, somewhere else, is holding the line. While those ideal conversations on an evening stroll discussing the Areopagitica may not be a reality now, there’s no reason not to aim for them to be so in some way in our lives. Likewise, our true surrender to transformation by God will usually turn our ideas of what we think He wants from us on their heads, as we’re confronted with His will for our lives not in an abstract and idealized sense, but in a personal and realized way. This is the Incarnation at work in each of us, in the process of theosis, through as simple and as fearsome a thing as Holy Communion. Such lives can have nothing to do with complacency of any kind in any respect. Richard brings this clearly to mind with this book, if I were to have to pin down “the moral of the story.”

So, get a copy, give it a read, let it sink in, and let me know your thoughts, as well. I know several others are currently reading and enjoying it or recently have. The more, the merrier!

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Bauckham’s …Eyewitnesses

Having been reading Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses over the last few weeks when I could squeeze in the time, I have to say that I have found myself non-plussed. As I mentioned in response to several readers’ inquiries, I found E. Earle Ellis’ work on the subject of “traditioning” and his scenario for the production of the Gospels, as found in The Making of the New Testament Documents and in the shorter History and Interpretation in New Testament Perspective to be not only more convincing, indeed compelling, but in particular better in interaction with various other trends of scholarship. I have found Bauckham’s work to be very interesting, to be sure, but the digressions and the overall diffuseness of argumentation without specific referents for opposing viewpoints (perhaps something to be expected from an Eerdmans book, admittedly more popular than scholarly press?), the relatively scanty annotation, and the numerous distracting lists to lead me away from taking it as more than a thought excercise, a published notebook of sorts. In comparison, the treatment of tradition in NT formation by Ellis is well-argued, well-discussed, and well-annotated, particularly with reference to German Biblical scholarship, which is typically where the most serious opposition to traditionary approaches to New Testament (and Old Testament, etc) formation has come from. I suppose that Bauckham’s work is gaining the better press as it is coming from a press that has been able to distribute more copies at a lower price than both of Ellis’ above-mentioned works, which are published by Brill, so they are, of course, both out of print in hardback, were extremely expensive when in print, with only The Making of the New Testament Documents now in paperback, though even that appears to have run out of print now as well. That’s a shame, that such excellent work on this subject hasn’t received the attention that it deserves. Traditionary input is not even so much a matter of faith as it is common sense. Who else would even have cared about Jesus or the very first Christians? The Romans? The Judean authorities? The Galilean Gentiles? Hardly. Those who witnessed bore witness to it.

These accounts were passed on from that point, sometimes becoming garbled and adulterated. But there have always been groups of people receiving and faithfully passing on what was passed down from earlier generations, leading all through the years from those first disciples down to the present, otherwise all those books would have been lost long ago. In the same way, there have been those through the years who have taken that message and run with it in another direction. Depending upon the place and time, sometimes the former were in the majority, sometimes the latter, sometimes the traditional and “orthodox,” sometimes the innovating and “heretical.” None of this is in question except in perhaps the outer limits of extremely skeptical scholarship, I had thought. On second thought, perhaps not.

The reason that Bauckham and others are finding it necessary to belabor the point of traditionary input in the formation of the New Testament perhaps lies not only in the extreme reaches of skeptical scholarship, but also lies in the extreme anti-traditionary aspects of certain trends in modern popular religion. I’ve heard with my own ears and read with my own eyes various derogatory references to “tradition” in various thoughtless low-browed works. Of course, the same will reference “ancient Christian tradition” and even quote some Church Fathers when it suits their purposes, in a species of unreflective proof-texting run rampant.

Nonetheless, Bauckham is an interesting read, but not one that has managed to hold my attention at the moment, unfortunately. It has now joined McDonald’s The Biblical Canon (see my short review) on a particular shelf for me to return to when I actually don’t have something better to read. But that’s just me! I enjoy reading other reviews, and expect to see a number of them appearing on various blogs, as it appears that numerous Biblical studies bloggers are currently reading the book. It’ll be a good thing to compare notes, in the end.

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McDonald’s Biblical Canon

Consider this an explanation of the reason that I’ve yanked a 500+ page book out of my “Currently Reading” slot on the blog, after having read not even 100 pages. The book is Lee Martin McDonald’s The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority (Hendrickson, 2007). I’m just not enjoying this book. In fact I’m finding it hard to read. I blame the editor. Its argumentation is diffuse and meandering. The writing is peppered with infelicities of expression, quizzical solecisms, and astounding propositions.

An example of a quizzical solecism: “These stelae, from around 600 B.C.E. to roughly 300 B.C.E., are quite uniform in style, progressing from one-dimensional to two-dimensional and finally three-dimensional stelae” [pp 39-40]. Now, I suppose he means the artistic depictions on the stelae go from painted (?) to bas relief (?) to sculpture in round (?), but that’s not what he says. A one- or two-dimensional stele is a physical impossibility.

As an example of an astounding proposition:

Along with the Prophets, a body of literature, some of which was written well before 200 B.C.E. and some perhaps even later (e.g., Daniel), circulated widely among the Jews. These writings circulated in Palestine and were later translated from Hebrew into Greek

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