biblicalia

Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950, Mark Mazower (Knopf, 2004). Aaron Taylor, who lived for a time in Thessaloniki, recommended this book to me. As the title implies, it’s a history of the city from 1430 until approximately 1950. What we have here is not just the tale of some kind of Oriental Everytown, though some aspects of this apply, but the tale of a city of remarkable communities of people who managed to coexist and thrive until outsiders in the twentieth century ruined everything. The Germans, as usual, had a hand in this, not least of which was their nearly complete extermination of the entire Jewish population, a Jewish population that had been the pride of the city and of the entire Jewish world. Likewise, in the name of “progress”, the striking old city of so many minarets and courtyarded, tiled houses, has given way to a city that is a gigantic grid of ugly apartment blocks. How all this comes to be is related in sufficient detail by Mazower. And while he shows perhaps a bit too much sympathy for the Turkish Muslim perspective, this doesn’t affect the historical account. It’s a very good read, very relaxing.

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, Edward Luttwak (Harvard University Press, 2009). Luttwak is the author of the magisterial The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third (Johns Hopkins, 1979). This volume might even be seen as more of a second volume to that than a separate work, as it immediately follows upon the heels of the last, and picks up the history of strategy in the fourth century, going until the end of the Empire in the fifteenth. Luttwak is a brilliant and engaging writer. I’ve never read such a thoughtful and stimulating book on military history and strategy before. Luttwak clearly admires the “grand strategy” of the Byzantine Empire (which he rightly recognizes as the Roman Empire, continuing after the loss of the West to the various barbarians), and suggests that we might find their strategy useful even today. Considering its remarkable success, I would agree. One wonders: was the vivid Orthodoxy of the Byzantines part of the explanation for their so very different strategy? At least in part it must be. Their adaptability and intelligence were legendary, contrary to the slanders of powdered, atavistic barbarians like Gibbon. This book merits rereading soon, I think.

Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism, Paula Fredriksen (Doubleday, 2008). This is a remarkable book, one which has given me a new sympathy for St Augustine. Fredriksen provides a remarkable summary account of the evolution of Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman society as a setting for her detailed discussion on Augustine’s writings. She goes directly to the heart of the matter: the educational system of rhetoric, classical paidea, is crucial to an understanding of not just Augustine’s, but all writing of the time. Most people miss this, almost always pulling quotes out and presenting them as something or other that the author “believed” or “felt.” Baloney. Rhetoric was about winning. And if winning your audience over meant some over-the-top insults toward absent friends or foes, then so be it. Rhetoric was always a tool to a higher purpose, and Augustine clearly had higher purposes in mind than scoring cheap shots at his fellow citizens. As with other Church Fathers, his most vividly awful rhetoric regarding Jews is found in those orations which are attacking heretics, where these “Jews” are a standard trope standing in as an image of the heretics themselves (to quite drastically simplify!). In Augustine’s remarkable work Against Faustus, however, he develops a theology of the Jews that is actually quite positive: they exist as a separate entity from Christians because God wills it so, and those who would attempt for forcibly convert them work against the will of God. The Jews likewise are a help to Christians for their holy books, which are (essentially) those of the Christians also, and which therefore serve as a witness to pagans of the antiquity of the message. I really sped through this book, it was so enjoyable. Fredriksen put many years of work into this book, which shows in its smoothly flowing argumentation, and especially in the extraordinary presentation of helpful background material for those unfamiliar with the period. In future, I am going to recommend this book to those who need an introduction to the rhetoric of the Patristic period. It is excellent!

Thus endeth the lesson on the lessons of ye summer.

Well, summer is slipping away with barely a peep on things that matter from this source. I apologize to you, my longsuffering readers. It’s certainly the case that once one breaks the habit of daily writing that it is difficult to get back to it. Nonetheless, I have many things to write on.

This post will thus attempt to make up for lost time in presenting short reviews of some of the offline reading that I’ve been doing over the last couple of months. Let us dispense with the chit-chat and get down to the brass tacks! I present these roughly in the order I read them.

The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism. Douglas Burton-Christie. (Oxford University Press, 1993)
I’ve mentioned this book in two previous posts (here and here) to which I refer the reader. The gist of my impression: This is a good book to have as an introduction to reading the Apophthegmata Patrum, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, if one is curious about the level to which Scripture plays a part in the lives and sayings of these early desert monastic Saints. Some, of course (illiterate though such an idea is) find their ways “unbiblical.” Through the course of the book Burton-Christie demonstrates the complete internalization of the Scriptures by the monks, not just through memorization of entire swaths of Scripture, but through true internalization: the process of intellectual and Spiritual digestion, with such food building up the New Man. This book, in conjunction with Derwas Chitty’s classic The Desert a City (now published in paperback by St Vladimir’s Seminary Press) would be indispensible for those needing a quick introduction to the ethos and history of desert monasticism.

Biblical Interpretation in the Russian Orthodox Church: A Historical and Hermeneutical Perspective (Mohr Siebeck, 2008). I’ve also mentioned this book briefly before, here. This is a fascinating book. A peculiarity of Russian scholarship (not to mention historical events) has rendered an account of the development of post-Enlightenment Russian Orthodox Biblical Interpretation impossible to write for those outside of Russia. This difficulty lies in the fact that the vast majority of Russian theological (as well as other) scholarship was conducted in journals, copies of which simply do not exist outside of Russia. This has led to any number of half-baked and even wildly incorrect perspectives (which shall remain unnamed) on the subject when based solely on monographic data. Negrov (a former Orthodox Christian, now the headmaster of a Russian Evangelical school, The St Petersburg Christian University) did the work, and did it well. This is essentially a history of Biblical interpretation in Russian Orthodoxy from the Kievan period to the early Bolshevik period, with some incidental mention of later developments. There is a long excursus (chapter 5, of about 120 pages), presenting as a representative example of the height of development one of the more well-respected of Biblical interpreters in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia: Bishop Vasilii Bogdashevskii.

The Old Testament in Byzantium. Editors Paul Magdalino and Robert Nelson (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010). In conjunction with the well-known exhibit in the Freer Gallery of Art, “In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000” (October 2006 to January 2007), the symposium “The Old Testament in Byzantium” was held in early December 2006 in the Meyer Auditorium of the Freer Gallery. Edited versions of the papers presented, with a substantial introduction by the editors, are included herein: Introduction by Paul Magdalino and Robert Nelson; Nicholas de Lange, “The Greek Bible Translations of the Byzantine Jews”; James Miller, “The Prophetologion: The Old Testament of Byzantine Christianity”; Georgi Parpulov, “Psalters and Personal Piety in Byzantium”; John Lowden, “Illustrated Octateuch Manuscripts: A Byzantine Phenomenon”; Elizabeth Jeffreys, “Old Testament ‘History’ and the Byzantine Chronicle”; Claudia Rapp, “Old Testament Models for Emperors in Early Byzantium”; Derek Krueger, “The Old Testament and Monasticism”; Robert Ousterhout, “New Temples and New Solomons: The Rhetoric of Byzantine Architecture”; Ivan Biliarsky, “Old Testament Models and the State in Early Medieval Bulgaria”; Jane Dammen McAuliffe, “Connecting Moses and Muhammad.” Obviously this is a very interesting lineup, and I enjoyed the various papers immensely. Still, I want someone (please God, don’t make it have to be me!) to write a full monograph on the subject of “The Old Testament in Byzantium”, focusing particularly on synchronic and diachronic accounts of hermeneutical trends and tropes through the ages of the Roman Empire and beyond, into contemporary Orthodoxy neo-Patristic interpretation. All of the data exist in the vast wealth of (largely untranslated!) Patristic writing and related theological, historical, and legal documentation. The papers in this volume point the way. I just hope that there’s some intrepid and qualified explorer who will take up the challenge. Let it be soon!

From Ikaria to the Stars: Classical Mythification, Ancient and Modern, Peter Green (University of Texas Press, 2004). I don’t think there’s any Classicist who is more of a delight to read than Peter Green. Urbane, witty, and both broadly and deeply intimate with the literature, primary and secondary, and yet maintaining a pragmatic approach to the sources that eschews egregiously de mode methods, Green is always an educational read. That is to say, one will always benefit from rereading Green, as well. This book presents a collection of his articles ranging over the last thirty years, with some of them substantially reworked so that they are essentially new publications: “‘These Fragments Have I Shored against My Ruins”: Apollonius Rhodius and the Social Revalidation of Myth for a New Age”; “The Flight Plan of Daedalus”; “Works and Days 1-285: Hesiod’s Invisible Audience”; “Athenian History and Historians in the Fifth Century B.C.”; “The Metamorphosis of the Barbarian: Athenian Panhellenism in a Changing World”; “Text and Context in the Matter of Xenophon’s Exile”; “Rebooking the Flute-Girls: A Fresh Look at the Chronological Evidence for the Fall of Athens and the Eight-Month Rule of the Thirty”; “A Variety of Greek Appetites”; “Alexander’s Alexandria”; “The Muses’ Birdcage, Then and Now”; “How Political Was the Stoa?”; “Ancient Ethics, Modern Therapy”; “Getting to Be a Star: The Politics of Catasterism”; “The Innocence of Procris: Ovid AA 3.687-746″; “Magic and the Principle of Apparent Causality in Pliny’s Natural History“; Appendix A: “Tanglewood Tales for the Yuppies”; Appendix B: “Homer for the Kiddies.” Various of these articles in their course become review articles of one book or another the point of which Green is systematically and convincingly demolishing, to one degree or another. In all of them, possibly why the adjective “urbane” comes to mind first as a description of the author, Green maintains a deeply cultured voice, one that is as familiar with the modern world as one could be, and who is as familiar with the ancient world as it is possible to be from this distance. Though I’ve heard from other classicists that Green is considered something of a maverick, I don’t see that the reputation is quite warranted. What he is is a classical classicist: that is, a classicist who is representative of old ways of doing the Classics, when the classicist actually needed to, you know, learn the languages and know the history beyond just well enough to fool the plebes. Green is also able to argue a point with a commonsensical pragmatism that is so foreign to much modern scholarship, besotted with its isms as the latter is. In that sense, I suppose he is a kind of maverick, a sort of rebel in not embracing the latest trends, just because one must embrace them to be considered “contemporary” or “modern”. This has always struck me as ridiculous in anyone doing studies of languages and texts from the ancient world, and it does the same in Green. So that’s surely another reason that I enjoy his writing so: it’s subversive. Tee hee.

Posted byKevin P. EdgecombAugust 23, 2010April 29, 2025Posted inReview1 Comment on Reviews of this summer’s reading