A Lampe to Read By

The courier has just brought me G W H Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon from the uni. library. How exciting! It's actually not as old as I'd imagined it to be: I thought Lampe was some bewhiskered Victorian clergyman-scholar, but in fact the publication date is 1961. Being an OUP publication, it's very much like my large Liddell-Scott-Jones in format (not quite so bulky though), but of course specialises in theological and ecclesiastical vocabulary, so I don't have to wade through all the classical forms and definitions first. I can't wait to get started!

The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle

Albert Schweizer's The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. Uncanny. I was looking for this in the uni library catalogue a couple of weeks ago and found that it had been relegated to the card indices and stores. And there it was today, up the winding stairs of the Minster Gates Bookshop (the bookshop that I'd most like to own because of its location adjacent the Minster). At £10, it has actually broken the bank, but I couldn't not buy it, could I? Call it serendipity, karma, whatever...

The Valley of Dry Bones

Currently occupied in tracing the development of the afterlife in Judaism, I find myself engaged with Ezekiel's 'Valley of Dry Bones'. Whereas She'ol is had generally been understood as beyond the dominion of YHWH, in chapter 37 of the Book of Ezekiel describes God's power through prophesy to clothe the dead bones and restore breath to the bodies. I need to look thoroughly at the language used in the Septuagint. I knew that the good old Barbican Bookshop had a rather elderly copy of an ICC Ezekiel, so I called in to see whether it was still on their shelves. It was, so I bought it. It's vintage stuff: first published in 1936 (although I have the 1960 reprint), Cooke's commentary 'keeps the Hebraist in view' and each section is most usefully followed with a page or two of detailed textual notes, including readings from the LXX. Marvellous stuff. Whilst there I happened to see another ICC volume: Abbott's 1897 (although mine must be a reprint) commentary on Ephesians and Colossians. I've generally avoided anything on the deutero-Pauline epistles thus far, and really only purchased it because of the library plate on the fly-leaf:

'This book is the property of

The Hoult Library

Free Methodist Church

New Mills. Derbyshire

and is on loan to

Rev. Keith Beckingham

as long as required.'

Wouldn't like to be paying his fine.....!

Am also currently waiting delivery of Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon from the university library. I imagine that it's quite a hefty tome - although probably not quite as large as my LSJ 9th edition. I couldn't find it when I was down there the other week, but even if I had, I probably could not have managed to hump it all the way back home on the train. My neck was cricked enough after filling my back-pack to capacity with impulse borrowings. Seven pound fifty is a bargain for door-to-door delivery.

The illustration at the top is one of my favourite pre-Raphaelite paintings by one of their lesser-known brethren Henry Alexander Bowler. Painted in 1855, it is titled The Doubt: Can These Dry Bones Live? (on display in theTate Collection). This is a quotation from Ezekiel which describes God showing Ezekiel the valley of dry bones. The butterfly, resting on the skull of John Faithful, is a traditional symbol of the Resurrection. The word ‘Resurgam’ is inscribed on the headstone, and translates as ‘I shall rise again’. It is typical of the Victorian tendency towards maudlin sentiment, but I just love the delicately backlit horse-chestnut leaves.

Gothic Urges

I was suddenly seized last week with the desire to have a look at the Gothic language (not the language of Goths, those black-clad pasty-faced miserablists....er, I mean alternative moodsters that blight bus-shelters and bung-up Subway). Having Googled to see what the preferred grammar on it was --- Joseph Wright's 1910 'Grammar of the Gothic Language' since you ask --- I happily remembered that I'd actually seen a second-hand copy in the local St Paul's book shop. Absolutely certain that nobody else in the whole wide world would ever dream of buying such a book, I confidently sauntered there to purchase the aforesaid. And would you believe it.....it had been SOLD!!!! WHAT!!! I thought there was only me who was interested in that sort of stuff. Obviously not....so that's a bit creepy. There's someone else like me about.

Saturday saw a rather satisfying padded envelope plop through the letterbox. Actually, it didn't plop.....it sort of squirmed its way through: undue wear and tear on the draught strip (caused by posties shoving packages through rather than spending a few extra seconds ringing the bell and handing it over face-to-face) means that anything fatter than your standard letter struggles to make its way through the slot. It was a copy of N.T.Wright's 'Paul in Fresh Perspective' the published and slightly tweaked collection of his Hulsean Lectures. Wright is a scholar who seems to sharply divide opinion and I look forward to reading his thoughts. When leafing through, I was amused to note that he accepts Ephesians and Colossians as part of the authentic Pauline corpus, and although he admits occasionally drawing upon them (and Acts) to illustrate a point, he generally confines himself to the 'undisputed' epistles. His reason for tentatively including the 'deutero-Paulines' is that - when push comes to shove - he feels he should 'conform to the episcopal stereotype'!!!

My early morning reading of late has been 'What Happens When We Die' by Dr Sam Parnia, a critical care doctor who has carried out extensive studies into Near Death and Out-of-Body experiences. Contrary to what you might imagine this was a very uplifting book: nearly all those who had undergone NDEs (bright light, tunnel, assembled relatives, angelic guides etc) remembered their experiences as positive, comforting and life changing - regardless of their religion, spirituality or lack of it. Parnia examines the theoretical possibilities of such common ground - the 'dying brain' scenario being the one most favoured at this point: the brain, starved of oxygen releases chemicals that trigger feelings of euphoric contentment. But it is his examination of consciousness that was most interesting, in that there is nothing in the brain that can, in itself, be 'fingered' as the generator of the consciousness. Just because the brain manifests consciousness does not mean that it initiates it, very much as a TV set manifests images that do not actually originate from its working parts. And seeing which parts of the brain light up in a scan when it is subjected to certain stimuli does not mean that they are actually the source of the emotions felt. Parnia seems to think that mankind does not have the wherewithal to explain consciousness as yet, just as the 18th century scientists knew that there was a form of energy that we now understand as electromagnetism, but that they were then unable to assimilate. Fascinating stuff.

Less strenuous bedtime reading has recently consisted of Marina Lewycka's 'Two Caravans', an engaging tale of immigrant agricultural workers who risk every kind of economic exploitation in their pursuit of a 'better life'. The lasting legacy of this book is a desire to avoid processed chicken of any sort (read it and you'll see why....).

I've also really enjoyed Moshin Hamid's 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist'. The unusual literary device of addressing the non-responsive reader in the second person, plus his cool, precise prose makes this book one of my favourite reads of this year so far, even if I anticipated the ending motif somewhat in advance.

I also have to admit to buying the Saint Jerome Daily Missal that I caught sight of a few months back. As it is now post-Easter and the volume runs from Low Sunday until July 31st, I felt sort-of justified. What swayed my decision to purchase was its illustrations - beautifully stark wood-cuts (of a type much-favoured in the sixties) by the Dutch artist Jan Sleper. It is a piece of artwork that is a joy to own.

A trip down to uni. meant some time spent in the smaller of its libraries and a heavy backpack full of books to lug around for the rest of the day. I'd only noted a couple of titles to pick up (Kasemann's and Cranfield's commentaries on Romans), but like a child in a sweet shop I kept seeing books that I just knew would 'come in handy' and, as the account limit is twenty books at any one time, I went for it big time. This means that I have an enormous pile of stuff to wade through for material. Hey ho! Time to crank up the reading hours again!

Classics and Frauds

Actually - the further I read through The Moses Legacy, the worse it got, so I just skipped through the last few chapters, reading only the chapter-end summaries. Meh!.

Ordered my own copy of 'The Gargoyle' from one of Amazon's subs: it arrived pretty quickly, but turned out to be a hard-back. Never mind - it's going out on loan soon. I do want to read it again, but maybe not yet.

Called in at the Barbican Bookshop on a rainy afternoon last week and found TWO books that made the whole day worthwhile: Ernst Kasemann's 'Perspectives on Paul'and Robert Martin-Achard's 'From Death to Life: A Study of the Development of the Doctrine of the Resurrection in the Old Testament'. this latter could not have come at a more opportune moment as I am currently writing about the Judaic conception of the afterlife, from the earliest times through to the Mishnaic period. The former is, of course, a classic. Both came to a mere £7.

Amused myself today by knocking up a couple of facsimile 'papyrus fragments' (inspired by Evangelical Textual Criticism's blogpost

http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2009/05/p52-for-sale-on-ebay.html)

I thought I'd also do P52 - so I did - and then a fragment of the late 2nd/early 3rd century CE Coptic 'Dialogue of the Saviour' (Nag Hammadi). I have to say that both mine actually look far more authentic than the one advertised on eBay does. Maybe a new career beckons?

**ha! if you look carefully at the picture of 'P52' above, you can see the reflection of me taking the photo!**