Metaphorically Speaking

I have finally finished Janet Soskice Sisters of Sinai and, despite my earlier misgivings about its initial slow pace, I have really enjoyed reading it. The author has managed to blend together an amazing story of perseverence (a solid Presbyterian virtue) with good, scholarly research that reflects the protagonists' own story of learning, delving and discovery. I only wish that I could pass it on to one of my family or friends, but I fear that the fairly esoteric subject, plus its 'slow-burn' start might put most of them off.

I am also making my way through (practically finished!)David J. Williams very excellent Paul's Metaphors: Their Context and Character. This comprehensive thematic survey of Paul's language is appealing at every level, to both the reader of the Bible in English translation (here the NIV, a good workmanlike, if occasionally nervous version) and to those who (like myself) like to wrestle with Paul's Greek mano a mano. In actual fact, it has been a very good way of revising those hapax legomenon - those one-off terms with which Paul peppers his epistles and which I tend not to always recognise immediately. I've also learned a fair bit about subjects otherwise not high on my agenda. Did you know, for example, that a Roman soldier had as much to fear from his fellow legionaries as from his commanding officers or the enemy? If he failed to keep his place in the battle line, or lost his weapons to the enemy he could be condemned to the fustuarium, to be assailed by his comrades wielding rocks and clubs! Indeed, whole units could be subjected to this treatment: after being paraded in disgrace before the whole legion (10 cohorts of between 480 to 600 men = up to 6000 soldiers) every tenth man was chosen to undergo the ordeal (the origin of the word 'decimation'), the brave alongside the downright cowardly could equally be chosen by lot. A similar punishment was meted out for a sentry losing the wax tablet that had the current 'watchword' inscribed on it, or for being away from his post during a spot-inspection (what if nature called?). Harsh. No wonder the discipline of the Roman army was legendary.

The layout of the book is pleasing, although I think I would have probably preferred the specialist language information to have been contained in footnotes rather than endnotes, but that is just because I (personally) find all the flicking back and forth between the pages mildly irritating. I can understand the decision to keep them all en bloc, so that the non-specialist is not overwhelmed with torrents of Greek.

The book is divided into sections that deal with concepts in the same semantic field, which will no doubt please the linguistics afficionados, but some of the metaphors 'bleed' into one another so information in the endnotes occasionally tends to be, if not repeated, referred on to other endnotes. But this is a problem with which I am all too familiar: how to successfully and comprehensively cross-reference without becoming bogged down. The book has a couple of nice and useful appendices- a chronology of the Roman Empire (in outline, rather than exhaustive) and short biographies of the ancient writers that make an appearance in the book, plus the usual bibliography (extensive) and scripture index. There is also an index of the cited ancient authors. Two very minor observations follow.

i) It would have been interesting to see a 'metaphor map' of each epistle to get an idea (at a glance) of the coherence (or indeed scattershot nature) of Paul's thought.

ii) The author skirts around the problem of Pauline 'authenticity' with the old 'what constitutes an author?' chestnut. He says that he has 'accepted the traditional ascriptions of authorship to Paul', and thus includes not only Ephesians, Colossians ansd 2Thessalonians (..well..OK...I can live with that...at a push), but also the Pastoral Epistles. In addition he ransacks the Pauline speeches of Acts for material which he believes contain a kernel of Pauline authority. Mmmm. Why not add Hebrews too, then? I think the trouble with including the whole kit and Pauline caboodle is that we end up examining language that is actually quite far removed from its 'source', and the valid fields of investigation can flow ever outward, until the whole NT is plundered (and then, why not the apocrypha - someone thought that they had authority). Why not maybe 'NT Metaphors: Their Context and Character'? That would indeed be a μεγα βιβλιον! (και ἰσως μεγα κακον!) But if source limitation really is the name of the game, then play on the side of conservatism (not theological conservatism though!) and limit your sources to those upon which the majority of scholars can agree: Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1Thessalonians and Philemon. The book would indeed be slimmer, but no worse for that.

That having been said, I am enjoying reading this handsome and appealing volume immensely - so much so that I have put my other current reads on hold for the meantime to concentrate on it. I shall no doubt refer to it in my own research, and shall heartily commend it to my fellow scholars.

Texting Away

Sisters of Sinai is still being read, allbeit at rather a slow pace. It improved once the narration fo their expedition got underway, but the most notable event for me was their individual bad-luck at losing their late-found and ideally-suited husbands after only a few years of marriage. That, and how the sisters managed to acquire enough language skills in Syriac to pass muster as serious scholars. But they did, so all credit to them. It must have helped to have no small amount of money to smooth the way though! Some birthday money allowed me to get hold of William Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary, Walter Wilson's Pauline Parallels and a Penguin Classics copy of the poems of Goethe, with German and English text on opposing pages. Lovely - should keep me busy a while. I don't seem to have a 'non-serious' book on the go at the moment: I did get a copy of Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian from a charity shop for £1, but it's just laid on my desk at the moment, unopened. I've also worked my way through Textual Scholarship: an Introduction by David Greetham, and John Harvey's Listening to the Text which examines the rhetoric of Paul's epistles.
The Penguin Classics Desert Fathers book can only be read in very short doses: their utter refusal to engage with life in any sort of normal way is so alien that the mind boggles almost immediately. I shall post the most bizarre example of this when I've finished all the chapters.

In the Desert, Up the Nile, In the Graveyard

The Testament of Gideon Mack has been duly passed onto the husband, who whipped through Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book in double-quick time while we were away. I have eventually managed to hold of a copy of The Sisters of Sinai (blogged about some time in early spring) and, to be quite honest, am finding it pretty dull at the moment. The first part of the book is taken up with a lengthy description of the sisters first venture up the Nile and details their tribulations with their hired 'dragoman'. I have found myself caring less and less, and if it doesn't get interesting and onto the nitty-gritty of manuscript discovery p r e t t y soon, I shall stamp my tiny foot in annoyance. The 'stipend' has seen me buy a copy of Charles Puskas Jr's The Letters of Paul: An Introduction, a pretty useful vade mecum for the basic facts on the epistles - always useful - as well as a somewhat less useful (but nontheless appealing) Penguin Classics copy of The Desert Fathers : Sayings of the Early Christian Monks compiled and translated by Benedicta Ward, who is a reader at Oxford, as well as a religious. I must admit that I was attracted as much by the cover as by the subject matter itself - a medieval illustration from the Bedford Book of Hours, depicting a 'hippocentaur' (half man, half horse, but with huge ibex-style horns on its head), a monster that does not seem to make an appearance in the book of medieval grotesques and monsters that I purchased the other week.

The desert fathers were renowned for their simple, solitary and austere lifestyles, their simple faith, lack of scholastic learning and joyful acceptance of life. One of the entries tells the story of the hermit-monk Macarius, who, on discovering a thief loading his few possessions onto a donkey, assisted the burglar to load up the rest saying to himself all the while that he brought nothing into the world, the Lord provided, and now its time to relinquish it all. Hmmm. Not sure I'd be so helpful. Still, the book is going to provide some short but interesting bedtime insights. A few lines is all I can seem to manage at the moment before my eyes shut!

Cosmological Schemata......and Book Mysteries

Strangely, I received an email from Amazon yesterday asking me to rate my transaction 'Sisters of Sinai'......as I had not received anything from them and was unsure as to the status of my order (see earlier post), I immediately went online and noted that that order appeared to be dead. Somewhat irritated, I logged on to The Book Depository and promptly ordered a copy from them. Hopefully it will arrive before too long - the BD are usually pretty good. Still, I originally ordered it from the BD through the agency of Amazon at £14.39: I am paying £15.64 to get it direct from the BD! If I had known that I would have had to wait, I would have gone directly to the BD in the first place!!! And will do in the future.

Whilst we were away in Venice, I managed to miss a programme on the BBC called 'The Narnia Code'. The other night, I caught up with it on BBC iPlayer (what a useful asset that is!) Whilst the programme was, in effect, a huge plug for Dr Michael Ward's book 'Planet Narnia' (not that I have a problem with that - it's wonderful when someone's PhD research is truly commercially viable), it laid out the intriguing notion that the seven chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis contained symbolism found within medieval cosmological theory. Apparently the idea came to Dr Ward late one night when he was reading one of Lewis's poems containing a couple of lines that referred to the imagined attributes of Jupiter, and it immediately struck him that those lines summed up, in a nutshell, the plot of 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe'.

Excited by his insight, he examined the qualities of the other members of the medieval cosmic hierarchy - the sun, the moon, mercury, venus, mars and saturn - and discovered that the writing contained in the other six Narnia books was indeed richly symbolic of those heavenly bodies. It was all a bit of a tease though: we found out that, for example, 'The Voyage of the Dawn Treader' alluded to 'Sol' - the sun, with its imagery of dawns, dragons and the eastern horizon, and that 'The Silver Chair', where the prince is thought to be a lunatic, is the 'Luna' or 'moon book'. 'Prince Caspian', with its themes of war, is the 'Mars book', who was also imagined to be the deity connected with woods and forests, hence the emphasis on the tree symbolism in that volume. I would have been fascinated to find out more and it was hinted that the theory was fully extrapolated....in the book! Grrr! Something else I'll just have to buy.....

It did occur to me, as it obviously did to the makers of the programme, that Holst's 'Planet' suite (used as a soundtrack) fits quite nicely alongside Dr Ward's theory, but maybe that, too, is tackled in the book.

**update: received an email from the Book Depository telling me that my order couldn't be fulfilled and so they were refunding my money. So why in Sam Hill wasn't the book flagged up as 'out-of-stock' when I placed my order? Oooooh!!!**

Sisters of Sinai

Recently I've been quite good with online purchases, that is, I've been staying away from Amazon and the like* and restricting my purchases to second-hand/charity shops. However, I had to make an exception today when I read about a newly published book called 'Sisters of Sinai' by Janet Soskice. It is right up my street: travel, preservation of knowledge, biblical and female scholarship combined. The Random House review reads:

'Sisters of Sinai tells an extraordinary tale of nineteenth century exploration; how two Scottish sisters made one of the most important ancient manuscript finds of the age. Hidden in a cupboard beneath the monastic library at St Catherine’s in the Sinai desert the twins discovered what looked like a palimpsest: one text written over another.It was Agnes who recognized the obscured text for what it was – one of the earliest copies of the Gospels written in ancient Syriac.Once they had overcome the stubborn reluctance of Cambridge scholars to authenticate the find and had lead an expedition of quarrelsome academics back to Sinai to copy it, Agnes and Margaret –in middle years and neither with any university qualifications – embarked on a life of demanding scholarship and bold travel.In this enthralling book, Janet Soskice takes the reader on an astonishing journey from the Ayreshire of the sisters’ childhood to the lost treasure trove of the Cairo genizah.We trace the footsteps of the intrepid pair as they voyage to Egypt, Sinai and beyond, Murray’s guide book in hand coping with camels, unscrupulous dragomen, and unpredictable welcomes.We enter the excitement and mystery of the Gospel origins at a time when Christianity was under attack in Europe.Crucially this is the story of two remarkable women who, as widows, were undeterred in their spirit of adventure and who overcame insuperable odds to become world class scholars with a place in history.'

The author is Reader in Philosophical Theology at Jesus College, Cambridge.

I await my copy with great eagerness.

*interestingly enough, once again it was cheaper to get this volume from The Book Depository through Amazon, rather than from The Book Depository direct.

HT Evangelical Textual Criticism