Stops and Starts

Fanning's book Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek arrived and, as usual, I am less than impressed by what the academic press gives you for circa £60. It has one of those glued spines that don't open flat properly and tend to shed their pages after a few goes. I had enough of those during my undergrad days: the overpriced Bristol Classical Texts, with the nasty photocopy quality print.....Still, they have a captive audience, I guess!

The good old Oxfam bookshop turned up a diamond this afternoon: Driver's 1907 Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (7th edition), a mere £3.49 and a handsome volume at that. In fact, strangely enough, there were two practically identical copies of it, the other had a shelf-mark in something like Tippex on the spine but less pencil underlining of the text (I don't mind pencil so I picked the un-Tippexed one). It looks right at home next to Farrar's Life and Works of St Paul (2 vols) and is a testament to the sort of scholarship that we just don't see anymore, a scholarship that lives within its subject and understands it completely. Truly awesome!

I've given up on Everett's Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: it was just such a strange mish-mash. I've been reading Magnus Zetterholm's Approaches to Paul, an excellent overview of Pauline scholarship and interesting enough to make a couple of longish train journeys go quite quickly. It touches on subjects that I have a vague understanding of, but fills in the details of how Kasemann differs from Bultmann, and how Bornkamm differs from both etc. etc. And I have read about half of it in one day, so that's a recommendation in itself.