The Idiot and a Potentially Evil (Buying) Eye

The close of one of my thesis chapters means the opening of another: another text to pull apart and examine with an eye on the grammatical issues that constitute my PhD. One of the comments that my supervisor made was that I 'didn't seem to use many commentaries'. Well, that's true, because (a) I wanted the ideas that came out of my writing to be mine and not some rewarmed opinions of another and (b) most of the ones I have to hand are quite elderly and (literally) fusty. I am quite pernickety when it comes to commentaries - I have to be, as it MUST nod towards the Greek text. Some are much better than others: the old International Critical Commentary series is superb, and I have been lucky enough to pick up a number of these from my local theological second-hand bookshop (The Barbican Bookshop in York).
They do look rather wonderful and serious on the bookshelf (uniformly dark green with gold titles) and are a tribute to the 'steeped-in-learning scholarship' of the late 19th/early 20th century. I also have Bishop Lightfoot's 19th century commentaries on the Pauline epistles - it's a real pity he didn't complete the set - which are a bedrock of any serious textual work, often referred back to in the ICC books. I've borrowed a few from the uni. library too. I don't have much time for the overtly devotional commentaries whose only intent is to bedazzle the faithful with praising and the party-line (mostly American, evangelical and conservative) without bothering to pick up on the serious historical and critical issues......let's be frank, PROBLEMS, belittering the texts.

Confronted by the need to update my academic wardrobe, er, bookshelf, I bit the bullet and bought the volumes in the New International Commentary on the New Testament that deal with the 'authentic' Pauline epistles. They cost a fair bit, but now my commentary work has been dragged into the late 1990's rather than the 1890's, and in truth, that's what my bursary money is for. They are the product of some serious scholarship and although you do glimpse the occasional flash of devotional petticoat, the detailed attention to the Greek text is exemplary.
Trouble is, I am running out of shelf-space - again! I may have to sell some of my old Classics stuff.

Tackling a new epistle is rather daunting, so I was going to spend a week boning up on the Corinthian background (revisiting some stuff tackled in my final undergrad year), but on reading introductory material to 2 Corinthians, I realise that this is going to be no walk in the park: the Greek text looks like a bag of spanners, like someone has dropped a stack of papers on the way to the Xerox, picked them up and duplicated them without regard for order or coherence.
Oh dear! I've certainly got my work cut out!

The Husband is s-l-o-w-l-y making his way through the latest Bill Bryson (he can't seem to stay awake for more than two pages per night). I've just finished Beryl Bainbridge's According to Queeney, a fictional account of the relationship between Samuel Johnson (he of the dictionary) and his 'patrons' the Thrale family, as recounted by the oldest daughter Hester (or Queeney as she is known to differentiate her from her mother). I really enjoyed it and will keep an eye out for more Bainbridges in the charity shops.
I've moved onto Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, partly because Daughter #1 recommended The Idiot to me (although I think she's stopped reading it now for some reason). Serious Russian literature is a bit of a lacuna for me, although I did actually read War and Peace once (meandering and quite dull, I seem to remember) and 'enjoyed' Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (I didn't actually get that the former was a satire on Communism). I am quite surprised at how easy C & P is to read - kudos to the translator - but sometimes I find the narrative arc of older literature unsatisfying and I end up scratching my head as to what's supposed to have happened. Or stop caring if it's too digressive. We'll see.

However, the point of this post was that I bought the Bainbridge book as a result of seeing a documentary on her fascinating and eccentric life: she had died just a week or so before. Daughter #1 was very impressed by the job the translator (Alan Myers) had done on The Idiot (I was looking out for a C & P by him), but I found myself reading his obituary in the papers within the same week.
More spookily, I ordered, through AbeBooks, a 2-volume set of Margaret Thrall's ('magisterial') commentary on 2 Corinthians and.......no sooner had I submitted my order than I read on a theological website that she had just died! Perhaps I should lay off buying stuff for a while!

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!**

The (damp) Homilies of John Chrysostom

Spotted two 'Library of the Fathers' volumes of John Chrysostom's homilies (6 & 7; Romans and Galatians & Ephesians) in the Barbican Bookshop the other day. I was initially quite interested, but it was only when I started reading Douglas Moo's NICNT commentary on Romans, and saw that he notes Chrysostom's preference in 5:1 for the hortatory subjunctive ἔχωμεν ('let us have') over the present active indicative ἔχομεν ('we have') that I thought Oooh! Textual commentary! So of course I went back this morning and purchased the two books, invoking my 15% theological student-card privileges. I wonder where the other volumes of the series have gone? The volume on Romans is in a particularly delapidated condition and needs attention to the spine (my last university's remedy was a nice thick piece of electrical tape!), and both smell somewhat damp, so I'll need to dry them out v-e-r-y slowly and thoroughly. I'm gradually accumulating a good selection of patrologia, including two of the Eerdmans Ante-Nicene Fathers series (volumes 1 & 2; Justin Martyr & Irenaeus and Hermas, Tatian, Athenagorus, Theophilus & Clement of Alexandria respectively) and the Loeb Ehrman 2 volume 'Apostolic Fathers'. But my dream-buy, only achievable with lottery-funding would be a complete set of the Eerdmans (both Ante-Nicene and Nicene) from the local St Paul's bookshop. If I get doctoral funding this year.....(hah!)*sigh* One can dream. Otherwise I'll just have to stick to scuffling around 2nd hand bookshops and charity shops for random opportune buys. Though actually, it's probably more fun and better for the soul to do it this way.

A Little Englishman's Greek New Testament

Re-reading F.W.Farrar's excellent (and slightly gossipy) 'Lives of the Fathers' (Church fathers, that is -written in 1889), I came across a reference to his slightly earlier work 'The Early Days of Christianity' written 1884. "Hmmm...." I thought.

Now I have a problem (actually, several problems) in that if I find an author that I enjoy, I hanker after possessing all that author's corpus. It happened with Thomas Hardy. It happened with Nikos Kazantzakis. If it weren't for the fact that there are so damn many of them, I dare say that it would happen with the Loeb Classical Texts too. As I was in town with daughter no3 on Saturday, I bargained with her that if I accompanied her to various music/clothes shops, she might indulge her ma by stopping off at the very excellent Barbican Bookshop on our way home. I love that shop...the smell of old books, damp, mildew whatever....the rickety stairs....the antiquarian section, locked away behind old glazed doors...the sense that there are treasures to be found and bargains to be had. And indeed there were! On the 'Early Church History Shelf' was a copy of Farrar's 1884 volume, for a mere £3!!! Furthermore, in the Greek and Hebrew section my eye fell on 'The Englishman's Greek New Testament', a little 6x4 pocket volume from 1896 (the 3rd edition) that manages to pack onto each page the Greek text complete with an interlinear literal English rendering and, packed around the margins the 1611 Authorised Version. It is indeed a thing of wonder and beauty, but the text is very, very small indeed. Even with my new spectacles, eyestrain sets in within minutes!