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.

Oratio Obliqua

Am scratching about for something interesting to take my fancy. I finished Robin Wasserman's Skinned, and although it was tolerably good, it didn't really live up to the promise of the initial few chapters. The characters' behaviour became increasingly stereotypical, and the excesses of angst betrayed its teen-fiction standing. My twelve-year old daughter liked it, though whether well enough to purchase the upcoming sequel remains to be seen.

Daughter #2, ransacking the Sunday car-boot-sale stalls, happened upon a 2-volume edition of F.W.Farrar's The Life and Work of St Paul (1879), which she bought for a mere £3. I was delighted, as I am a fan of his quasi-whimsical, late-Victorian (but very scholarly and insightful), immensely readable ponderings. It was in fairly good condition, but sadly someone had seen fit to plunder it for its coloured maps. Shame, but the prose is as enthralling as ever, if somewhat fanciful.

'It is clear, from the education provided for Paul by his parents, that they could little indeed have conjectured how absolutely their son would be reduced to depend on a toil so miserable and so unremunerative. But though we see how much he felt the burden of the wretched labour....while he plaited the black, strong-scented goat's hair, he might be soaring in thought to the inmost heaven, or holding high converse with Apollos or Aquila, with Luke or Timothy, on the loftiest themes which can engage the mind of man.'

This week she arrived home with two rather attractive 1895 volumes of Demosthenes Orations - the orators are not really currently my cup of tea, but there's no denying the shabby handsomeness of the books (although, sadly, Volume 1 is missing). The Husband is still engrossed in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere: it's lasted him for quite some time, having started it on the outward plane journey of our holiday some 3 weeks ago. For someone who spent many a year NOT reading, he's certainly getting some good stuff under his belt now, although he does tend to get what I borrow/buy for him (I'm his personal book-shopper) so it's not really a balanced reading programme at all. I noted not long ago that the books I choose for him tend to be a bit predictable - all in the same vein: NG's Anansi Boys, American Purgatorio by John Haskell, Dogwalking by Arthur Bradford, You Shall know Our Velocity by Dave Eggars, Steven Sherrill's The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club.....all a bit weird and with a hint of sadness/madness. We were both, however, reduced to wonder by the amazing tales in David Eagleman's Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlife.

Perhaps it's time to diversify more....

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!