I just barely made it this week! I finished this dude a few minutes ago. It's a textbook - you know, big pages, small type - but it reads well, straight-forward. I was anticipating more headwind. There's enough voice to sound personal, but not so much to sound conversational. Ehrman seems not only to love this subject but to love writing about it - for which I'm very thankful; there's no way I would have finished otherwise.
My dad suggested this as a starter, instead of Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament, which appears to be more of a thesis and less of an introduction to the field. I'd still like to read Who Wrote at some point, because I've heard that it's fun and that Mack is obsessed with "Q!" True?
- Doesn't Ehrman have a reputation for being in-your-face-anti-fundamentalist? Maybe that's more of a classroom personality, or perhaps that comes through more strongly in his other books. In any case I didn't pick-up on that in this textbook. Certainly he prods the exalted view of Scripture, and he picks on modern day "family values" and "end-times preachers" in a couple of places, but conservative protestants aren't his only targets. Here and there he flashes a sardonic smile at various writers and groups, ancient and modern. Only the whole, however, he writes respectfully of religious belief - Christian, Jewish, Greco-Roman - and over and over he stresses that he's not writing from a religious (or anti-religious) perspective; he's working as a historian, with specific historical methods, to study historical artifacts. He stresses that so so often...maybe he's responding to his reputation, or trying to rein-in his own antagonistic streak, or just asking students to chill-out when he says that Quirinius was not the governor of Syria when Jesus was born.
- This textbook has a good balance of show and tell. Ehrman is as concerned with demonstrating various methods for studying and reading ancient texts as he is with his explaining his and others' conclusions.
- He has these great little break-out text boxes, "Another Glimpse into the Past." I know the book is long enough for him already, he says so in the preface, but I wish he could do another set of break-out boxes, "The History of Interpretation," or "Ancient Methods of Interpretation," or "Early Christians Reading the Books of the New Testament," or something like that. We get little crumbs, like, he mentions that Marcion loved certain parts of Paul, the Gnostics enjoyed complicated allegorical interpretations, the authors of Matthew and Luke may have understood their common sources in different ways, John and Thomas may have punted away the apocalyptic sayings, pseudonymous authors re-created (or didn't) their forerunners, Polycarp quoted every new testament author in a single letter to Philippi (not really). I would have enjoyed more.
- Where's the chapter on the canonization process? The whole idea of the new testament? Again I think he just ran out of pages. Maybe just a quick chapter at the end? An appendix? He focuses on the creation and context of each book in the New Testament, and he teases us with clues about how they eventually ended up bound together, but that's all we get.
- He comments occasionally that the New Testament, as a unit, an entity, creates its own context, it's own pathways of understanding, it's own interpretive pressure. That's why it's important to take time to look at each book "on it's own terms," so to speak, as well as in broad, non-canonical contexts (e.g. Jewish history, or Greek literature, or Roman politics). I'd love to hear more about how the formation of the New Testament influenced the interpretation of its texts, and/or vice versa - how the interpretation of its texts influenced the formation of the New Testament.
- I've been thinking...Christians, conservative and liberal, maybe we're all missing out on the inspirational power of textual "variations" or "discrepancies." Like, here's an example I think about sometimes: in 1 Samuel, when Jesse presents his sons to Samuel, David is the 8th son, but in 1 Chronicles, David's genealogy lists him as the 7th son. A conservative might immediately look around for a reconciling explanation, and a liberal might immediately look for the different traditions informing Samuel and Chronicles. That's all cool, and I usually take the "liberal" route, but can't we just hang out and enjoy the variation, too? As a religious reader, as someone seeking inspiration from a sacred text, why can't I be inspired by the difference itself? What's the "spiritual meaning" of David, the 8th son, in the Samuel story? What's the "spiritual meaning" of David, the 7th son in the Chronicles genealogy? And what's the "spiritual meaning" of the variation between the two? Is that kind-of crazy?
- Anywho, this is a good read, for everyone, I think. Even if you already know you won't agree with most of his conclusions, you might enjoy the historical details and fascinating cultural back-story. This would be a perfect book to read in a month - there are 30 chapters, 10-20 pages each, one chapter a day. Peace!
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