Old Books New Year

  2019 is here, and the 2018 Jesus read-a-thon continues! For my Ruah saint-report, due next month, I picked Origen, without knowing much about him other than he castrated himself. I figured that meant he was sufficiently crazy. Turns out he might be the ultimate Jesus read-a-thon-er! What I've seen so far - I'm slowly winding through Hans Balthasar's thematic anthology - is a relentless pursuit of Jesus in every nook and cranny of the Bible and to some extent, of philosophy. Origen is convinced that the Christ is Logos is Bible is Wisdom. It's not just that each "jot and tittle" of the scriptures prefigures or is connected to Jesus, it's that their truest meaning is Christ. Somehow, every word and phrase is Christ. Origen's job is to show us how that works.

   I read a couple of books for background.

Manual of Patrology - Rev Bernard Schmid, O.S.B., translated "by a Benedictine"

   I'm not sure I've read anything like this before, except maybe an old Encyclopedia of Basketball I recently gave away. First Schmid lays out some guidelines for who qualifies as a "Father" and who doesn't, how and when the Fathers speak for the Church, and how to safely use or rely on the Fathers. Then he summarizes the life, work, and relevance of about 100 kinda crazy dudes. Not all are "Fathers," some aren't as theologically reliable, so they're called "ecclesiastical writers," and some have been officially upgraded to "doctors" by the church.
   This is a beautiful old book by the way, printed in 1903, in great condition. It smells wonderful.

A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible - Robert Grant

   It lives up to its title. Accessible and enjoyable. A swift "epoch" style history (except for the Alexandrian and Antiochene chapters, all the chapters define and describe intellectual time periods), lightly peppered with quotations and examples. Perhaps the most helpful new word for me was "typological" - usually referring to the way Christians see Hebrew characters or events as "types" of Christ or the crucifixion-resurrection story. Origen was all about this, as was the early church in general, but somehow he took it much further than many people felt comfortable with. I'm still trying to understand that. It's like a Borges story - I'm cool with the "idea" of a library, or a lottery, or an author - but when Borges lets these ideas run free, they end up in some wild, interesting, and sometimes disturbing places.

The Diatessaron - Tatian, translated from Arabic by Rev Hope Hogg

   I heard this described as a "gospel harmony," so I expected a heavily edited gospel based on the four gospels, like something you might see in a bookstore today. Instead it felt more like layering the gospels on top of each other, or weaving them together. Tatian doesn't seem concerned to weed out all duplications or discrepancies. His running editorial question seems to be, how can the monologues in the Gospel of John best fit into the outline of the synoptics?

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words - Randall Munroe

   My brother gave this to me a while back, and I'd only every read a little bit here and there. I needed something different. I don't keep up with Monroe's comic strip "xkcd," but his book What If? is one of the most entertaining books I've ever read. Thing Explainer is a big tall book, filled with Munroe's wonderfully inviting drawings of planes and planets and machines and stuff (always with a few little stick figures doing funny things). The catch is: he has to explain the pictures using the 1000 most commonly used English words. So, for example, he can't say "one thousand," he has to say "ten hundred." Or he can't say "microwave," so he says "food heating radio box." It's fun.