On "La Brava" by Elmore Leonard ****

This one took a bit longer to get into than the previous works I've read of Leonard's. The plot doesn't really get ticking till halfway through. Instead, Leonard spends a good deal of space introducing us to the characters involved. There's Joseph La Brava, the cameraman and ex-government agent. There's his friend Maurice. There's some woman named Jean Shaw, a former actress. And then there's this other plot going on, with Richard Nobles and a guy named Cundo. They're the seeming crooks in this narrative, but it's hard to know exactly what their angle is in terms of what they're plotting other than some small-time bad stuff.

Meanwhile, La Brava finds himself being pulled into Jean Shaw's life--romantically--in part because he was a big fan of hers as a teen, and to be involved with a movie star, even one fifteen or twenty years his senior, is a real turn-on, like being in her movies themselves. But clearly, Maurice, an old friend of hers, has the hots for her too, though she generally just rebuts his advances while taking advantage of his friendship.

About halfway through the book, the plot with the crooks begins to converge, and we learn that things aren't quite what they seem, even as real life begins to converge more and more with Shaw's past films, as the novel becomes almost metafictional. What counts as real? What counts as acting? The book grows hard to put down at that point, until the final, somewhat emotionally unsatisfying close. 

On "Christianity at the Crossroads" by Michael Kruger ****

This is a basic introduction to Christianity in the second century. As such, it's a good summary of the various issues that the second century presents for scholars to explore, written for lay people. I found the early parts a bit basic, retreading much that I've read elsewhere, covering the second-century society and culture, the basic practices and possible government forms, the manner of worship and meeting, and so on.

In chapter 4--about halfway through the book--is where Kruger really starts to get down to an argument that he explores more fully in another book: namely, he discusses how diverse the second century was in terms of belief and practice (as per much modern scholarship, based around Walter Bauer's thesis that there wasn't really any such thing as a unitary Christianity early on). Kruger doesn't believe that, so after exploring the differing non-mainstream Christian groups, he proceeds in chapter 5 to show how there actually was an orthodox Christian faith all the way back in the second century, one that stemmed from the first century. He argues this primarily by discussing "the rule of faith"--that is, the basic tenets that made Christians, in fact, Christians, into which the non-mainstream did not fit: the idea that Jesus Christ came in the flesh, died, and rose the third day; that he was God in the flesh; and so on.

Chapters 6 and 7 are where this book really shine, which is not surprising, given that the chapters cover topics that Kruger specializes in and has written several other works on: namely, the canonization of the scripture and the literary culture of the early church. Kruger goes into more detail on these subjects elsewhere, but these two chapters seem a very good and detailed summary of the issues and are what make this book worth the time spent reading it, even beyond just the basic introduction.

On "Creating the Canon" by Benjamin F. Laird *****

 

This is one of the best books on questions related to the biblical canon that I've read. Laird managed to find new angles and new ways at looking at what is a very well-rehearsed subject. He covers, of course, a lot of the standard territory, but to each subject he brings a degree of fresh thinking and wide-ranging discussion.

How were the New Testament books composed? Were the people credited with them really the authors? Laird brings up, of course, the degree to which authors relied on secretaries. Whether you were literate or not (and most people were not literate at the time), you might well have a person or persons who wrote on your behalf. One of the difficulties, of course, with much of the language in the New Testament is, of course, the fact that sometimes a given author might seem to be writing in a way that he hasn't written in earlier circumstances. This, of course, explains why that is possible. But it wasn't just secretaries who might have an influence on a work. There was the process of “publication.” Before a work was released into the world, it was often, even as it would be today, commented on by numerous others—friends and associates. It might, in other words, have various renditions, privately distributed. Once it was ready for dissemination, the secretary might make more than one copy: there might be a copy to the recipient, and a copy kept by the author. There might also be multiple copies, if multiple recipients, and sometimes these copies might differ according to the recipient. So it's possible, for example, that Paul created a version of a given letter for general reception, one for people specifically in a given city, and one for himself. Thus, we would have multiple versions of a letter floating around (for example, you might end up with Romans with and without chapter 16), but only one that was really intended for general publication. Still, that means there isn't really a single original. Once something was in publication/distribution, however, it was next to impossible to pull it back. It's now public, being copied from one recipient to another. But such intricacies explain both how most of our New Testament writings match so well against surviving manuscripts but also why there might be occasional significant variations—and it does so in a way that doesn't require that some later person has “messed” with the text.

Laird looks at also when canonization could have happened, per various other people's claims, denoting how no single council really determined the canon. Very interestingly, he posits that Marcion may not have “shortened” the Bible (rejecting certain letters of Paul) but may have only had access to a ten-letter version of Paul's writings. This idea seems a bit dubious to me, given when Marcion was writing (namely, at at a point when the fuller collection and other New Testament writings should have been available) and the conclusions Laird later reaches, but nevertheless it's an interesting thought.

After reviewing early citations to the books of the New Testament, Laird discusses how the New Testament likely circulated—namely, not as a single book but as a collection of distinct collections. Bookmaking just wasn't of the sort that you could it all twenty-seven works into a single volume. So generally, there were collections of various sorts, the most popular being the Gospels, Paul's letters (in ten, thirteen, and fourteen letter versions), Acts (sometimes with the General Epistles), the General Epistles, and Revelation. With regard to Paul's letters, the initial ten may have been published first, then later the others were added—thus, you have versions with and without the pastoral letters and with and without Hebrews. This doesn't require someone else write said books in Paul's name. It may be that Paul, or an associate, republished the collection with the additions (though of course such multiple publications leave open the possibility that someone wrote in Paul's name and added those works; Laird notes that no early writers doubted the authenticity of the pastorals). Nevertheless, what Laird shows is that rather than there being twenty-seven books circulating separately and gradually gaining status as canon, there were discrete collections that came to be considered canon.

A final section looks at the importance of authorship with regard to what was to be considered canonical. Laird looks at various theories regarding how the canon could come to be and could come to be (mostly) fixed (he acknowledges that actually the canon does differ across Christianity). He shows the shortcomings of arguments that dismiss the centrality of authorship—that the canon is just somehow evident, that the church decided it, that God inspired it, and so on. In the end, the early church believed these were the works written by the apostles and their associates and that's why they became canon. Authorship mattered, even if the works were inspired or the church decided; other “inspired” writings didn't make it. The point was that these were the witnesses God sent forth; that is what the church believed, and that is how the canon became fixed.

On “For Something to Do” by Elmore Leonard (4943 words) ***

Here's a short story that seems somewhat typical of Leonard's work: the violence, the tough guy focus, the criminal element. Even the fact that this is set in rural Michigan might be seen as emblematic of Leonard's work—bringing together a common setting (Michigan) and the western elements of his early work. Evan has married his sweetheart. The two are expecting guests, but they hope, strangely, that the guests won't show: in fact, they'd be okay with the guests getting in an accident or something else dreadful. The reason soon becomes clear why. Cal (a relative) and Ray (a former boyfriend) are tough guys here to spend time with Evan's wife and not too keen on seeing her poor horse farmer husband. Leonard's work probably works better over a larger page count, where the plots can unfurl in unpredictable complexity. Here, as seems inevitable in so much Leonard fiction, a fight ensues, and we see the parties come to a head, the situation “resolved,” though the degree to which that resolution is permanent, I have to wonder, would be questionable outside the tidy resolution of the story. You can read it here at Harper's Magazine.

On "City Primeval" by Elmore Leonard ****

The subtitle of this work is "High Noon in Detroit," which essentially sums up this cop versus robber (or really, killer) novel. Raymond Cruz works in the homocide division of the Detroit Police Department. Clement robs the occasional person and shoots the occasional person for fun.

Clement currently is setting up a scam with an Albanian, but he's interrupted by a lousy driver. His reaction: Shoot the dumb driver--and his passenger. The driver turns out to be a judge. Only, the judge was crooked and not well liked. So you figure maybe folks wouldn't care too much, maybe? But the police go after the killer like any other.

In a whodunit, we'd be wondering, well, who done it? In this work, we know who's done it from the first chapter. In many another book, we might know who done it, but we'd be walking with the police as they figure that out. Neither is true here. The police know pretty quickly the killer. The issue is that the killer is good at snaking out of any charge that is given to him, so the book is mostly about gathering evidence and also about setting Clement up so that he can't slink away.

And that's where Raymond comes in. In a central scene in the novel, the two protagonists square off, and they talk about how if this were the Old West, they'd have a duel. And that's really what this becomes: the wits of one man against another until only one is left. (Without giving much away, I'll say that in a way, the book ends twice. I prefer the first ending, but I think Leonard felt a need to bring it back to that faceoff, so we get a tag that seems unnecessary and less fitting to the circumstances.)

On “52 Pickup” by Elmore Leonard ****

This is the first crime thriller I've read by Leonard, though of course I've seen several movies based on his work, movies, which I've read, often just lift his dialogue whole. Indeed, this work is quite cinematic: built in scenes, around people and events, not a lot of summary or exposition. As with the two westerns I've read by Leonard, this was a page turner, thrilling pretty much from about five pages in until the very end.

So Mitchell is the owner of a car parts manufacturer, a man who for a brief period uncharacteristically ends up having an affair with a woman one year older than his daughter. Three neerdowells decide that Mitchell is the perfect object of an extortion scheme. You see, the gal he's been carrying on with, she was into adult modeling and, as such, has links to a shady underworld. The three guys hatch a plan, based on photographs they've gotten of the couple together, to insist that Mitchell pay them $100k or the info gets leaked to the press, the family, the company, whatever works to make his life dreadful.

Mitchell, though, is a tough nut, and he's not sure he's ready simply to pay up. He doesn't want to go to the police, either, because things could get messy. He doesn't want to put his family through all that. When he doesn't comply, on time, the three crooks murder the girl and arrange things so that the crime can be easily pinned on Mitchell. Now they want $100k every year. Mitchell says he'll think about it and continues along his usual way, delaying and generally being cool to their attempts to intimidate him. This involves, for example, coming clean with his wife, and it evenually involves him turning the three crooks against one another through various nefarious means so that in essence they do the work of solving the problem for him.

The plot thrills, and the characters are well drawn, and the dialogue is fresh. What's not to like? I was ready to hand this five stars, but the ending was a letdown. The story, I suppose, is over, but there are all kinds of ramifications to what Mitchell has done. He does so much, supposedly, to save his family, but in the process, his wife suffers terrible consequences; he doesn't go to the police, but at some point not going to the police seems more a plot point than mere logic, and in the end, the police will be involved, and how exactly is Mitchell going to come clean? He has a lot of great plans, but it's obvious the crooks know where he lives and have access to his wife and family. They're capable of killing—or at least Mitchell actually believes they are—so why would he not safeguard them, send them away, or whatever? It's these sort of issues that pulled me away from genre fiction when younger, and while I can enjoy thrills, the lack of emotional link to the characters and their feelings makes for a less compelling work.

On "Hombre" by Elmore Leonard *****

Another fine western by Mr. Leonard. This one, apparently, is the only novel that Leonard wrote in the first person, but he uses the voice effectively if unironically. It's a taut thriller from start to finish. The story involves a man who is actually called Tres Hombres at one point, because he manages to shoot as many as it would take three men to shoot. In typical western fashion, that is our book's superhero—a man raised by Indians who sympathizes with them and lives half on the edge of civilization.

Our narrator is a young man who has just lost his job with a wagon company, the railroads having taken most of the business. But there is a need for a wagon on his last day on the job, and one of those passengers needing a ride is a young gal who has been held captive by Indians for a month and is now free and wanting to get home. Other passengers include Russell, the aforementioned hero, and a rich man and his wife. It's the rich man who agrees to pay for the journey, so the young man's boss agrees to allow use of a wagon to carry them, to the young man's chagrin, as he wanted to drive (something he hadn't done before). But the good thing is that this gives opportunity for the young man to sit in the carriage with the young gal. Also along for the ride is a military man readying for marriage and a new job, but though he's bought a ticket, he's bucked out of his seat by a bully named Braden, who shows up at the last minute.

The rich man insists that they take a seldom-used shortcut since he's paying for the journey. But this off-road experience proves to be as harrowing as one might expect. And then, that's where things get really interesting. Spoilers follow.

The reason the main road was not a good option, it turns out, is that the rich man is transporting stolen goods, money he's stolen as a federal Indian agent, allowing the Indians for whom the money was designated to starve. The main road is more likely to be dangerous in terms of thieves (or, one might also assume, law enforcement). As such, it takes the thieves, who actually were aware of the rich man's bounty, extra time to catch up, word being sent to them by Braden, who it turns out is part of the party. Once they circle the wagon, they take the bag of money and the rich guy's wife (for insurance) and leave the party to die.

Except that things don't work out that way. Russell, as would be expected, comes to the rescue, recovering the money and leading the party out of the area. The wife, though, is still a hostage, and the thieves are keen on getting their loot. Alas, a man who steals from Indians is not to be trusted and certainly has no honor when it comes to either his wife or the others in his party. Is he worth saving, after he himself steals the money (again) and leaves the party for dead and then finds himself in trouble? Some people seem to think so; others not so much. When it's at the cost of lives, who gets grace and who does not? Tragedy unfolds.

On “Being Cool” by Charles J. Rzepka ***

This is a critical study of the work of Elmore Leonard, and a pretty good one at that. Though a devoted reader to Leonard's work, Rzepka doesn't idolize Leonard the way the biographer of Get Dutch does. Readers get close readings of several works and a bit of biography as well. The biographical sections come in mostly near the start of the book, but Rzepka's main focus is in the title: What makes Leonard's characters “cool.” By “cool,” we're not talking what makes them great characters so much as “cool,” as in collected. Leonard, as such, has characters who are cool and others who are not. The “cool” characters are those who maintain grace under fire, who handle stress well, who don't get unnerved. Leonard's work is often violent, but the violence is usually a result of characters losing their cool, characters who don't maintain ease in the face of stress.

One of the most interesting readings Rzepka engages in is regarding Leonard's form of narration, which is almost always omniscient, or rather, third-person limited but wherein he travels to the different limited vision of various characters. As such, Leonard, as author, disappears. This is something that didn't happen as much in his early fiction. There, you'd find the author sometimes intruding with an adverb or a description that was clearly that of a narrator or author, not something coming from within some character's head, but in time, Leonard moved himself further and further into the shadows so that what we have in his fiction is simply characters perceptions. Several close readings over time demonstrate this.

On “The Holy Land” by George W. Knight ***

I've had this pictorial guide on my shelf for probably close to a decade now, a gift from someone at church. It's made to be picked up, read a bit, and put down. But I finally decided to do more than that, to actually read it from start to finish. When I say that it's made to be picked up and put down, what I mean is that it's structured around various sites, prolific with photographs, and somewhat interesting in the short term. But that was precisely the reason I never read it in full. There is not a through-line, so anything but short reading into the book doesn't tend to hold one's focus. The book is, in essence, set up like an Insight Guide, one of those marvelously illustrated travel guides to a region, full of info and pictures, but really intended for you to read about sites of interest rather than to read it from start to finish. There wasn't much to be gained from the book in terms of new information; it was interesting, I suppose, on the level of thinking about events spatially and regionally: this is the area where X and Y and Z happened. Sometimes, it was enlightening that way, making one realize that certain events shared a place. For what it is, however, within its genre, it's a great book, wonderful to look at and drop into occasionally—which is why I've kept it on the shelf.

On “Get Dutch” by Paul Challen ***

I feel like I chose the wrong introduction to Elmore Leonard, a writer whose books have been turned into several movies I've liked and who I've until now read just one book by, a very good western. I was looking for one biography and one critical study. I chose this biography because it is the most recent (the other was written a decade earlier); I chose a particular critical study also because it is the most recent, but it is limited in scope. I stayed away from the Twayne series book on Leonard, because the series seems so formulaic and basic, even as I'm now thinking the one in the series may actually have been more in line with what I wanted—a true critical introduction.

Challen's book is the work of a fan. Not being an aficianado of Leonard's, other than the impression he's worn on me via film and the one book, I actually found myself a bit turned off by the work. You can sell a subject too hard, and that's how I felt here. I'm not particularly keen on violence, but there's supposed to be lots in Leonard (so this book makes clear, with gusto). So why am I reading more by him? Because I was impressed by the one book.

As a fan, Challen doesn't engage much in actual critical analysis. More often, the work talks about the various books and how Leonard writes. Challen did a lot of interviews with people who knew Leonard, many of whom are also fans. So there's lots of gushing about how great Leonard is as a person and as a writer. And I guess that was what Challen aimed for—nothing negative or even anything that might be seen as such. This is not a warts and all biography.

So what did I learn about the writer? He comes from a middle-class background; his father worked in corporate America, and Leonard sort of followed in that vein, becoming a copywriter for an ad agency. That was his day job. Most of his life was spent in Detroit. His off-time job was writing, at which he worked hard. He started at a time when the short story era was just coming to an end. What I mean by that—people obviously still write short stories—is that it was the end of the era where magazines were devoted to stories and had substantial subscribers and paid substantial amounts. So Leonard sold his first story for a thousand bucks, and this at a time when that was several months pay at his regular job (today, you might get a few thousand in a glossy magazine, but it would likely take only story an issue; most publications pay nothing or a few hundred if lucky). It was a western. An agent noticed the work and got in touch with him, offering to help. Leonard took her up on it.

For many years, Leonard churned out western short stories, selling them for a hundred or so dollars apiece. It wasn't enough to quit working, which the agent made clear. Indeed, the agent worked with writers like Leonard in the hope of one day scoring big, once such authors started writing novels. And so Leonard did. Again, he was paid a modest sum, something like three thousand dollars, which if you think about how much he was paid for that first story, tells you how little/much such work paid: not quite a year's salary with no guarantee of more money to come. But Leonard plowed on, and his books sold for movie production, at which he made a little more money.

His agent, meanwhile, started to push Leonard to write something other than westerns (indeed, other than stories involving Indians). She knew the market for such stuff was drying up. She encouraged him to write adventure tales. And so he started.

And that's, of course, when he started to really hit the big time—or at least, do well enough that he felt he really could quit his day job writing ad copy. From there, he'd churn out mystery books with regularity, selling quite a few to film companies, and also getting work as a screenwriter here and there (his first screenplays were for a series of documentaries). As decades passed, his reputation grew until two decades in or so he started hitting the best seller list.

As a writer, Leonard treated his profession like a job, writing each day from about 9:00 to 5:30. He worked longhand, on the first draft, and then with a typewriter thereafter. Very old school. He didn't plot out his novels. Rather, he let the characters take him where the books were to go. Dialogue was his huge focus, enough that you'd think, based on what he said in interviews and what Challen writes about him, that his books were just collections of dialogue, which they are not—there are plenty of descriptions, even if they aren't florid. But I do think it interesting that he didn't know where a book was going or how it was to end until about forty pages to the end; given how intricate some of his plots are, one would think he planned a bit more. What he did do, though, he says, is as he was nearing that end, he'd realize certain things were important and then go back and add in the scenes that were needed to make that ending work. He was clearly a talented guy. I find that plotting something out in advance tends to give a work a kind of shallowness and fakeness, because one is forcing characters to do things rather than letting the characters guide themselves, so I understand his point; on the other hand, when one is writing longer works, it's also easy to lose track of characters and history and so forth, which is a big challenge of book-length fiction. It's also easy for a character to become completely predictable in terms of the plot that comes into being. So in those senses, Leonard seems to have been gifted with a good memory and kind of natural ease of finding ways to keep characters from simply falling into standard tropes, or at least that's my impression of him. I guess I'm going to find out over the coming months, as I read a selection of his work.

On “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin **

This has been on my too-read list for years; unfortunately, it was quite a big disappointment. In part, this book suffered from The Godfather complex. By that I mean that so many other works that came after this book use similar tropes that the “original” hardly seems all that innovative or exciting, so while it might be the classic or the first, as a reader coming to it late, it reads as derivative. Not only that, but it doesn't read well.

The book is about a man working for the United State. Everyone works for the state. There is a kind of group think. Outside the state are revolutionaries, aiming for individuality. The man, like all other citizens, is simply a number. No one bears names. They all work for the good of the state. Until . . . The man falls in love with another person. Now, they work to break the system. Numbers: think Lucas's THX 1138; omnipotent, omniscient state with clandestine love affair: think 1984. Unlike those works, however, I never found myself caring about the characters. The writing was emotionally over the top; at the same time, it was hard to follow, and the fact that I fairly early on gave up caring meant I didn't try hard. A synopsis on Wikipedia explained most of what I'd gathered and little of what I hadn't (go there for the real synopsis).

Spoiler: It doesn't end well. Just as you think the revolutionaries might pull it off, the man himself reverts to be interested in supporting the state, soaking up its drug. It betrays his lover. The state wins. One can, I suppose, take the comments from the man's lover as holding hope out—namely, that revolutions never stop. A state might have total control, but eventually someone overthrows it. There is no end to that. We just don't see that overthrow in this story.

On “The Reluctant Parting” by Julie Galambush ***

Like Metzger's book, this work is essentially an introduction to the New Testament, providing summaries of each work and a short account of how it came to be. What differentiates this work is that it purports to provide a Jewish view of the New Testament. Galambush's thesis is that before the New Testament became Christian it was a Jewish work, one in which Jews debated Jews about the meaning of Judaism. It's a provocative thesis, one that I would have thought would have led to many more unique readings of the New Testament works than it did.

There are some valuable observations here but on the whole the work seems more an introduction to the New Testament to Jewish readers who would otherwise be unfamiliar or less familiar with the works, so it didn't offer as much new info to one familiar with the New Testament as I would have expected. Complicating this further if Galambush's standard Protestant reading of so much of Christian doctrine. With the author having been a Christian that converted to Judaism, I felt as if I were getting two rather distorted views of the scripture rather than a fresh read of it. Galambush takes the standard secular line on the late creation of most of the works of the New Testament, merges that with standard readings of Christian doctrine (e.g., harrowing of hell) that likely were not part of the NT authors' original intent, and then places all of that within Jewish arguments over what would have made for proper Jewish teaching at that time.

On “The New Testament” by Bruce M. Metzger ****

This introduction to the background, growth, and content of the New Testament was much more interesting and potentially useful than I expected. I'd been under the impression that this leading biblical scholar, as the teacher of Bart Ehrman, was something of a liberal one, but his readings fit, rather, more often with the conservative school. In addition, the work being an introduction would seem to offer little more than basics, but it actually provides some strong readings of the various biblical works.

The first part of the work discusses culture of the time in which the New Testament was written, providing in roughly one hundred pages a summary of Jewish sects and Greek philosophical, as well as the Roman governmental structure. A second section discusses life of Jesus and the literary structures of his various sayings and stories. Metzger than discusses the church's early history and the travels of Paul. A large section summarizes each book of the New Testament and presents theories regarding each work's creation; the summaries sometimes provides a few close readings that are eye-opening. The book closes with a suprisingly conservative view of how the canon essentially self -authenticated long before its actual setting aside and with a discussion of the various translations and their limitations and advantages.

On “Misquoting Truth” by Timothy Paul Jones *****

I figured I'd give this Christian response to the work of Bart Erhman a go after reading Ehrman's similarly titled work. Even Jones has to admit that Ehrman is an amazing scholar, but of course, both Jones and Ehrman have particular points of view and different axes to grind, as do we all. So what was useful about reading Jones's book was seeing so many of the fact that Ehrman doesn't quite give the full truth about. The first part of this book largely adresses Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, and the second largely addresses Ehrman's Lost Christianities.

Interesting tidbits that Ehrman doesnt include in his text: While many early documents are missing author names on their works, it's possibly because the title page is missing; in the cases where we have author names attached, in every single case, from a wide variety of areas, the names (Matthew, Mark, John, etc.) match what these works would come to be called. It's not like someone assigned these names to the works later. (What neither Jones nor Ehrman discuss are the specific documents and the specific dates of the documents and the actual numbers, which is likely getting a bit too far into the weeds for most people. If we have Gospels of John before 300 and none of them bare his name, and we have sixteen from the 400s with twelve bearing his name, that would arguably mean something quite different from having two Johns from the 200s, one bearing his name, eight from the 300s with one bearing his name, and then twelve from the 400s with three bearing his name.)

Ehrman's argument about 1 Corinthians 11:34-35 being added by a duplicitous scribe with an agenda mentions that those two verses are sometimes placed after verse 40 in some manuscript; what he doesn't mention is that those two verses, nevertheless, still always appear. We don't have versions of the letter without them. That suggests something quite different to me.

Other things that Jones brought up were things I'd thought about even while reading Ehrman's work. Most of the discrepanciess Ehrman sees in early manuscripts as destroying the value of the written works seem, on reflection, not to make that much of a difference when it comes down to the actual pont of the work. The same message still applies. I suppose that one could argue that God should have put his writings on some kind of industructable stone so that we would absolutely what they said, which seems to be the only thing that would satisfy Ehrman's scepticism, but the part of the point of scripture is that God works through fallible humans; the stone would kind of dissuit the point. That we have as accurate copies as we do seems no less than a miracle, as Jones notes, because if you think about people copying stuff down in a language without punctuation or spaces between words, such would seem to lend to all kinds of errors and eventual changes. You can take from that what you will. One man sees the whole enterprise as a human one attempting to speak for a god created by humans, and one man sees God speaking through humans.

But as Jones notes near the end, and I think the point is a good one, we can't get too tied up in the idea that everything in the Bible must match or that we have all the answers. Such prognostications can lead us to lose faith when scholars point out the problems. We need to be honest about what's there and about what we don't yet understand, while seeing the bigger picture.

On “Leaving Las Vegas” by John O'Brien ****

 

This is another reread for me from a book read about three decades ago. When I last read it, the movie was a more recent title, and O'Brien's other two books were things more heavily on folks' minds. I did not like Stripper Lessons, which seemed mostly some male fantasy, and I never got to Assault on Tony's, which someone in grad school had recommended and which sounded sort of intriguing, mostly for its ties to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, but which I suspected would not be unlike the other two books in focusing mostly on dreariness and drinking and maybe some hot angelic woman. I was uncertain I would find this book of much interest this time around, and I was surprised by how well it held up.

Having come off reading Tapping the Source, this was a different sort of read. There isn't a strong plot on this title, but it deals with similarly salacious material. I can't say I'm likely to read this one again. In some ways, the plot is laughable and the characters seemingly nonsensicle and the whole thing unceasingly depressing. And yet, on some level, the work still manages to pull a bit at the reader, since it explores such dark and depressing lives and doesn't flinch at looking at them.

This is essentially a love story between an alcoholic and a prostitutee. The prostitute gets beat up. She has men (i.e., the former pimp) from her past show up and expect her to provide them whatever cash she's earning. This is not a glamourous life. It's hard and awful. The alcoholic has lost his wife and his job, though both losses seem mostly due to his drinking. He's chosen to drink above all else, and he has resigned himself to drinking himself to death, and he won't let anything or anyone stop him. He knows he's messed up. He gets the shakes anytime he hasn't had a drink recently enough. He too gets beat up or just stumbles for little reason and as such beats up his own body. (I'm prone to think such a life ridiculous, but having had a friend essentially do just that—drink himself to death—I know now this sort of thing happens, in late-stage alcoholism.)

The prostitute is desperate for companionship. The alcoholic, on some level, seems open to that for a while, but in the end, what he really wants is to be left alone with his drinking, and there's no stopping that. For a short while they meet and share share some moments. The plot never shirks from the inevitable bleak end.

On “Tapping the Source” by Kem Nunn *****

I was uncertain whether I read this while living in California or while living in Texas, but my reading log, reveals it was the latter, which makes sense, because a fresher read would better suggest why I kept the volume. It was recommended to me in California, while I was working at a bookstore. I picked it up cheap on remainder but like so many books at the time, I didn't read it. It sat in my library. In Texas, I was without access to a public library, which meant that array of books I'd collected over the years finally got read, every single one of them. This was one of those. And when I read it, finally, I was impressed. That's how it ends up here with five stars.

On rereading it here nearly thirty years later, I remembered almost nothing about it except for the fact that it involved a mystery and surfing. Likely, these sort of things are what impressed me. I love Nunn's description of a California desert town, which fits well with what I remember of the state. His attention to the California beach towns is also interesting, though Huntington Beach, where this book is set, always seemed a good deal more built up than how he describes it here. The attention also to surfing culture, about which I know little, and to bike culture, is also of interest. This is also a book about “tough” guys, a kind of overmasculinized culture, which is fun in its own right.

The novel is gripping. But it is also selacious and, in the end, rather ridiculous, at least to me as I read it now. (I'd be more inclined to give it four stars were I rating it now instead of then.) The story involves a young man who is in love (incest forges part of the text) with his sister. Years ago, his mother took off; he never knew his dad. Though their physical needs (a place to live) were supplied by an uncle and grandmother, he and his sister were left to fend largely for themselves. Ellen, the sister, eventually, though, ran away, taking up with various men. One day, Ike, her brother, receives a note with three names on it and word that Ellen is in trouble, has gone off with these three men to Mexico and never returned. Thus begins Ike's quest. He leaves the desert for the beach and takes up surfing to try to get close to the men who might know what happened to Ellen. (Spoilers from here.)

Instead, he ends up largely becoming friends with a man named Preston, a biker, impressed with Ike's mechanical skills, which he picked up working at a shop in the desert. Preston warns him to stay away from Hound Adams and the other two men on the list. They are trouble. But Ike never is told the truth about what happened to Ellen. As such, as one can imagine, he ends up not taking Preston's advice, and when opportunity presents itself, he takes up with Hound. Preston and Hound, as it turns out, are old rivals and old friends. Ike, meanwhile, takes up with a gal. Bad things go down between Preston and Hound. Ike ends up being pulled into a nefarious underworld of drugs and pornography and eventually Satanic rituals in the quest to find out what happened to his sister. While engaging, the book gets more and more ridiculous and perverted, until of course we finally find out where Ellen is.

On “Misquoting Jesus” by Bart D. Ehrman ****

I'd been a little leery of this book, knowing Ehrman's penchant for calling into question basic tenets of Christianity, and that is, on the whole with this book, his point and purpose. His general thesis, as denoted in the introduction and conclusion is that because the text of the New Testament can't be perfectly known, it must not be inspired. But his general point, alas, does not necessarily follow from the evidence he provides. In between is a really good layman's introduction to textual criticism and to some of the issues that arise when trying to edit the Bible (the same issues, actually, that arise with editing virtually any book whose author no longer is alive). It was because I couldn't get ahold of Ehrman's Orthodox Corruption of Scripture that I ended up reading this layman's version. I actually wanted to know more about the various alternative versions of the text. And while not as thorough as that book, this one certainly provides some great case studies.

The start of the book and, indeed, some passages later on are very basic. Such made me reflect on the difficulty writers have who are aiming at a general audience. How much is too general? How soon can one delve into specifics. But soon enough, Ehrman drops into literacy rates in the ancient world (they were low, but Ehrman takes the lowest end of estimates as a given) and the nature of how early texts were copied. The earliest texts, as he notes, were copied not by professionals but by what few literate members there were among the Christian community. Most of the time this would have been those who also were rich enough to have large enough homes to host Christian gatherings. As there were a number of Christian beliefs, some “scribes” would have had a willingness to change texts to fit an agenda. (The fact that our texts are as close as they are to one another would itself seem to be something of a miracle, but Ehrman focuses on differences not on similarities.) A few centuries in, the role of copying was taken over by professionals, but the damage of these early years was already done. There were no really reliable manuscripts. But I'm not so sure this reading of the history is correct. Professionals, as Ehrman brings out in his examples, were inclined to make similar errors or even deliberate changes as well.

This is the situation we find ourselves in when we come to the translations into English. The King James Version, which has so affected every English translation since, was itself based on a faulty manuscript, according to Ehrman, one of the most faulty of them all. Other reading of mine, however, shows this claim to be debatable, counterarguments that Ehrman largely ignores. The issue, of course, as Ehrman brings out, is that with varying manuscripts, editors are left trying to figure out what the original actually was. We have, in many cases, older manuscripts than those that were used to translate the KJV. Differences there would seem to indicate that some of the later manuscripts reflect changes made to the text that weren't in the original. But our early manuscripts, alas, are also often from particular regions and reflect, arguably, changes that were made in that region. They might be older, but there is possibly a reason that the variations in those texts didn't show up in later versions: They weren't the accepted or best text. It's impossible, often, to know. Ehrman describes some of the ways in which scholars attempt to figure out which really is more accurate. One way is by looking at what is the more difficult reading. It's more likely that a scribe would have changed something to be easier to read or understand than to be more difficult. This makes sense to a point, but it's no given. Another, Ehrman does not, is also regional variation. Copyists in one part of the world might have a manuscript with an error that is copied from frequently, an error or variation that doesn't exist in manuscripts in other parts of the world.

Ehrman himself admits that the vast majority of the changes to the text are mere typographic errors that are easily enough discerned. It's in the places where such changes make a difference to meaning that issues arise. But even here, some of these variations don't seem quite as profound as Ehrman makes them out to be. Whether Jesus looks on a disabled man with grace or anger when healing in one passage in Mark makes a little difference in the context and even to an extent in how we read Mark generally, but when we look at the overall point of the Gospels, I don't think it signficantly changes Christian teaching. One can read such a passage both ways and find value in each.

And I can totally understand the difficulties scribes and editors are up against. Sometimes a passage is unclear. If there's no author to ask, one is left sometimes with a difficult decision. Is this weird thing an inadvertant error or was that what the author really wrote and intended? It happens even when editing contemporary texts. The more interesting observations are those where Ehrman claims the text was changed deliberately. Some of these are more obvious than others; others are certainly open for debate, though how one reads other parts of the New Testament will often affect whether one believes these were later changes.

In the end, I found this book really engaging and informative. And while I don't think that Ehrman's overall point is ultimately convincing, denying that some parts of the Biblical text are difficult to discern is not the best means toward valuing faith. It's better to acknowledge that we don't know everything, even as we look to the overall themes of the New Testament text.

On “Underground” by Haruki Murakami *****

I first read this book at the airport in Madrid, Spain. I believe it was 2001, but it could have been 2005. Either way, at the time, I found the book engaging and heart wrenching, especially the account of the woman who became mostly a vegetable after the 1995 Aum Shinriko sarin gas attack in the Japanese subway, which is the focus of this book. On this second read a quarter century later, I didn't find myself tearing up (in fact, maybe because I remember the account of the woman, I was more affected this time by the account of a pregnant woman who lost her husband), but I was nevertheless pulled in by the interlocking accounts.

Essentially, the book is a set of interviews Murakami conducted with some of the attack's victims. In the account of the pregnant woman, it was incredible the coincidence that on thar particular day, her husband and she go up early to eat a heavier breakfast together before work. It was like a good-bye, but how would they have even known? Murakami organizes the accounts around stations, so one reads several different people's observations from each station, and often the one observed in one account is one telling the account in another. Also fascinating was the way that the people generally speaking didn't know what was going on, which I suppose is almost always the case in real time in these sort of events. I remember 9/11, which would have happened, actually not long before I read this title, the kind of chaos and confusion of the moment, and I also remember a friend of mine who lived in New York at the time explaining how that day was even more chaotic for her. After all, the Twin Towers were where most broadcasting towers were, which meant no TV or communication was available. Were we are war? What's happening?

But the accounts of the victims are just the first part of this book. The second part, tacked on apparently after its initial Japanese publication, concerns those who actually are or were part of the Aum Shinriko cult. This was interesting insofar as the accounts expose the way in which one's reaction to being in a cult really is complex. Most people got quite a bit out of the association, in terms of mental stability, but at the same time, it's clear that a good chunk of the teaching and behavior was abusive. Some were locked up for days or had to make a furtive escape from one of the group's communes. Further, of course, was the degree of loyalty the group inspired such that members would go through with such a plot as to release poison gas on a subway.

One other thing that surprised me was that these events occurred in 1995, so around the time of the Oklahome City federal building bombing. I'd thought these event occurred in the late 1980s, around 1987-89. Strange how our memory can transplant events like so. When I heard of this on TV (which I do remember), that means I was in grad school, not high school or my first year of college, as I'd thought.

On “Early Christianity in Alexandria” by David Litwa ****

We don't know much about Christianity in Alexandria before about 180, when folks like Dionysius, Pantaenus, and most especially Clement and Origen show up on the scene. Or at least, that's the usual story. Litwa claims that we actually know quite a bit about Christianity before these folks arise, if only we stop overlooking the obvious. Christianity in Alexandria was not what we have come to think of as orthodox. It predates all that and nourished quite different views of Jesus than those that have come to be adopted by the church centuries later.

A major point in this claim comes in the form of the Jewish community itself, which was highly Hellinized, at least among some of the intellectual class. Our source for that sort of info is, of course, Philo, the Jewish philosopher who resided in the city around the time of Jesus who adopted Platonic thinking to Jewish scripture. Jewish Christians simply fell in line with such Jewish thinking. Case in point for Litwa is Apollos. I'm not convinced that Apollos was a thinker in line with Philo and with Christian thinkers who would later be termed gnostics, but Litwa tries to make a case for it from Paul's writings about Apollos and about false teachers in his letters to the Corinthians. (For me, the two simply don't fit well together. Paul doesn't seem one for subtlety when it comes to people he disliked, so I don't see him writing positive things about Apollos in one place (although Litwa reads Paul, even in such passages, as actually placing himself above Apollos, thus snubbing him) and then writing such sarcastic and denigrating things about “ministers” more generally, while actually meaning Apollos among them.

But after those early chapters, as Litwa notes, Jewish people were essentially for a few decades removed from Alexandria, around 117. This left primarily non-Jewish Christians, who did their best to use the Jewish scriptures but read them in allegorical ways, like Philo, finding in them valuable lessons even while giving up the Jewish rites connected with them. Mix those ideas with others from Greek philosophy and from Greek and Egyptian mythology, and you end up with a unique form of Christianity, one that most would come to see as not Christian at all: These would be the followers of people like Basilides and Valentinus. Such teachers, however, at the time were no less Christian than those who would eventually win the doctrinal debate going on among early Christians. Transmigration, the idea that Jesus was never really human or that the god of the Jews was some other, lower god who was not the real one—many of these things found space in the theologies of the Alexandrian Christians, until, of course, they didn't, because other Christians won out. But truly, as Litwa notes, even Origen and Clement dabbled in such ideas, even if those men eventually got adopted into what become the Catholic Church.

Litwa's book is a good corrective to the manner in which we often think about early Christianity. Although I'd argue that such thinking was not that which reflected the early apostles, at least as preserved in our New Testament, it's clear that other Christianities existed from early on. Those, however, were not the ones that eventually came to be the Christianity we know. (Even so, such ideas subtly changed much of what Christians have come to believe in the millennia since the New Testament was put together.)

On “The Giving Way of Life” by Manfred Arthur Fraund

I was given this privately published/printed book nearly a decade ago but only now got around to reading it. It was by the father of various kids I grew up with, a friend of our family's and of my parents. Alas, at this point, the author is no longer alive, nor my father, so I can't write him to thank him for the collection and his thoughts. In the closing years of his life, the author took to writing books of essays, poetry, and memoir. This is one of his books of essays. Truly, this is a man who thought a lot about his faith and about God. Once in a while, I'd get a more personal insight about his life or family, something that would have been wonderful to read more about. As it is, the five extended works in this book are made up each of twenty very short essays on a given spiritual subject. They read, in a way, like devotionals, though usually with the focus on a spiritual idea rather than one particular scripture. Written as it was, I suspect that there would be more to glean from reading this in small bits, picking up the book and reading one essay and then maybe returning some other time, meditating on the small passage, much as the author likely wrote the pieces. And that is how I'd largely read it until the last couple of months—though returning to it far too infrequently—when I decided I'd read it through, so that I could say I'd actually read it all.

What is there to say of our lives? We pass from one place to another. When I met Mr. Fraund at a church picnic where he handed me the book, he seemed excited to see me and to share his work with me, this kid who had grown up with his. Occasionally, he'd had contact with my dad, who still lived in the same town but who had taken a slightly different path when it come to his spiritual journey and ended up in a different fellowship, though they believed largely the same thing. The rest of Mr. Fraund's family, it appeared, had taken yet other paths. As family, of course, he was still involved in their lives, but outside of a Facebook contact list (that I rarely ever touch), I would no longer be likely to come across any of his children in real life, given our own diverging paths and places of abode and worship. It is wonderful that technology can put us in touch or keep us in touch with such people, in ways that were not possible twenty-five years ago, but at the same time, one is reminded constantly of how our lives converge for a time and then diverge, the blessing of a friendship for a few years and of the memories that go with it. I could write of such memories here (so many of them, indeed), but I will save those perhaps for some other venue, not focused as much on my reading, and some other time.