On "Flight" by John Steinbeck (7661 words) *****

One of my favorite stories of all time, this one reminds me of what I found so engrossing about John Steinbeck when I was a teenager. It's a bit overwrought and melodramatic toward the beginning, but the slow, deliberative descriptions of a young boy--er, man--on the run fits with the inevitable end. Read the story here.

On "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez *****

It's been a long while since I read Garcia Marquez, and this reread was well worth the time, suiting my mood precisely. In the cannon of Latin American writers, Garcia Marquez has generally ranked behing Borges and Cortazar for me, but were it not for those two great writers, I'd probably think much more about the Colombian author.

This tale is wonderful for its various details but also for its tone. Garcia Marquez builds the story as if a man were really conducting research on an incident from earlier in his life. We read of interviews he's conducted, his own memories, written accounts. In that sense, the Chronicle is like reading an investigative report.

The story revolves around the killing of Santiago Nasar for the apparent deflowering of Angelica Vicario, whose new husband returns her as such. As we read further, we learn not just how the killing went down but how Nasar was implicated--even as his actual guilt is called into question. By the end, I found myself saddened by the course of events, which is as good as one could hope from such a story. The novella can be read here.

On "The Last Asset" by Edith Wharton (12,119 words) *****

A journalist befriends an American woman who is at the center of the social world from which he draws his stories. She in turn wants a favor--she wants him to get in touch with her husband, from whom she has been separated for years. The husband is needed for the daughter's wedding, or else no wedding can take place. Why the husband is separated, how he lives, and why he has no interest in helping is at the center of this story, a center which comes to encompass even the journalist. The story is told in the third-person limited perspective of the journalist, and yet, it's one of those tales that fits in with The Great Gatsby or On the Road insofar as the story isn't really about the main character but about someone whom the main character is obsessed with (although actually, this story is about the main character insofar as he is the one transformed in it, even if he's not the main spring for the events). Those two novels are first person, and I wonder to some degree why, given that the story is still told from a limited perspective, why Wharton didn't settle on first person for this one. Read the story here.

On "Early Biblical Interpretation" by James M. Kugel and Rowan A. Greer ***

Book 3 in the Library of Early Christianity, this one focuses on how Bible readers interpreted the scripture up through about the third century CE. The main thing that I got out of the book was something very obvious, something I just hadn't given much thought to: namely, even the later Old Testament scriptures are even interpretations of the earlier ones. Thus, Chronicles, written after Kings and the Torah, in many ways reads the events recounted in those books in a new way, "making past events bear on present reality" (38).

Much of the book--though not as much as I feared, since that wasn't something I was particularly interested in reading about at present--is given over to the rise of and cannonization of scripture. Much is also given over to different genres of the scripture, at least in the Old Testament, and of interpretation--wisdom writing, apocalyptic writing, interpretations among the Qumran sect, interpretations among the rabbis, the hellenistic allegorical approach.

While the first half of the book focuses on the Old Testament, the second half focuses on the New. The author of this half is particularly interested in Iraneaus's view of the scripture, as he is the first to reference most of the books in the New Testament in his own work. The author delves into the various ways early Christian writers put Old Testament scripture to work within the new Christian framework (Jesus in the Old Testament, the church as the new Israel, etc.). He also looks at the differences between the Alexandrian allegorical school and the Antiochan typological school, showing that actually the two schools are not perhaps as different as one might initially claim, as their main interest was in making theological points.

The book's final line is perhaps most telling of the two religious traditions that come out of interpreting Old Testament scripture: "It is instructive that the figure of Wisdom, portrayed in Prov. 8:22ff, as God's agent of creation and revelation, was equated in Ecclesiasticus (Ben Sira) with the Torah but was identified by Christians as early as Paul with Christ. From the same point of departure we thus find two paths, strikingly similar in many of their presuppositions and methods, but finally divergent" (203).

On "Pointing East, Where Things Happen" by Donna Baier Stein (3770 words) ***

Is he or isn't he? When a man has an affair, it's hard to trust him ever again--that's the angle in this story, centered on a revival meeting and a mysterious bracelet too small for his wife. Read the story here at Summerset Review.

On "From Sabbath to Sunday" by Samuele Bacchiocchi *****

This was a reread for me. The last time I read the book was back in 1995, when some doctrinal changes in the church I was attending were going on. Back then, I thought the book useful, but I'm not sure how interesting I found it. It seemed quite scholarly, perhaps even a bit difficult.

Having now worked with scholarly books for more than twenty years and having read more extensively among the works Bacchiocchi examines, this book now seems like a fairly easy read. The more interesting parts for me are those that focus on the historical shift to Sunday and those that discuss specific scriptures used to justify the shift. Much of the early portion of the work focuses more on other scholars' claims regarding the shift, showing how those claims don't pass muster. In  that sense, those early sections are where the book seems most scholarly and most tied to the dissertation from which it derives. When Bacchiocchi is dealing with primary sources, as the later chapters do, the work is much more interesting, indeed, for me, gripping.

On "The House of the Dead Hand" by Edith Wharton (10,201 words) *****

Wharton had a knack for mysteries. This one reads like a gothic tale ala Poe and Borges. A man is asked to get a copy of a newly discovered painting by Leonardo, which has been purchased for a private collection. The purchaser, however, is a man who will not allow others to photograph the image and, save for the young visitor (who has some special connections), even look or describe the painting, which was purchased by the daughter of the current owner. The painting, however, is also the daughter's prison sentence, for the father is not just possessive of it but insanely attached to it such that no one else in the family can live a normal life. Read the story here at the Atlantic.

On "The Divinity of the Roman Emperor" by Lily Ross Taylor ****

This book proved to be quite gripping in its middle section wherein Octavian and Alexander were competing for power--and it was really in the midst of that that the move toward making the Roman emperor into a god happened, which emphasizes the extent to which that move was largely for political ends.

As Taylor notes, the real irony is that while Caesar was killed to keep him from amassing too much power and becoming a "god," his very death is what led to him gaining divinity and thus the emperors that would follow him.

The idea that an emperor would be a god was really something that derived from eastern kingdoms in the Roman empire--most specifically Egypt. People in that portion of the empire were thus more inclined to think of an emperor as a god to begin with. The trickier part was getting Roman people to go along with such an idea. In that sense, a dead emperor was more easily proclaimed such than a living one. Rather, it was the "Genius" (similar to a metaphysical soul) of an emperor that was godlike and that was worshiped. This Genius, within the emperor, lived on beyond his body, ascending to the godly realm after the body's death.

That nations like Judah were allowed not to worship an emperor, while still showing deference to him through sacrifices for him rather than to him, shows also the degree to which emperor worship was largely for political ends--whatever works to subject people to the rulership is what was most important.

On "Deafness" by James Chapin (2276 words) ****

This lightly science fiction story revolves around a mysterious phenomenon wherein vast swaths of people lose their hearing. It's told in the form of a letter from one relative to another, about the "old days"--the days when one could hear. The other day I was on the phone with my mother; dad couldn't come to the phone. His hearing's not so good these days, and on this day, it was no good at all. What is there to say to a silent world? What is there to say to the silence? Chapin has some ideas. Read the story here at New World Writing.

On "The Moral World of the First Christians" by Wayne A. Meeks ****

This text is a basic introduction to the ways in which people in the first-century Roman empire discussed and determined what moral action is. Meeks devotes individual chapters to Greco-Roman philosophical thinking, Jewish thinking, and Christian thinking on the subject.

Because these are such large subjects, he chooses to focus on various philosophical schools and within those various philosophical schools individual philosophers. As such, Plutarch's writing stands in for Platonic philosophy; Musonius Rufus for the Stoics. In the end, he looks for what they have in common: the desire to lead a happy life is the choice to live in conformity to nature, which is made possible by reason.

For Jewish moral thinking, Meeks focuses on sages, like Yeshua ben Sira, the sect at Qumran, Philo, and the Mishnah. All, of course, stress the importance of the biblical law, though they differ to a great degree in terms of how much they integrated those ideas into Greek thinking.

Meeks then looks at various types of (or emphases among) Christian sects (Gentile, Jewish, Apocalyptic) and closes with a discussion of where such sects met: synagogue, house, school, and church.

Finally, in the last chapter, Meeks examines what specific New Testament passages tell us about the moral foundation of Christians in the first century, how the writings were related to common literary practice, and how the moral standards developed into standardized forms of expression.

On "The Reckoning" by Edith Wharton (8233 words) *****

This story looks at the emotional toll that divorce takes on a person, most especially the person not expecting/wanting the divorce. Unattached love is all fine and glorious if you're the one who gets out first. The story renders a bit too little of the pain that is usually experienced on the part of the party ending the relationship, but it does so to make a point about how love cannot be all about one's own self and feelings at a given time. Read the story here.

On "Moral Exhortation, a Greco-Roman Sourcebook" by Abraham J. Malherbe ***

This book is essentially a collection of short abstracts of various Greco-Roman philosophers' writings, arranged around themes that have some relation to the social environment in which the New Testament was written. Reading these extracts in conjunction with the biblical passages to which Malherbe refers can be somewhat illuminating, especially when it comes to seeing how Paul and other writers used rhetorical devices similar to thinkers of their day. At the same time, one wonders to what extent said devices are used by just about anyone. 

A few things become evident in reading the extracts. One is that, contrary to what I've read elsewhere, the selections Malherbe has chosen seem to show a set of philosophers very much concerned with morality--including, most notably, sexual morality. Romans come across as quite conservative per the selections chosen--adultery is discouraged and even fornication, as are homosexual relations. I end up wondering, however, to what extent these selections speak to the actual environment of the day. Mahlerbe, in fact, may be drawing largely from Stoic philosophy for those passages, and as such, a more conservative view certainly makes sense, since the Stoics were all about "denying the self" in a sense. In fact, it's easy to see how (gnostic) religion inevitably seems to advocate either aestheticism or its opposite when under the influence of such ideas, because both in essence argue that the physical should not be our focus.

Another major thing that becomes obvious, I have already denoted--that the structures of writing often are similar between Christians and philosophers. In this regard, one of the more interesting sets of extracts have to do with extended metaphors. As Paul uses metaphors to racing (sports), war, and the body (for unity), so too do the philosophers. One could say that such shared metaphorical ideas show that the concepts were common in the society at the time, but I also ended up thinking about how such ideas likely aren't unique to just the time period, that even without such metaphors in scripture or other ancient writings, writers today would likely come up with similar ideas.

Although the extracts are interesting and the summaries useful, this is indeed a sourcebook--Malherbe largely stays in the background, and the book doesn't build to any kind of crescendo in terms of its contents.

On "Spring 1933" by Donna Baier Stein (4952 words) ***

What happens when a woman falls in love and then loses everything she thinks she might have. Not good things, apparently. Amber settles for something close to what she wanted and finds instead much worse the heartbreak. Read the story here at VQR.

On "The New Testament in Its Social Environment" by John E. Stambaugh and David L. Balch *****

This is one of the best reference books on the social world of the New Testament that I've read. It does a great job of summarizing Jewish history leading up to the Roman period. It discusses family dynamics, religious ones, financial ones, governmental ones, and so on. In its final chapter, it covers the social dynamics apparent in individual cities. It's a short book and easy to read, but it isn't easily summarized, especially given the fact that I did not have opportunity to take notes on it right after completing it. But I will be coming back to this book, as I bought a copy to keep.

On "The Touchstone" by Edith Wharton (26,849 words) *****

Essentially a novella, this work ruminates on the subject of loyalty, love, and literary acumen. A man befriends a woman writer whose husband soon dies; she falls for him, writes to him for years, but the love is unrequited. Years later, after her death and needing money to be able to marry, the man arranges for the publication of the letters, which are a huge literary hit, but at what price to his personal soul? What do we owe to the dead? Do we keep their secrets forever? Read the story here at Project Gutenberg.

On "The Search for the Twelve Apostles" by William Steuart McBirnie ***

This book seems a useful reference, but on the whole it was a disappointment, especially in comparison to the more recent Fate of the Apostles by Sean McDowell. The latter suffered from a kind of formulaicness, but this work suffers in some sense from a seeming lack of method.

McBirnie quotes extensively from various sources, many of them late in history such that one wonders to what extent the later sources are reliable. Further, at least in the edition I read, it was difficult to tell what was a quote and what wasn't--in other words, the design was not well suited to McBirnie's text (a problem likely resolved in more recent reprint editions).

Finally, McBirnie focuses heavily on burial sights of the apostles for his information. This seems somewhat dubious. Granted, in tracking the bodily remains of the apostles, he may at times hit on how true a given myth is, but given how many churches like to claim an apostle for their own and the relative proliferation of relics during the Middle Ages, burial sights seem a difficult way to go about finding the supposed path of the apostles.

On "The Lobster" by Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou ****

It's been a while since I read a screenplay. For a brief time, I read quite a few. Really, the story of my reading of screenplays is also the story of technology and me.

Back before I was an older teen, the only way to see a movie was in the theater or on television--what was available--and the latter was something I spent a lot of time watching. In my later teen years, we had a VCR, and rentals became something we could use to see specific films we wanted to that we had missed; more often, though, I simply recorded movies I would have missed on TV.

As a young man, once I was out on my own, I got rid of the television. The only way to see a film then was in the theater, and so it was that I started reading screenplays. At this time, this usually meant borrowing the screenplay or buying it--and this in turn also limited the selection of films I had access to.

With the Internet, things changed a bit. Drew's Script-o-rama offered a relatively wide selection of screenplays, so if I missed a film in the theater, quite often I could read the screenplay online. Or I could "read" a classic film. Once I had a computer that could play DVDs (around 2006), however, my need to read a film dropped precipitously. But from 1999 to 2006, reading was the way I came to know many films.

I didn't manage to see The Lobster in the theater, or catch it streaming when it was available on Netflix, and video stores don't exist much anymore, and so . . . here I am, reading again, a film I'd wanted to see.

In a lot of ways, I'm glad not to have seen the movie. My tolerance for violence or sex on screen is not what it once was, and judging by the screenplay, this film would likely have a lot of the latter.

But the screenplay itself touches on many themes that intrigued me about the film. It's a strange blend of dark comedy, fantasy, and thriller. David's wife dumps him, and so he is forced to go to a hotel for single people, where, if they do not manage to find a partner within a specified period, they are turned into an animal. Some run away and become loners, who live in hiding, trying to avoid being shot and turned into animals.

The plot is obviously a comment on the way in which society pigeonholes people into particular roles, as well as the general untidiness that singleness represents. It left me with much to think about--the way we transform ourselves to try to "fit" with someone; the difficulty that there is in being truly loving, let alone finding love; and the selfishness that we all exhibit in our search. David, at first sympathetic, is a character who by the midway point of the screenplay, I had come to dislike. Indeed, I can't say I much cared for any of the characters by the end.

I'm sure that seeing the film my reaction might be much different. Acting can really embue a role with compassion beyond what's in the written word. But as a mind exercise and as a truly unique piece of writing, the screenplay really works. It can be read here at Scriptfest.

On "Big Bad Love" by Mary Miller (3914 words) ****

"Big Bad Love" seemed less compelling than many of Miller's tales in Always Happy Hour, but in the end, it packs something of a wallop. It concerns a woman who works at a care facility to abused children, a woman who puts a lot into her job but gets little out of it. Read the story here at the Good Men Project.

On "Primitive Christianity in Crisis" by Alan Knight ****

This was not quite the book I was expecting. I read it because it was recommended as a good study of gnosticism, its history, and its effect on Christianity. And indeed, the first third of the book is exactly that. In fact, Knight does such a good job of laying out the various concepts of gnosticism that he makes it seem easy to understand. In that, I suppose, is a problem insofar as at times, he seemed to be simplifying things or writing things as if they were facts when in reality some of the ideas are, from my other reading, in most people's mind under dispute.

Knight starts off the book with an anecdote about Nicolas, of Acts 6:5, the supposed founder of the Nicolaitans. The story is one I'd read before, how he was so full of zeal with regard to showing that the pleasures of this world mean nothing that he offered his wife up to others. The idea--that material things do not matter--becomes so twisted that it actually ends up being the source of both aestheticism (denying one's self) and of lasciviousness (giving into all pleasure). This is the heart of gnosticism.

But the story isn't quite as simple as that. While I believe Knight to be right in his summary of what Nicolaitanism is, others claim that it has to do with hierarchical rulership in the church. Still others would dispute the idea that Nicolas of Acts 6:5 was the founder of the sect--indeed, it is quite possible that the sect simply borrowed the name or that some other Nicolas founded it. Even the story about Nicolas offering his wife is one that some dispute. But little of these other ideas arise in Knight's book. Hence, while the book is easily approachable, I found myself a bit concerned that the simplicity also perhaps hid the fact that Knight's own version of various gnostic sects is not one that is widely accepted by scholars. This made me a bit leery, even as I greatly enjoyed reading such a finely crafted summary of the various sects.

The anecdote leads to an exploration of the various Greek philosophies widespread in the first century, their effect of Judaism and paganism, and (eventually) on mainstream (largely Protestant Reformation) Christianity today. The second chapter goes into the beliefs of the various gnostic sects. Knight also discusses gnostic ideas about heaven, angels, God, and the "eighth day"--which came to be revered, as opposed to the Sabbath, as going beyond the material realm. That discussion is a good one for understanding the philosophical underpinnings for much of the replacement of the Sabbath with Sunday, as opposed to the historical context provided elsewhere, as in Samuel Bacchiocci's From Sabbath to Sunday, which only touches on "eighth day" thinking.

Another thing Knight comments on a lot is the move toward a belief in the immortality of the soul, which made its way into Platonic philosophy through the Pythagorean philosophers. Knight claims that this belief is rooted in a "reformation" of sorts that happened in pagan religion around 700 B.C., wherein most religions came to have this idea. This is something that I need to read more about and that also made me wonder to an extent about his accuracy. Most scholars of religion and the Roman world that I've read claim that the concept of the immortality of the soul was not widespread in the first century, that in fact, unless you were a noble or king, you likely did not have much hope beyond this life. A king, by contrast, supposedly had some vague promise of some kind of afterlife, but this idea was not well defined. To be sure, the concept of the immortality of the soul can be found in Egypt hundreds of years earlier, and Plato and the Pythagoreans certainly adopted the idea, but how widespread it was beyond certain philosophers I'm uncertain of, given what others have written on the subject.

After the first section, Knight turns to gnosticism's effect and influence on contemporary Christianity and even on the Reformation. This was not what I came to this book for, even if his drawing of parallels between gnosticism and concepts like "once saved always saved" is illuminating. Some of the material on the Reformation teachers was particularly interesting, as I had never read much about Calvin's or Luther's actual lives. At the same time, not being one who follows many of the contemporary Protestant preachers, I was at times not as interested. In fact, much of the book in the latter sections seemed to become rather repetitive.

One of the things I really enjoyed about the book were Knight's explications of certain scriptures, particularly of Colossians 2. I've never read as thorough a discussion on that chapter of Paul's letter as Knight gives, and it was well worth the read. And as much as I might belabor the book's possible shortcomings, overall, I found it a good read, especially the first part and in selective parts thereafter.

On "The Pelican" by Edith Wharton (7614 words) *****

There's something about stories that are written in the first person about someone else that I seem drawn to. I think of The Great Gatsby, On the Road, and A Prayer for Owen Meany. The latter seems less like the first two insofar as things actually seem to happen around Owen that affect the narrator; by contrast, the narrator in the first two pieces isn't really a large part of the story. He's a hanger-on, a person fascinated by the characters around him--and most especially one. (Brideshead Revisited has a similar dynamic, I'm now realizing.) Perhaps it's the narrator's fascination that works its magic on me: I too become interested in knowing more about this acquaintance or friend, as mystified as the narrator is. "The Pelican" works a similar form. Here, the narrator is a man who happens to fall in with a woman whose husband has died and who has a young child. She takes to the lecture circuit to make money. Unlike those other stories, however, here perhaps it is the narrator himself who is rather fascinating--this because he seems so much to detest the woman but still spends so much time writing about her, dropping in on her lectures, trying to avoid her, and so on. In short, he finds her lectures facile. But years go by, and every five to ten years he ends up running into her, each time, she's still at it, raising money to educate her son. At some of these drop-ins, she's wildly successful; at others, she's down on her luck. Such is fortune. But that son, well, she's been doing this a long while--and we begin to realize something more about the woman, that she's a con of sorts. And we begin to wonder also what exactly it is that draws her to lecturing, what makes her tick. Read the story here.

On "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses" by Richard Bauckham *****

Cogently written and elegantly argued, this monograph was not only a breeze to read but a joy. I took it on because the subject seemed interesting, but I wasn't expecting to enjoy reading it so much as I did.

Bauckham essentially makes the argument that many contemporary scholars have it wrong. The Gospel accounts of Jesus's ministry are not oral traditions passed along for generations, many of them mythologized in the telling. They are actually written accounts based on eyewitness accounts of the happenings, from the lives of people who actually had interactions with Jesus. And he says there is evidence in the Gospels of this. In other words, those like third-generation-from Jesus Papias who say that the Gospels were written by people they knew, who themselves got their information directly from people who had interaction with Jesus aren't fibbing. Papias, in fact, says he preferred to get information from these eyewitnesses, who by his time were few in number, than from written accounts--such was the preference of historians at the time. That is, Roman writers only wrote about the distant past as needed to set the context for events that they themselves had firsthand knowledge of. It was no different for Papias, whose work largely no longer exists except in these passages where he explains his objectives. Putting such words into writing would have been especially important as the generation with firsthand knowledge of Jesus would have been passing away, the opportunity thus lost to capture these reminiscences.

For material internal to the Gospels, Bauckham looks at different features. One is the use of names in the accounts. Names used, he argues, coincide to the actual witnesses who were still living--and were part of the church--at the time that the account was written. Thus, if someone wanted to verify a story, one need only ask the person named. Unnamed persons are generally those not bearing witness, not connected with the church, but rather being talked about. Helping to confirm this idea is the very names that show up in the Gospel accounts, which tend to match by percentage the relative popularity of the names given to people in ancient Palestine (as we find in ossuaries and other archaelogical evidence). Thus, we have many Simons and Josephs, as one would expect if the stories were originating with witnesses to Jesus's ministry in Palestine.

Much is made in the scriptures themselves about the need that those who serve as apostles be witnesses from the beginning, corraborating the importance of witnesses being those who tell the stories. Bauckham looks specifically then at Peter, who by tradition (and by Papias's account) was the source of much of Mark's Gospel. Is there evidence within Mark that this was so? Bauckham points to the way that the Gospel essentially starts and ends with Peter's witness and the way in which Peter is a major character; certainly, his importance in the early church might account for this, but it can also be accounted for by his being the source of much of the information. One of the most interesting parts of Bauckham's argument comes from his analysis of the grammer. Much of the story uses a "plural-to-singular" narrative device, a feature that is used five to ten times more often by Mark than any other Gospel writer. That is, the sentence starts off in the plural and then focuses on the singular: e.g., "They came to the place, and then Jesus said to his disciples." The language is a bit strange in third person; put it into first person plural, however, and it seems quite natural: "We came to the place, and then Jesus said to us." It's as if Mark took Peter's account (we did this, we did that; he told us) and wrote it out in the third person (they did this, they did that; he told them), given that Mark was a nonpartaker in the events.

Another interesting feature is the way certain people aren't named in some of the Gospels but are in others. Why? Bauckham argues that it had to do with legal jeopardy and persecution. Thus, Mark merely mentions that someone cut off the priest's servant's ear, but John, writing much later, tells us it was Peter against Malchus. Why the secrecy, especially if Peter was the source? Because if the Jewish leaders had written evidence as to who had done the deed, Peter might have been able to be prosecuted for it. (This also explains why Peter so adamently disavowed being a follower of Jesus, even though he followed Jesus to the place where Jesus's trial was--if he had admitted to being a follower, others might have pointed to him as Malchus's assailant [John tells us that one of those who asked about Peter was related to Malchus].) Once John was writing, much later, Peter was long since dead--no troubles could follow from revealing his identity.

Or take Mary (sister of Martha and Lazarus), who annointed Jesus but who goes unnamed until John's account. The annointing, Bauckham argues, set up Jesus as the "annointed one," the "Messiah," thus adding to Jesus's followng and posing a threat to the Jewish powers, who would likely have wanted to persecute Mary for doing so. Once she's dead, however, it doesn't matter to name her.

Or what of the man who runs away naked when the priests come to get Jesus. He likely got involved in a scuffle with the priests and then to get away loosed himself from his robe; as with Peter, protecting the identity from being known as an assailant would have been important to prevent later prosecution. Some have posited that this was Mark himself (a sort subtle signature to the book), but Papias wrote that Mark never had any direct dealings with Jesus--only with Peter--and Bauckham finds it more probable that it was another disciple (possibly not one of the twelve) or even Lazarus.

Lazarus's story isn't given in any account until John. Why is that, given that it is a major reason the Jewish leaders decide to do away with Jesus according to John? Bauckham suggests that it was to prevent the leaders from themselves killing Lazarus, something John says they sought to do. Not putting the story in print would thus keep it from being spread about as easily and thus putting Lazarus in further jeopardy of being killed. Once he had died, however, once again, the reason to keep the story and Lazarus's identity somewhat hush-hush becomes less important.

From here, Bauckham recounts different theories regarding the passing on of oral traditions, showing how the idea that the Jesus stories were largely folktales by unknown community traditions rather than stories related by specific persons is unlikely--that is, showing how the various theories don't pass muster. This section, while easily understandable in Bauckham's deft rendering, was heavy on theory.

What is interesting also is that Bauckam generally does not take the namesakes as being the authors of the various accounts. He thinks they're pseudonyms. Likewise, he accepts the generally accepted idea that the Gospel accounts were written at later dates--in his case, just as the witnesses were beginning to die out (thus, the reason for rendering such information in writing).

One of the most interesting chapters in the book applies psychological theories of memory to how they would apply in the case of eyewitness testimony--and specifically with regard to how they apply to the Gospel accounts. What do we remember in detail, why, and how likely are those memories to be accurate and stable over time? No doubt, memory is often unreliable--we conflate various events or we come to think, given the power of suggestion, that we witnessed something we actually only heard about. And yet courts rely on eyewitness testimony, as indeed virtually any account of a happening.

And yet, in one example given, of a contemporary memory compared with a newspaper account from decades earlier, the person recounting the story, who was about ten at the time of the event and was part of the community where the event occurred, was amazingly precise and accurate. How and why? Bauckham, drawing on the work of pscyhologists, lists several extenuating circumstances that make certain memories more accurate and precise than others: (1) uniqueness or unusualness of the event; (2) consequentionalness of event; (3) emotional connection to the event, and (4) frequent rehearsal. All four lend to our ability to remember the event. Other important factors that tend to be part of accurate memories were (5) vividness of the imagery--memories we remember well tend to be remembered with with more imagery than other memories; (6) inclusion of irrelevant detail--we tend remember inconsequential items that happened as part of or around the event; (7) point of view--we tend to remember an event both from our own first-person perspective and from a third-person observer perspective; (8) dates--we don't tend to remember specific dates of events but we will remember the season, the time, the locale; (9) gist and details--we are better at remembering the general idea of an event than specific details, but that does necessarily mean that the memory becomes inaccurate (it's the way we begin to "interpret" the event in our memory). No doubt, Bauckham notes, those healed by Jesus or who witnessed a spectacular event would have had good reason to have good recall about it--it was unique, often consequential, had emotional connection (if you were the one healed), and would have been retold as a story frequently. As such, many of the accounts in the Gospels include vivid imagery, seemingly irrelevant detail, shifts in point of view, and elements of time and place. Even though the gist of a memory might be all that was recalled, often some details remain important in the recounting: the number of fish and loaves of bread, for example, and the size of the audience, as well as the baskets of leftovers taken up.

Bauckham then shifts his discussion to the Gospel of John, presenting several compelling arguments for why he believes the gospel to have been written not by John the apostle from among the twelve but by John the Elder, who he claims is the actual beloved disciple. (In this sense, Bauckham departs from conservative tradition but is still more conservative than others who see the Gospel as not being written by any John at all.) Some of the major reason for this belief are that two Johns (the elder and the apostle) are mentioned by Papias. Likewise, Polycrates, when writing of John denotes him as being related to the priesthood, which seems unlikely of the brothers of Zebedee; indeed, the book of John (18:15) references a disciple as being with Peter at the court during Jesus's trial--one who knew the various members of the council. The elder likely garnder his name because of the length of his life, as denoted near the end of the book of John, wherein some thought he would never die. That the apostle became associated with this John is not strange, as such mixing up of people with the same surname was typical of the period and after; as another example, Bauckham presents Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany, who are often conflated even though it's pretty clear from the Gospel accounts that they were two different people. Further, John's use of third person to reference himself, except near the start and end of the book, were not atypical of Roman biographies at the time, which tended to subsume the author except at the start and close, suggesting a John really was the main source and/or author. (Personally, I still find it difficult to think that John of the twelve is not the supposed author--he seems to take on such importance with Peter and James that it seems odd that he would have more or less disappeared into history after the few very clear references to him in the Gospels and Acts, whereas John the Elder, who appears only in second-century sources and who presence is only implied in the Gospel of John played such a huge role in the first-century church. That said, Matthias, who became one of the twelve after Judas's death, is noted as having been with them from the beginning, so it is indeed possible there were yet others who were not noted by name who witnessed a large number of Jesus-related events and who played a role in the early church, as indeed is Bauckham's whole point.)

The final chapter closes in on what the fact that eyewitness testimony can be and should be relied upon as part of historical analysis says about how historians should approach their subjects--that is, with more respect than perhaps has always been shown. (Quick review is available here.)

On "Trouble at the Dance Hall" by Donna Baier Stein (2665 words) ***

The center of this story is a fiddler who is struggling to get by--and who also happens to be a black man in a bar full of white people, some kind, some not so. Read the story here at Green Hills Literary Lantern.

On "Gods and the One God" by Robert M. Grant ****

This book sets out to describe the state of religion during the first century insofar as it related to what Christians would have encountered, then goes on to describe how those religions and philosophical thought based in them went on to influence the development of the Christian idea of the trinity.

What's interesting about the book is the way Grant ties in Christianity with an overall movement in philosophical and religious thought that was increasingly sliding toward monotheism. Centuries before Christians came on the scene, philosophers were beginning to describe concepts that emphasized one god (e.g., Zeus) as the father or hierarch over all the other pagan gods. Such reasoning would play an important role in the development of the Christian trinity as Christians tried to explain how God could be one and yet Jesus and the Holy Spirit were also God with the Father.

The through-line unfortunately isn't that clear in what Grant presents to readers, and for a book aiming for general readers, it's still a bit technical at times, something that probably can't be helped given the complexity of trinitarian ideas (e.g., Grant acknowledges a triad existed early on but it wasn't a true trinity, which is a difficult distinguishment). Still, it's an excellent reference.

On "Mrs. Manstey's View" by Edith Wharton (4114 words) ***

What makes this fairly formulaic story so special isn't the plot, which is as drear as one would expect from Edith Wharton, or the characters, who are perhaps a bit less uniquely drawn than usual but the writing style, which is beautiful and the portrait of loneliness in its most egregious form and what little hope one clings to. Manstey is an old lady with nothing to live for but a room with a view. Read the story here.

On "Collected Stories, 1891-1910" by Edith Wharton ****

This collection of writings from the first half of Wharton's writing life runs the gambit of subject matter.

"The Fulness of Life" works off of some fairly banal tropes: A woman at the gates of heaven finds the love she's always wanted, except it means that her husband will have to be alone for eternity because she was his love for all time. Guess what happens?

In "The Lamp of Psyche" a woman in love with her husband discovers that, though able bodied, he did not fight in the Civil War. Why? Her idealistic bubble is burst.

"The Valley of Childish Things" is a series of short vignettes that read almost like jokes. It's a strange piece that I'm not sure adds up to much--but that leave one with lots to ponder.

"The Muse's Tragedy" is about a literary critic who finds the companion of a dead writer he's written extensively about. The companion and he forge a relationship, but as the story proceeds, we move from third person to first and learn the truth of the companion's relationship to the dead writer, which is not, at least as she perceives it, the way that others have perceived it.

"A Journey" is a melodramatic tale about a woman who has to bring her sick, dying husband home but who seems unwilling to let anyone else know he's dead once he kicks the bucket. The piece seemed overwritten to me, like something I'd expect to see in some slick magazine for people looking for "thrilling" writing.

"The Pelican," by contrast, is one of the best Wharton stories I've read. It's a tale about a man's various meetings with a woman over the years, but it's tone is such that it gripped me from start to finish.

"Soul Belated," about divorce and non-remarriage, feels both quite modern and a bit dated, insofar as society standards go. Wharton is a curious figure insofar as her writings about relationships go--her modern sensibility fits in well today, but she was writing in and for a time when views were quite different.

"The Twilight of the God" is a short play and seems out of sort with the stories in the collection. It focuses on the ways in which we idealize relationships of the past to the detriment of those in the present.

"A Cup of Cold Water" is another study in class, which so many of the Wharton stories deal in. Here, as with many of her protagonists, a man has gotten in over his head, taking out a gal whose tastes are far too expensive for his salary, and pays the price.

"The Touchstone" is a novella that touches a bit on class (a man needs money to marry) but even more so it deals with questions of what we owe to the dead and to those who love us, even if we don't love back.

"The Duchess at Prayer" and "The Angel at the Grave" both in their own ways deal with the way that one responds to death and to the legacies that people leave behind, the first a statue of a woman at prayer and the second a man's storied ideas.

Fine art figured large in many works by Edith Wharton, as in "The Recovery," which revolves around a woman who marries a painter whose reputation is such that he is hired to paint for various patrons and even to have a show in Europe. In "The Rembrandt" a woman attempts to sell an "unsigned" Rembrandt--something no museum would be interested in precisely because it lacks the signature. "The Moving Finger" combines with art the macabre, when a man who loses his wife asks that a painting of her be continuously updated so that she ages with him. "Sanctuary" focuses on an architect who is faced with an ethical dilemma.

"The Descent of Man" focuses on the difference between economic considerations and values/science in answer to the question regarding the prostitution of one's writing versus true art.

"The Mission of Jane" is a tale about adoption told from the point of view of the ambivalent (even negative) adoptive father. The story ends with the father finding love within him, as one would expect, but not in the same place where one would usually expect.

"The Other Two" is a fine tale ahead of its time, focusing on a newly married man and his relationship with his divorced wife's two previous husbands. "The Reckoning" continues on that theme, with a woman coming to terms with what it really means to divorce someone after her second marriage ends.

"Expiation" is another piece focusing on writers--this time, on the nature of what makes a particular work popular.

"The Lady's Maid Bell" is a well-put-together ghost story with a ghost that is perhaps a bit more interactive than in most such stories I've read. "The House of the Dead Hand" is another ghost story, but only in its final moments--before then, it is a gothic tale around which the mystery of of a masterpiece makes the piece one that one can't stop reading.

"The Introducers" is a forgettable romance story whose plot is predictable from early on. "The Hermit and the Wild Woman" is another less intriguing story, this one reading like a Catholic fairy tale.

The very fine "The Last Asset" is a kind of psychological horror story, insofar as the main character learns how manipulated he has been when helping a lady with her daughter's wedding. "The Pretext" also works off the idea of love used as an excuse to perform certain actions that are not as genuine as one desires; here, an older, married woman falls for a younger man who also falls for her and who drops a fiance because he can't handle marrying someone else, much to family consternation. Does he love her, or is something else going on?

"The Pot Boiler" returns to the theme of art versus money. Here, an artist is convinced to paint portraits of society ladies for good cash, hence, compromising his artistic vision. Wharton seems to suggest that it's okay for folks without real talent to paint (etc.) for money but that it's a waste for a person with talent, who should live in poverty for art until discovered. I used to have conversations with a roommate on this subject, who viewed folks who wrote pop lit as hopelessly compromised. I wasn't totally convinced then that such a person was sacrificing integrity then, and I'm even less convinced now. After all, why should one's artistic skills only be put to use for the highest ends and not for the everyday? You can do "low-end" stuff and use it to pay for the high end, if that's what you want to do.

"The Best Man" focuses on a similar issue of money versus integrity, this time in politics. A governor has a district attorney few like, a man who had had a scandal a few years before and who the governor hired anyway, at his wife's urging. Now, it has come to light that his wife was paid to urge the governor to hire the man, just as she has again been requested now by another party to help get him fired. The news is about to break. What is the governor to do? Sully his (or rather his wife's) reputation by not firing the D.A. or fire him to avoid the scandal? Or?

"His Father's Son" is about a man living his life through his son, who is doing things he dreamed of doing (moving to the big city and becoming a society man).

In "The Daunt Diana" a man collects artwork, sells it, and re-collects it. "The Debt" focuses on a scientist's assistant who upends all that the scientist has done once he's dead, much to the consternation of the scientist's relatives. What is loyalty? To be true to scientific ends or to be true to someone's legacy? Or is the legacy those scientific ends?

"Full Circle" is a deft exploration of the psychology of guilt, as an author hires another author to write fan letters for him.

"The Legend" is about the cult of authorship, how we often esteem highly what others esteem more than we esteem by any sort of objective criteria (if that's even possible).

"The Eyes" and "Afterward" return to the ghost tale. In the former, a man describes a pair of eyes that look at him at night, mostly when he has run-ins with one family. "Afterward" is about a ghost one doesn't know is a ghost until "afterward."

The long "The Letters" closes the collection, focusing on many of Wharton's themes about love but reminiscent in some ways of the 1944 best-seller Forever Amber in its caustic views.

Wharton stands as a writer at the end of one era and the start of another. Her language is sometimes verbose, but her sensibilities are quite modern. In this sense, I find her fiction a joy to read. 

On "The Terrible Old Man" by H. P. Lovecraft (1150 words) ***

"The Terrible Old Man" is a kind of folk tale. It revolves around three men who go looking for treasure--via the robbing of an old man that everyone else is afraid of. They should have known not to pursue their ends. Read the story here.

On "The House Church in the Writings of Paul" by Vincent P. Branick *****

This very short book does a great job of summarizing what we can know about house church in the first century with what little information we have--from Roman society, from the New Testament, and from archaeology, and of course more especially from the writings of Paul.

We see not only how the house church came to be (Branick views time in the synagogues as being minimal and not very successful--something I think he pushes a bit too much, since there are plenty examples of the success in the synagogue, and since Paul and other Christians continued to go there when possible) but how it flourished and finally why it ceased to be. We also see how it worked when it did exist.

Branick explores the social context: the way that rich often hosted and how that set up a power dynamic in the church, how various house churches were networked together, and how churches might manage larger meetings. He discusses the major house churches we know of as discussed in scriptures.

The house church's demise seems to be related to the growth of the church and to the desire for more central authority among the elders in the church. As churches outgrew homes, homes were often turned outright into churches. Likewise, as pastors and elders tried to assert more authority, the idea of meeting in homes, which were thus to some extent under the control of the host--the owner of the home--house churches became even outright banned. As such, the contemporary Catholic church as we know it began to come into being.

On "A Landing Called Compromise" by Donna Baier Stein (4990 words) *****

In this opener from Stein's collection, two women come to terms with the friendship among their sons and another boy who suffers from a terrible accident. While the accident furthers the distance between the two women, an unnatural disaster brings them to a point where common humanity is recognized. Read the story here at the Saturday Evening Post.

On "Scenes from the Heartland" by Donna Baier Stein ***

A standard writing exercise consists of taking an image and writing a description of it. Sometimes this can lead to more, especially as one comes to know the scene or the persons inside the image. This was essentially the process the Stein went through in writing this book. The title of this collection, thus, is an apt one. The scenes here, however, are not photographs but lithographs, all of them created by Thomas Hart Benton, an artist whose work I have only lightly been familiar with before. As an exercise, each story finds success at putting a story to the image. Stein descends into the lives of each character in each piece.

In her afterword, the author notes that she wanted to get out of herself, to write about things that were less familiar to her. The lithographs were a means toward this. The exercise resulted in some very heartfelt meditations. That said, there's a part of me that felt like most of the stories strained at times to overcome a setting in time and place that was not the author's own--by that I mean that many of the tales, while well researched, seemed impersonal and even, to an extent, to fall back on the kind of Hollywood stereotypes one would expect when looking at the image rather than thrusting readers into something unfamiliar and extraordinary.

The best stories, though, do manage to do something to that effect. The most impressive of all is the opener, "A Landing Called Compromise," a tale that seems deceptively mundane but that builds to a great emotional catharsis.

"Trouble at the Dance Hall" explores racial relations at a country bar.

The title "Morning Train" is a play on words, as the story concerns a family whose son is about to go off to war, to the mom's grief and consternation.

"Pointing East, Where Things Happen" revolves around a revival meeting and concerns about faithfulness.

"For Her Own Good" focuses on two children whose father sends his wife (their mother) away for "woman troubles"--as in she has grown dispondent and doesn't do her chores in a satisfactory way. The children, of course, don't care about this--they want mom, and they want to enjoy the fair that they were promised to be able to attend. There's a grief and sorrow that runs throughout this piece, though it's not quite as finally crafted as in some other pieces.

In "The Sweet Perfume of Somewhere Else," it hasn't rained in a long while, and the main character dreams of being somewhere else--or more specifically being with someone else, her teacher. But what she wants proves not to be what she imagined, and the story makes an awful turn that has the girl wishing for childhood.

"Prodigal Son" is a heartbreaking tale about a son who has difficulty dealing with an injury to his father, in some sense blaming himself. The difficulty causes him to desert his family when it needs him most--this for a woman who becomes a quick study in booze and grift.

"Spring 1933" focuses on lost love an abusive father/husband.

The collection ends strongly with "Under the Weight of His Mother's Body," this one about a woman who marries beneath her expectations. I love a story that ends with an opening--especially to more trouble and concern. I'm reminded of a Raymond Carver story called "Neighbors," which ends with a couple who has been doing a bit more than house sitting when taking journeys into another person's house being locked out. That moment bears so much more than the simple pressing against the door. In this tale, an orphan from a small town named Arthur falls for a woman in the big city. A kind man, he's not ready for the demands this woman will make of him or for the demands his small town will either for that matter.

Some common tropes arise throughout the stories. At least two men marry women who then descend into various levels of alcoholism. At least two women mourn over sons. At least two fathers prove abusive of their families to various degrees. In fact, if one were to craft a common trajectory in the stories, it is one of disappointment with life's expectations and hopes. That's not to say the stories are all gloomy--in many cases, the characters find something redeeming among the sad events. Another things Stein does well by the collection is to present us with a view of a community at a particular time and place, the kind of linking that I often enjoy in story collections.

On "Tweet" by Sabrina Orah Mark (1151 words) ***

Mark is a poet, which is obvious from this piece, which plays with language more than anything else one would expect of a story. It's about following, about religion, about looking for something beautiful, about wanting to be beautiful like that something, about not knowing where to go. It is about life and about social networks. Read the story here at the Collagist.

On "Luke the Historian in Light of Research" by A. T. Robertson ****

I came to this book rather oddly. Someone handed me a copy of Robertson's Harmony of the Gospels, a book my father had on his shelf for many years. I perused it--have found it useful in many ways--but I was intrigued by the fact that Robertson had a list of other books he'd written. Harmony is quite old, so I figured these books might well be in public domain, might well be available online, and indeed they were. This was the one that seemed the most intriguing--and indeed, it proved to be very handy. Admittedly, it's a bit dry and in some ways a bit hagiographic, but I like the Robertson takes Luke the writer seriously and that he dispels many of the ideas, still current to this day, that Luke is not the author of the two books credited to him in the New Testament, that those books were written far later. In fact, Robertson has good answer for most of the critics of Luke, as a writer and as a reliable source of information.

What's admirable here also is that we get something of a biography of Luke, as much as one can glean some two millenia later when pretty much all we have for data are the books he penned. Robertson also provides some useful background information--on Roman law, nauticals terms, written speeches, and first-century medicine. Read over the course of months, the book has given me a slight desire to look at one or two other titles by Robertson, still useful these many decades after their original publication. You can find this book on Google Books here.

On "The Tree" by H. P. Lovecraft (1634 words) ***

Two artists vie to build a statue, but in the course of their work, one dies--vaguely becoming a tree. The supernatural effects go on to change the community. Read the story here.

On "Between Athens and Jerusalem" by John J. Collins ****

This book describes how Jewish people and Greek people interacted with one another during the second temple period, especially from 200 BC to 200 AD. Collins does this primarily through looking at apocryphal Jewish writings from this period, but also by looking at historical and social elements.

Gentiles, to some extent, took on Jewish customs during this period--many began to take off one of the days of the week. Some went to synagogue. Many were impressed by Judaism as a kind of philosophic religion or by the fact that it was monotheistic. But the focus isn't as much on those who took on Jewish customs as on the ways that Jews reacted to Gentiles.

In that respect, Jews wrote with various strategies to show that they were in fact every bit as intelligent their Greek conquerors. One strategy included playing up the philosophical angle of the religion. Another strategy included claiming that Greek ideas actually originated with the Jews. With many diaspora Jews, the law, while important, was not the overwhelming concern that we think of it being in rabbinical Judaism. Greeks might have as much affinity and promise of a good life as a Jew if they generally stuck to moral laws of God--dietary laws, circumcision, these things didn't matter so much in much of the diaspora literature.

Collins provides some great summaries and analysis of Alexandrian thought and history, more than I can sum up here, as he does of various specific texts, most of which I have never read.

On "The 37" by Mary Miller (2097 words) *****

"The 37" seems a fitting end to Miller's Always Happy Hour collection. It's about a woman who tries. What I mean is that it's about a woman who, despite her constant anxiety, forces herself to travel, to go to places and to do things that she's uncomfortable with, like riding the bus. And in a sense, that's the most healthy thing a person can do--even if that person's mental state is seemingly unhealthy. Read the story here at Joyland.

On "Always Happy Hour" by Mary Miller ***

There is much that I enjoy about Mary Miller's writing. It's accessible; it's gritty; it's realism in the form that I much enjoyed when I was younger: dirty. These are stories about plain, old everyday life. They're not going to wow you with narrative innovations; rather, they're going to plod along wowing with the content of the words.

"Introductions" is a case in point of how good Miller can be when she is "on." This story is about an insecure woman fretting over her fairly secure relationship. Is she smart enough to be with her well-read boyfriend? good enough? pretty enough? Why is he still with her? Will they last? It's true to the feel of a lot of relationships, which makes me wonder to an extent why we live this way, why we want relationships when we don't feel ourselves worthy of them.

"The House on Main Street" focuses on a similar gal, though here insecurity is replaced by a kind of willingness just to be and a longing to be more. The narrator lives with a Yankee, both students in an MFA program in Mississippi. The New York City roommate frets constantly over how backward the South and southerners are, though showing herself not much more sophisticated than those around her at every turn, except in superficial ways (she drinks wine!). The narrator has settled into a pseudorelationship, a friends with benefits relationship, with another grad student who would marry her in a heartbeat. She thinks a lot about her ex-husband, even calls him occasionally, though she also wonders why, since she tells us she no longer knows what she saw in him. We're left wondering why the heart wants what it wants.

As the collection continues, some of the stories fall into a rut, becoming different versions of one another and harder to distinguish. In "Proper Order" a new (visiting?) professor invites students to her house for a party, largely with the intention of sleeping with one of them. She knows this is a horrible idea, but it's beside the point. Her life choices have generally been bad, and she thinks of how her students still have the ability to make the right decisions and choices, leading to better lives--this, even though the teacher is only shortly out of grad school, though not writing, after publishing a first book.

"The Longest Covered "Walkway in the World" seems a somewhat less effective version of the opening story of the collection. A woman goes out with her boyfriend, a divorce with a child he shares with his wife, taking daily turns at custody. The woman expects, at any time, to be rejected, for the man to go back to his wife. She aims to be a better person, worthy of love, but constantly believes she is incapable of that.

By contrast, "Uphill" is a fun story that seems somehow less than the sum of its parts. In it, a woman travels with her boyfriend to do a favor for a "bad guy"--a friend of the boyfriend's--taking a photo of a woman for which a substantial amount of money will be given, because, you know . . . The whole mystery at the center of this tale is part of what makes it so intriguing. Bad things are probably happening, but you're never certain exactly what those things are. As Mark Richard once said in a workshop I took from him, not knowing is often more powerful.

"Dirty" features some really memorable lines and some interesting characters, though the story as a whole doesn't seem to go much of anywhere. It features a gal and her boyfriend and their close other friend, who is dating a fat girl but won't admit it.

"He Says I Am a Little Oven" is about a woman on a cruise with her boyfriend an his parents. As with the main character in most of the stories in this collection, the relationship seems temporal and unsteady, the woman herself unsteady and often unemployed, dependent on the boyfriend.

"Where All of the Beautiful People Go" is a story about a pool party. A gal is hanging out with a much older female friend who debates whether to return the furniture she racked up on her newly dead mom's credit cards, who has prostituted herself because her husband can't get it up anymore, and who had an accident that may have affected her brain years before the narrator and the woman met. It's also a story about how accidents (and accidents of the mind) can change our whole being and circumstances, how utterly unpredictable our lives can be.

"Love Apples" is a story about a woman throwing her life away, at least that's how I read it. She has a fairly decent, if boring, husband, who she is divorcing to run off with a man from the Internet, her "boyfriend," whom she has never met in real life and who doesn't really know what she looks like. It seems to be a story about really bad decisions we make in pursuing dreams or in living them--for the moment.

The weather plays the role of an important secondary character in "Hamilton Pool," where drought has sapped the landscape in which Darcie and her ex-con boyfriend trundle along in survival mode, not really working, trying to deal with a past that was hard and brutal, one the boyfriend tells first wanted then unwanted stories about.

The title story serves as a kind of template for the book as a whole, insofar as it includes a typical female narrator and her boyfriend. The latter is jobless, has a child he shares with an ex, and the former feels very lucky to have him in her life--so much so that she worries about losing him, even as she drinks a lot.

"Little Bear" does something similar in a very short space, but the focus in this one is on the mom (who is actually married) with her child. She thinks on how ephemeral all these family blessings are and hopes desperately that things don't fall apart.

"First Class" is one of my favorites in the collection. Although boyfriends also feature in the background of the story, the focus is on the friendship between two women, one a spendthrift lottery winner and the other her unhappy hanger-on. The two take a trip with each other, the latter traveling on the former's dime. The hanger-on doesn't like her friend or the trips they take, and yet she finds herself oddly compelled to stay. The story answers the question why.

"Charts" focuses on the relationship between two sisters, one adopted, the other a divorcee who relishes the home, the things, she got in the divorce but who like most of the characters in the book has anxiety issues, such that when her sister comes to visit, she does her best to avoid serious social interaction.

In the end, the collection is, as one review states, a book about Texas (and Mississippi) women making bad choices. And in a sense, it is--but those choices are grounded in a sense of anxiety about losing love or not believing in the value of one's mundane life. And if that's one thing about Miller's stories that places them into a sector of fiction, it is the focus on the mundane, which much like Ann Beattie's or Bobbie Ann Mason's work, eventually makes most of them seem much the same.

On "Happy Hour" by Denis Johnson (1590 words) ****

This short piece about drinking, scrounging by, and trying to score a certain woman expertly exhibits the kind of crazy randomness that rocks Johnson's stories. We're never sure quite where we're going to end up--perhaps popping horse meds. Read the story here at Granta.

On "When Christians Were Jews" by Paula Fredriksen ****

I started off with much excitement and anticipation of reading this book, which I'd been wanting to get to for quite some time. Fredriksen promised to approach the subject of early Christianity, it seemed, from a Jewish perspective, which makes sense, given that the early Christians were Jews. Alas, in some ways, I was a bit disappointed, but in yet others this proved a profitable read.

I'll start with what was not as I had hoped. First, while Fredriksen writes very accessibly, I had a hard time following a through argument. A lot of interesting subjects--and some not so interesting--are explored, but I didn't really feel like there was much of a unifying thesis. Second, Fredriksen's approach is very much one informed by in-vogue secular ideas about the Jesus cult: namely that Jesus was not worshipped in the first generation. That veneration grew with time and mythology. It's an easy assumption to make, because that after all is how most myths are born. But to make such an argument, Fredriksen has to assume that all of the New Testament other than Paul's writings was written significantly later, in the last first century or early second. And even problematic passages in Paul's letters are seen as being mistranslations: Jesus isn't "God" as we read Paul's writing in English but "a god." Fredriksen's stance with regard to her biblical sources is further testified to by the way that she often claims there are contradictions. Some of these I can easily see any reasonable person making such a claim about; but others seem preposterous. For example, she claims that Paul's not writing about persecuting Stephen by name means there's a contradiction and that it likely did not happen as it is written about in the much-later-written Acts. The mere fact that someone does not mention an event in specificity but only in general does not make for a contradiction nor excuse for dismissing its reality. If I were to write that many acts of Islamic terrorism happened in the early 2000s but never mentioned 9/11 specifically, that would not mean that 9/11 did not happen.

What I liked about Fredriksen's work, however, came late in the book, when she focused on the interaction of pagans with Jewish Christians. Here she left me with much to think about. That's not to say there aren't interesting points earlier: they are nestled in among the larger text. What is perhaps most refreshing was exactly what I came to the text to read about: that Fredriksen does not read into the early Christian movement an anti-Judaism. She sees Paul as very much Jewish, which is not something many other scholars seem to recognize. Unlike those scholars, Fredriksen sees Paul as part of the movement that Peter and the apostles forged rather than as one who stole into the movement and introduced a Christianity devoid of its roots.