On "Playing for Thrills" by Wang Shuo ***

This book starts off with a very interesting premise, arguably even a good one. It's a mystery. A guy finds out he's the major suspect in a murder case, the death of a friend of his ten years ago. He's got to clear his name, find an alibi. The week of the supposed murder, however, he doesn't remember. Where was he? What was he doing? Could he have been the one who murdered his friend?

Imagine The Hangover as a murder mystery, and you've got kind of the gist of this work. The protagonist doesn't have a great memory. Of course, I probably wouldn't know my whereabouts from a given week ten years ago either, except that I live a very humdrum life and so could probably point to being at work, but after work? I would have no idea and little way to track that down if I hadn't taken notes in some way. Or maybe the main character was on a bender. The novel then tracks his attempts to find out what he was doing that week, as he interviews friends he knew and places that he frequented at the time.

The protagonist is something of a ne'er-do-well, a guy who spends most of his time gambling and playing around with friends, and when he can still manage, chasing tail. So are most of the characters in the novel. This makes for some degree of difficulty telling the characters apart. There's a man in a striped shirt whom nobody knows who was at the last dinner at which they saw the murdered man. But later in the book, other friends wear such a shirt, the murdered man does in a dream/memory, and even the protagonist. The characters are in a way interchangeable, which makes them a bit less interesting.

And when one doesn't have characters to root for, it all becomes about the plot. This plot is loose and goofy but substantive enough to sustain two-thirds of the book. But at that point, the novel takes an odd turn, one that plays well with the kind of players all these people are but that blows all the suspense in the book and makes it, well, not terribly interesting anymore. One gets the sense that even the author isn't all that interested anymore, from the way the last few pages of the book go.

There's probably a lot here that is missing in translation. Footnotes explain some of the cultural context, some of which I knew but most of which I didn't. There are jokes that flew right by me, not being Chinese, references to classic works and authors. Such makes me appreciate all the more works that manage to speak to a person in translation, because they speak not just to the culture in which they arose but to the human experience. This book didn't really do that, even though it made a stab at trying to say something about identity and jokes and other human things; there wasn't, in the end, enough heart.

On "Christianity in the Second Century" by Emily J. Hunt. ****

The subtitle of this book is "The Case of Tatian," which is what this book is really about. I'd have flipped the two titles were it me, since the main title is deceptive and too broad for what the author does here. Certainly, some of what she writes about Tatian establishes ideas about broader trends in second-century Christianity, but the book does not really lay claim to that focus. If I'd wanted a general book about second-century Christianity, I'd have turned elsewhere. Lucky for me, I came to this work because I was looking for a work about Tatian, and it was a ready read.

Tatian was a second-century Christian who grew up a pagan in Assyria. At some point, he went west, became a student of Justin's and then, after Justin's death, apostasized, becoming a gnostic, moving back toward Assyria, and disappearing from history. Or so that is what most histories will tell you, based on the writings of various early church historians. Hunt calls this apostasization into question. The second century was rife with different points of view, and while Tatian's may not have been mainstream, they were hardly gnostic. It seems that the label was assigned him possibly for political reasons by these later church historians.

The two works Tatian is most known for are his Oration to the Greeks, which still survives, and the Diatesseron, one of the first harmonies of the Gospels--and the only version of the Gospels available in much of the church of the East for the first few centuries. Hunt looks closely at the first work to ferret out Tatian's points of view and his likely influences. She comes to believe that Tatian was heavily influenced by his teacher Justin and possibly eastern Christian view but not as much by the Gnostic Valentinus or Greco-Roman philosophy (except insofar as the ideas of philosophy permeated early Christianity generally). There are, of course, some problems with depending so much on the Oration, the main one being that we're not sure when it was written and and therefore what stage of Tatian's point of view it represents. If written early, he could well have changed much of his perspective later on (Hunt doubts not so much the early writing but the idea that he would have actually changed his point of view so greatly as to accept Gnostic ideas, something I find a bit dubious, knowing how some people really do flip in terms of belief systems over the course of their lives); if written later, of course, we're on pretty firm ground to use it to argue that the various early historians had Tatian wrong in many respects.

As per the Oration and what little we have of the Diatesseron, it is evident that Tatian did have ascetic sympathies, much like most other Eastern Christians. It's also clear, however, that he did not believe in more than one God, an evil and a good god, a pleroma of aeons, or the immortality of the soul, as most Gnostics would have. Rather, like Justin, he embraced the resurrection. He thought there to be just one God (curiously, he rarely mentions Jesus in the Oration). He believed demons to be fallen angels. Perhaps one of the most unique aspects of his thought, insofar as what Hunt describes, was his belief that people had been created with the spirit of God but that that spirit was removed when Adam sinned; the Christian process thus is one of having that spirit restored.

As with so much of early Christian history, however, much of Tatian's life and thought is hidden in shadows. We have only the one work and a few early comments about him, each with their own agenda. Hunt's work adds now, many centuries later, to that set of comments; there have been and will be others to do so.

On "Marcion" by Adolf von Harnack ***

This introduction to Marcion is one of the few book-length critical studies on the gnostic teacher of the second century--Marcion, the creator of a New Testament consisting only of seven of Paul's letters and an edited version of the Gospel Luke. That seems to be his main claim to fame, when one reads about him in other works. He posited that the god of the New Testament was a different one than the Old Testament and that all the rest of the Bible was twisted by Jewish thinkers and believers, who had fallen for the doctrines of the old fake god.

As one commentator said Harnack's work, Harnack makes Marcion almost into a Protestant hero. Here is a man who understands the difference between the god of the Old and New Testament, who had the guts to know that grace is by faith alone. Indeed, parts of Harnack's work definitely come across that way, especially in the introduction and conclusion. But Harnack does draw a line at claiming there were actually two gods; he sees that as Marcion's bridge to far for Christians.

In between, however, Harnack does a good job of showing some of the subtle aspects of Marcion's thought. One would get the sense that Marcion was an antinomialist, and yet in reality, he was an ascetic. If the Old Testament is the work of a evil creator god, then one must do what one can to prevent the continuation of the creation. That means no sex, no joy in physical things. They're all fake and keep people bound to that fake god, just as much as the law, so one is to avoid them. Interestingly, while Marcion saw much of the New Testament as corrupted (thus his throwing away of much of it), he saw the Old Testament as an unadulterated complete work. And it is in fact the means by which one comes to know the difference between the good god and the bad one, so even though he dismisses it as scripture, it has a purpose. As Harnack implies, Marcion wouldn't have even had a problem with much of the content of the law (no murder, adultery, etc.); rather, his problem was with the motivation for keeping that law. The good god is all love; he will not judge. Rather, one falls out of contact with that god and thus loses out on the goodness. The evil god, by contrast, punishes for not keeping his law. But the evil god and his law will one day pass away with all that is physical.

Of particular interest to those technically inclined is Harnack's inventory of items that Marcion deleted from or changed in Luke's Gospel and even from Paul's letters (I hadn't realized he'd made changes to Paul's letters before; makes one wonder what exactly Marcion thought he was looking at that he felt like he knew better than the texts handed to him; I mean, if these works are full of errors, why bother trying to rescue them?).

Marcion, according to Harnack (and many who have written about Marcion since), was also the impetus between the canonization of the New Testament and the organization of the larger Christian church. In this view, his New Testament predated that of the orthodox church; it was to refute him that the church came up with its own list of acceptable books. Likewise, his church was earlier organized, in this view, with a hierarchy of structure and government.