On "A History of Christianity in Asia, volume 1" by Samuel Hugh Moffett ****

If you want a book about world history from about 0 to 1500, as processed through the lens of the spread of Christianity, you probably can't do better than this work. Moffett lays down the various theories about the earliest church, much of which we are essentially dependent on legends for. How much of any of these are true, we don't know. Then, he proceeds to explore the Nestorian and Jacobite faiths as they developed out of the more known portions of Christian history.

Christianity in the East at one time might well have had more adherents than in the West, but you wouldn't know it today. The history Moffett tells explains many of the reasons. Unlike in the West, Christianity in the East never had a major empire-wide political promoter--no Constantine--though there were occasional small kingdom adherents. As such, its popularity remained always at the mercy of whichever entity was in charge, as well as remaining often something seen as "foreign." Some kingdoms, such as that of the Mongols, were relatively open religiously, thus allowing Christianity to thrive as one religion among many, but others not so much. Thus, Christianity, rose and fell and rose and fell again throuough Asia, with the rise of various kingdoms and with the advent of Islam, whose influence grew stronger than in the West.

All that said, 1500 years across thousands of miles of land is a lot of material to cover. At some point, though accessibly written throughout, the work became for me more a set of names with a few highlights. I found it hard to keep track of all that was going on. Indeed, any history of nations outside the West, being less familiar culturally to me, tends to be difficult reading, a testimony to what we focus on in school. When more is unfamiliar, it's harder to find holds on which to ground one's self; were I to go read more and more histories of the East until events and people became easier to place, I'd probably find this book more accessible.

On "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" by Ron Hansen *****

Perhaps I ruined this book by watching the movie a few months ago, unwilling to wait to see something that had gotten such great reviews. The book received great reviews too, and I understand why, even if as I read, I often saw Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck in my mind. In a way, seeing the movie first may have helped, insofar as the book includes a lot of characters and keeping them straight might have been more difficult had I not known where the story was already going.

Hansen comes from a different school of fiction writing than that to which I've become accustomed and generally come to see as professional. What I mean is that unlike so many purveyors of modern fiction, he doesn't seem to descend as much from the concrete, action-is-character line of writers like Hemingway or Carver. Hansen has no problem using abstractions, describing people's character and feelings without reference to an act. Yet he manages to do so with great power. The book is also heavy on physical descriptions of people and places, which while beautifully rendered, seem somehow pertinent despite their length.

As historical fiction, there's a degree to which it's sometimes hard to distinguish what is fact and what fiction. Hansen noted that he didn't make up anything that would have strayed from known facts, but clearly in smaller scenes, he rendered some dialogue and so forth (but how much of this itself was pulled from newspaper accounts and so on is difficult to know without looking at his source material). At points, the novel felt more like history, as he covered material that seemed less connected to the action, providing readers with information about people and what happened to them once they left the main plot of the story. The last portion of the book, likewise, feels a bit of a letdown, as insofar as once Jesse is killed and we focus almost entirely on Ford, the chronological pacing picks up rather rapidly. Years go by in the page span where previously only a few days would have. And yet, in a way, that's Hansen's point. The letdown is not just ours but also Ford's. He had thought killing Jesse would bring him fame and fortune and popularity. He had not considered the emotional consequences (after all, he kind of idolized Jesse but also felt a bit envious of Jesse's own fame and wanted that for himself--even as Jesse was a quasi friend). In the end, the fame turned out to be more infamy, and the fortune short lived. As Ford notes, at one point, he died long before his actual death.

It's curious also how one comes to care about both James and Ford, who were both rascals and not people we would term good human beings insofar as what they did to others. Yet even after all the killing and stealing James did and how much you hate the way he treated others, when James dies, you end up feeling a little sad and a little angry at Ford; likewise, you feel somewhat similarly about Ford at his death, though he'd proven to be not much better. Perhaps that's because Hansen portrays them a little as men who come to rue their life choices and who wish that somehow, could they go back to pivotal moments in their past, they'd have taken a different path, like the one Jesse hopes for for his son, whom he shelters from stories about his bandit life.

On "The Question of Canon" by Michael Kruger *****

This well-argued book essentially attempts to show the difference between the extrinsic theory of biblical canon formation and the intrisic theory and the shortfalls of the former, which seems to be the more popular contemporary view. The extrinsic view of the canon posits that it was created by the church in the third or fourth century and that many works were considered--in other words, that there was little agreement regarding what constituted scripture until the church defined it in this late period.

Kruger argues that what constituted scripture came into being much earlier than that--possibly as early as the early second century--even if the canon was not established until many years later. Unlike those who claim the Christianity was an oral faith until much later, he shows how even if most people were illiterate, the Jewish faith--and the Christian faith that derived from it--was a textual religion. That is, these faiths dealt in texts, which served as authority. Oral readings of texts still constitute a written center to the religion.

He also shows how even in the second century, many of Christian writers talked of "scripture" when referring to many of the works that would become part of the New Testament. Even the apostles themselves seemed conscious of their attempt to forge a scripture that would, in fact, complete the scripture of the Old Testament.

What I like about Kruger's work (but also what is perhaps a bit maddening about it too) is that he doesn't overplay his hand. He makes little claim to the idea that the New Testament "canon" existed by the second century, only that the outlines of it were largely already there. Indeed, there is little one could point to that would definitively show that all the New Testament books had been selected by that period. And yet, at the same time, the fact that all these folks in the second century refer to New Testament scriptures as scripture does seem to suggest to me that perhaps a canon really already did exist (Eusebius and others' debates about what counted notwithstanding). After all, there is not a lot of debate about what constitutes New Testament canon to this day, and that suggests, as David Trobisch's work suggests, that fairly early on, someone "edited"--or rather, selected--what would constitute the collection such that the matter was closed; what we lack, alas, is hard documentation.

On "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" by Michael Ondaatje ****

When I set out to read a group of Westerns, a genre I have had little experience reading, I mostly intended to focus on the pulp fiction, and indeed, most of the books so far that I've ready have fit into that category, but now, for the last few, I'm moving toward reading "high-brow" Westerns, those that intend to be Literature with a capital L. Ondaatje's work certainly fits into that because it's not a Western aiming for a popular audience, with a heavy-handed plot and a likeable character at its center. Rather, it's a book of poetry, with the legendary Western antihero Billy the Kid at its center.

The book, in large part, is a kind of "found poetry," extracts from real-life documents rearranged in a poetic format. Ondaatje aims to describe the final days of Billy from multiple points of view, as his partners are gunned down and he is taken prisoner by and then escapes from his one-time friend and now sherriff Paul Garrett. All this seeps through what narrative is provided, because, this being poetry, we're more focused on the thoughts of the people at any given moment than on what's happening. In that sense, not having read Billy's history, I found the earlygoing parts of the book difficult to follow, but as I read on, I began to understand who was talking when and how events came to be.

As a piece of descriptive and experimental literature (Ondaatje includes various types of prose, rhyming poetry/lyrics, free verse, photographs), the Collected Works works admirably. One gets a pretty good set of views of the young man--from his friend, lovers, enemies, and self--while also coming to see how real-life people enter into myth. It was an enjoyable read, though I can't say that the work made me empathize too much with anyone or made me want to read a ton more about Billy.

On "The Early Christians in Ephesus from Paul to Ignatius" by Paul Trebilco ****

I was looking for a book about the Johannine cricle or about second-century Ephesus, and there really don't appear to be as many as I thought there would be. Trebilco's book is a huge tome, though, and was well worth time involved in getting through it, though it only goes up to the time of Ignatius.

Trebilco largely makes the argument that Ephesus housed several Christian groups and that certain groups were friendly toward one another, while others were beyond the pale. Pauline and Johannine circles, in other words, borrowed from each other, but Nicolatains and the like were not acceptable. These folks left the Johannine circle, forging their own docetist circle that were not acceptable to Ignatius.

The first small bit of the work looks at the social context, providing a short history of Ephesus, its religious and trade importance, and the Jewish community within it. Next, Trebilco turns to the accounts in Acts and in Paul's letters, finding Acts to be mostly trustworthy. He's less certain about what we can glean directly from Paul about Ephesus, as the Pauline imprisonment in Ephesus isn't perhaps as clear as might be desired. The letter to the Ephesians, furthermore, was likely not directly to the group--in fact, it may have actually been written in Ephesus. It bears, in early manuscripts, a blank to whom it is written, suggesting that it was an enciclical for sorts, sent out to various churches and that Ephesus was just a convenient name to attach to it in the end.

Next, Trebilco turns to the pastoral epistles, the Johannine epistles (and gospel), and Revelation. He takes the view that the pastorals were pseudonymously written by Paul by people from a Pauline group in Ephesus. The Johannine works, he believes, were written not by the apostle John but by John the Elder. The pastorals were written in the 80s, the letters from John in the 90s, so we're looking at two groups nearly contemporarily to each other. From this, Trebilco draws out various ideas about what the leadership practices and theological concerns were among the two groups.

Although one has to go along with Trebilco's ideas with regard to authorship and time of writing (which are fairly common among scholars) to glean what he does about the community(ies), the argument is well put out (if often redundant) such that his ideas are easy to follow. I didn't learn quite as much about Christianity in Ephesus as I would have liked, but what Trebilco shows is that after Acts, we really have little to go on other than theoretical leaps about where works derived and what those works represent about the people who wrote them and to whom they were written.