On "Herod" by Peter Richardson ***

Richardson's book focuses on the first Herod. It's a biography based largely around the work of Josephus, and it is focused primarily on the political rise and fortune of the king, recounting much in the way of his war exploits and quarrels within his family.

I came to this book not so much wanting to read about Herod as wanting to read more about the culture from which he derived--the Idumeans. The Edomites, of course, have a long history, but I wanted one that focuse specifically on the culture of the people at this time, the time of the Herods. There was no such book that I could find, so I figured a book about Herod might give me some of that. Indeed, this book did.

But because the focus was, as it should have been, being a biography, on Herod's political career, it was something of a disappointment for me.

Richardson uses fiction techniques to start and end his work. He begins with Herod's death, describing it from the point of view of various peoples who would have known him--radical zealots, Romans, Pharisees, and so on. Indeed, how he was remembered would have depended in many ways on what your own political and religious views were. He was, on some level, very religious, and another, just the opposite. He was an opportunist. He was one who did well for his adopted Jewish people. He was one who sold them out to Rome for his own gain. He was one who did the best he could to support Judah at a time of Roman hegemony. The conclusion reaches for similar points, documenting his various accomplishments.

In between, we get the actual biography, which is, as many histories can be, a bit overwhelming with its accounts of battles. Such rarely keeps me wanting to read, even in books that are outright about wars. After so many, they begin to seem similar, like so much maneuvering to attain specific ends. I tend to prefer to know those ends and in general how they were obtained--not so much the specifics.

The parts that spoke most to me, thus, were those that focused more on Herod's building program, which was impressive. Also of interest--though this too got bogged down in details--was his growing paranoia and the destruction of his family largely by himself. Finally, a mere chapter--but an interesting one--is devoted to his descendents, the tetrarchs that followed him and the final kings.

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.