Why I prefer a paper Bible

There are lots of words that could be used to describe me. Among some of the more reasonable would be ‘Luddite’ ‘technophobe’ or ‘old fashioned.’ One aspect in which this is true is how I read books. I do not own and have no desire to own a kindle or other sort of tablet device to use as my primary mode of reading. I love picking up a real book and reading it. Even when I have read something, I still like dipping back into it occasionally. Though, of late, I haven’t re-read many books entirely, there are a few which I like to return to again and again: Jamaica Inn, Jude the Obscure, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and His Dark Materials are among the works I’ve read more than once.

Above all these, though, is the anthology of writings which is commonly known as the bible. It really is 66 separate books (though some are sequels to earlier books), spanning a variety of genres, telling the history and beliefs of a nation, climaxing in the life, death and resurrection of one man; and of starting to explain what it all means for the wider world.

Though I consider myself a religionless christian (where I use the term ‘religion’ to indicate a life of ritual, rite and ceremony) the bible is still, for me, the primer for my belief.

Also, as a reasonably well-educated person (though, admittedly, I don’t have a PhD) I know the importance of, where feasible, checking your sources. If I see, say, a rumour on Twitter of something significant happening, but it’s not being reported by and of the mainstream media then I become quite skeptical and will (if I think it’s worth the effort) try to trace the origin of the idea.

Likewise, if I hear or read anything about christianity, then my first port of call is usually to check against the bible. Is someone making something up (even if it sounds like the sort of thing that ‘might’ be in the bible), quoting something out of context or choosing to ignore another point of view that might significantly alter their position?

So here I come back to the point about paper books. If I do an electronic search for what I am looking for (say, on Bible Gateway) then that is all I will see. Though I have a concordance, I am reluctant to use that as a first reference. You see, if I only have a vague idea of what it is I want to check, and I don’t ‘cheat’ then what I have to do is read a lot more material than I otherwise might.

For example, if I think that the passage I am looking for is in 1 Corinthians, what I have to do is re-read most of, or maybe all, of the book. What happens when I do this? More often than not, I come across a passage that I can learn something from, or remind myself of, that I had no intention of reading half an hour earlier. Also, by reading large sections quite quickly, I find that the books flow much better than when broken down into small chunks over a long period of time. Even if you take the longest gospel, Luke, this can easily be read in one sitting on a quiet afternoon (if you have the luxury of such a period of uninterrupted peace). Yet many will eek it out over a week, 2 weeks or even longer!

Of course, I put a reasonable time limit on such searches, otherwise I would never reach my goal. This I usually cap at about half an hour; only if I can’t find something after that do I resort to my concordance.

An analogy I find useful is that of climbing Scafell Pike, the tallest mountain in England. I ought to add, I’ve not actually climbed it myself, though I have climbed much taller mountains in the Alps. Many who attempt to conquer it don’t make it to the summit. It’s not because it’s an especially hard mountain to climb, it’s because there are some beautiful sights to be found just off the route to the top. So climbers get distracted by these and by the time they are ready to move on it is necessary to start making their descent, lest they be caught by a creeping nightfall.

The other benefit to the paper bible is the cross-referencing that is included in some. In my NRSV bible, I have a list of cross-references in a thin column down the centre of the page. So what I do is look up the reference whilst keeping a finger in the original passage. Any electronic bible I have used has not been able to replicate this with either the practical ease or the tactile pleasure that you get by flicking through pages.

So what about you? Are you one to adopt any and every new technology as it comes to market or are you more of a stick in the mud like me? Would love to read your opinions.

2011 in books

So another year has passed, and I’ve managed to read quite a few books in that time. In fact, when I compiled the list below, I surprised myself at seeing I had gone through them at a rate of almost one a week; and that included some fairly weighty 500+ page volumes. I try to maintain a balance between what I tend to identify as my 4 main genres of reading, though as you can see I have been far biased towards the christianity end of the spectrum. There are still some books I received for my birthday in autumn and for Christmas which I have not read. In all, I currently have 4 books on the go at present, with a further 24 on my dining table awaiting to be read (including some of the “books of shame” which I want to finish at last). Of these, there is definite bias towards the fiction side, not least a large number of the less well-known works of Thomas Hardy.

So here's the list, along with a couple that I'd started. Every one should have a link to the relevant review.

Christianity (18+2)

Letters & Papers from Prison – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If you want to walk on the water, you’ve got to get out of the boat – John Ortberg
Why men hate going to church – David Murrow
A Place for truth – ed. by Dallas Willard
The Resurrection Of The Son of God – N.T. Wright
The Crucified God – Jurgen Moltmann
The Reason for God – Tim Keller
The Didache: a window on the earliest christians – Thomas O’Loughlin
Why God Won’t Go Away – Alister McGrath
The Problem of Pain – C.S. Lewis
The New Testament & The People of God – N.T. Wright
A Grief Observed – C.S. Lewis
The New Testament Documents: Are they reliable – F.F. Bruce
Lost Christianities – Bart Ehrman
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses – Richard Bauckham
Heresy – Alister McGrath
Surprised by Hope – Tom Wright
Did St Paul Get Jesus Right? – David Wenham
*The Historical Reliability Of The Gospels – Craig Blomberg
*Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes – Kenneth Bailey

Science (10)

Bad Science – Ben Goldacre
Boffinology – Justin Pollard
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity – Lee Smolin
Cycles of Time – Roger Penrose
Gaia – James Lovelock
The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
The Meaning of it all – Richard Feynman
You Are Here – Christopher Potter
The Logic of Scientific Discovery – Karl Popper
God’s Philosophers – James Hannam

Fiction (12)

Love in the time of cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Chosen Ones - Alister McGrath
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
The Shadow of the wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Tess Of The D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Master & Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Curious Incident Of The Dog In the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Kokoro – Natsume Soseki

Other (8)

Captive State – George Monbiot
The Borgias & Their Enemies – Christopher Hibbert
Begat – David Crystal
No Logo – Naomi Klein
Treasure Islands – Nicholas Shaxson
Wired for God – Charles Foster (this could be put into christianity or science, though it doesn’t fit very well in either)
Churchill’s Empire – Richard Toye
Map Addict – Mike Parker


Total = 48+2

* = currently reading (i.e. unfinished)

The books of shame

As you may have worked out, I’m a bit of a bookworm. It’s what keeps me sane on my commute into and out of London every day. I’ve made way through lots great books but I’ve also come across some fairly disappointing ones. There are those, though, that I am ashamed to say I never finished. I have a pile of them on the desk in my study, staring at me. Like Poe’s Raven, they just remain there implacably, goading me to give them another go.

In the meantime, I find excuses to not revisit them, mainly because there are plenty of other books I would rather read as a matter of priority. So here I will swallow my pride and admit to the books that I have but which failed to get through cover-to-cover. Just note this doesn’t include the books I am currently reading (which, if you’re viewing this on the desktop version, you can see in a widget on the left sidebar).

The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren – I briefly went through the reasons for this recently (see point 2).

The Man In The High Castle by Philip K Dick – An odd one. I love Philip K Dick’s short stories and have quite liked a few of his books, but I just couldn’t get into this one. The premise was that the Nazis won the Second World War, but that’s not really very clear in the text. I just got bored and moved on.

The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose – This is another one from a writer I love. My Master’s thesis was written on a subject Penrose pioneered. This is his first book on computing and artificial intelligence (the follow up being Shadows of the Mind). As fascinating as the ideas are, I just got bogged down in the technical computing of Turing machines and pages and pages of binary code and programming instructions.

Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton – one of the most important books in the history of science. Whilst I spent my formative years being taught a lot of ‘Newtonian’ mechanics, I felt it was important to read Newton himself. Similarly, for Euclidean geometry, I read Euclid; for Darwinism, I read Darwin’s The Origin of Species; and for Platonism, I read Plato’s Republic. But this was just so hard to get through. I have subsequently become aware of a hypothesis that Newton was being deliberately obscurantist in his examples in order to avoid plagiarism.

The Book of Dave by Will Self – Truly one of the most frustrating reads of all time. I picked it up on the premise that it was a witty satire on religion, where the diary of a London cabbie became the basis of a post-apocalyptic society. What I wasn’t aware of until I started reading is that the dialogue is written entirely phonetically in a cockney accent. To try and make sense of it, you have to try and read each sentence two or three times. Some things are worth a lot of effort to read; this wasn’t one of them.

God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew – I’ve been questioned as to how I could put this down. It’s been maybe about 12 years since I started this. I just didn’t find it terribly interesting at the time and got distracted by Frank Herbert’s Dune series, the entirety of which I read between my GCSE mocks and my finals, which probably contributed to me losing a grade on 8 out my 9 GCSEs.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad – One of the classics, but one I just struggled to be able to get a handle on. This probably had much to do with the fact that I didn’t try to read it until after I had seen Apocalypse Now. The book I have it in contains many other stories by Conrad, all of which are fairly similar and could be considered as early attempts building up to the masterpiece. But once you’ve read 2 or 3, they do just seem to merge into one.

Does God Believe in Atheists by John Blanchard – Creationist claptrap. I heard him speak when he came to my church, promoting this book, many years ago. The book manages to waste a lot of paper by not saying much. Blanchard wants to start by defining an ‘atheist.’ He does this by first defining a ‘theist’ in an extremely narrow way that would exclude Muslims, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, a fair few christians and many others besides. He goes on to use Richard Dawkins as the primary spokesman for all atheists, getting muddled up between atheism and an understanding of various sciences including evolutionary biology, cosmology and geology. It was just painful to read.

A User’s Guide To The Brain by John Ratey – This is another one that I found utterly fascinating, but at the same time I just couldn’t understand it. It’s a pop science book on neurology, though it doesn’t shy away from the terminology. What I have read, I have loved. I just find it easy to get distracted by other books.

So those are mine. Have you got any books of shame, or have you managed to finish any of those that I haven’t?

Should I write a book?

This is just a quickfire posting, written in haste. I’m rather behind in my blogging as work is taking up the majority of my time and all I have time for when I get home is a quick dinner and a wash, which I prioritise over writing. So I may be infrequently posting, but at least I smell OK and have am ample waistline!

I do have some time off over Christmas, though, and I was pondering writing a book. I don’t have the time needed for something the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) which ended yesterday but I’ve long considered the possibility. I’m no spring chicken anymore, with my 30th birthday not seeming all that far away. So if I weren’t to start now, would I ever?

Then I run into my second problem: what to write? As with my blog, I am full of ideas and great at doing outlines and making a start. What I’m not good at is finishing and polishing the thing off. I now you’re supposed to write about what you know and are passionate about, so I was thinking about doing one of the following:

1) A fictionalised history of the early church, only setting it in modern business. The story would start with the retirement of the CEO and document the spread of the business along with the personal wranglings of the directors, especially the relationship between one of the CEO’s most trusted execs and a new guy who had previously made several attempts to kill the company off.

2) A manifesto for religionless christianity. This is a challenge that Dietrich Bonhoeffer laid down in his Letters & Papers From Prison and one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I don’t know if something like this has been done already, or whether that falls under an Emergent/Fresh Expressions label; to be honest, I don’t know much about those two, so I may be inadvertently following someone else’s footsteps.

3) The joy of science. I would just go through all my science books and notes from college and university, pulling out all the things that I just find fascinating and interesting. It would be a bit of a compendium, with no overall narrative. It should just be something to bring a smile to a geek.

4) A snapshot of the churches in England. Similar to the Mystery Worshipper, my plan would be to take a sample of churches from across the country (one per county/major city) and just find out what is being preached on one particular Sunday, randomly chosen. I would download the sermons off their website, listen to them and write some notes on them. I already download quite a few from churches I’ve never been to and listen to them while I do the washing up.

A lunchtime with Tom Wright

A few weeks ago, I caught wind that Tom Wright was in town. Regular readers will be aware that I have a lot of respect for him. I first came across him when he was made the bishop of Durham in 2003, where I was living at the time. There was a chap at my church who described his job as “reading books on behalf of the bishop.” For the last 20 years he’s been writing his “For everyone” series of the New Testament (NT). This is a series of easily accessible commentaries on each of the books of the New Testament, where Wright has provided his own translation of each book. He has now finished the series and this talk was to publicise his complete New Testament, “The New Testament for Everyone.” After the talk there was to be a Q&A session, before signing some books.

The talk was scheduled for lunchtime, though it was over a mile from my office, so I had to get my skates on a bit. It also happened to be a very hot day in late September, so by the time I got there my shirt was rather sticking to my back and all I could think about was grabbing a cool drink. All that was on offer though was wine, and this was the last thing I wanted on a hot day. As it turned out, I got there a little bit early, which was a slight relief, as I had envisioned bursting in late, sweaty and out of breath. As it was, I burst in early, sweaty and out of breath!

The location, the London Centre for Spirituality, is a slightly odd place. Situated just a few yards from The Bank of England, right in the heart of the City, you are greeted by a small bookshop as soon as you walk in. But at the back of the bookshop is a highly ornate Anglican/Catholic style church building, replete with stained glass windows. There were very few chairs out, maybe around 30-40. Most of those at the back were taken so I perched myself on the front row.

I was expecting to stand out as the only bloke there under 45, but I was pleasantly surprised to find there was a really healthy mix of ages there. They ranged from about 4 or 5 (a young girl brought by her mum) right up to a few who I’d estimate to be in their 80’s.

We got going a few minutes late with a brief introduction from the guy who seemed to be running the bookshop giving a very brief introduction. There then followed a second introduction from Simon Kingston, the head of SPCK Publishing. The thing most noticeable about all this was the odd behaviour of the bookshop owner who, when he wanted to clap, held his arms out at full length in front of him, elbows straight. The other thing to notice was Simon Kingston’s waistcoat, which was brilliant. I wish I had a photo of it, but it didn’t seem appropriate.

Anyway, the main topic was the translation of the NT and the “for everyone” series. Wright had been approached when he was the Dean of Lichfield to write a commentary on every book of the NT. The idea was that it was supposed to be for the person “in the back pew.” In his description of the background and target audience, Wright certainly betrayed his Anglican tendencies, given talk of “pews” and “laity.” In his estimation, only a minority of Christians ever read their bibles, finding an old dusty AV on the shelf to be an intimidating prospect. While this may be true of Anglicans, it is not something I’ve found to be in the case of the various Baptist/charismatic/Pentecostal churches I have been to over the last past 3 decades.

The intention was to make the NT accessible again. One of the things Wright drew on was one part of the Lord’s prayer, where Jesus talked about “giving us our daily bread,” as opposed to merely giving us some bread once and for all, allowing it to go stale. From this, Wright proposed that every generation ought to have its own translation of the bible.

He then talked a little about the difficulties of translation, where one can try and find a one-to-one mapping (i.e. word-for-word) translation such as the King James Version or something that is more phrase-for-phrase such as the New International Version. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. Wright’s view is that you have to try your best to aid the modern reader in understanding the author’s meaning. So when a translation is phrased in archaic language that ultimately turns people off, then the message of the gospel is lost.

One little anecdote he threw in was about the first commentary which was on the gospel according to Mark. He was sat in a church next to someone who looked at him sideways and said, “Are you Tom Wright?” to which he replied, “Yes.” This chap then thanked Tom for Mark for Everyone, as it helped him get through his first year theology exams. Tom slightly despaired at this, as it was not intended as an in-depth theological book. Personally, I haven’t got any of the guides yet. My intention is to wait until they are released as a box set and then get the lot at once.

When we got to the Q&A section at the end, there was an interesting mix of questions, from the bland to the look-at-me-for-being-able-to-ask-a-clever-question. One of those on the bland end was something like, “which was the hardest book to translate?” The questioner may have been angling for a talk on the apocalyptic style of language found in Revelation, though a follow-up hinted that it may have been more aimed at ascertaining (or casting doubt upon) the authorship of 1 & 2 Timothy.

The answer that Tom gave was slightly surprising. In his opinion, the biggest difference between any two books in the Pauline corpus was between 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians. Wright’s hypothesis was that Paul may have suffered some kind of mental breakdown, taking the second half of the first chapter as his evidence towards this. He also said that Paul’s usual writing style was highly fractured, with a totally unorthodox grammar, like someone struggling in their search for an appropriate phraseology.

I managed to get my own question in. As you will have seen from my recent post, I have not yet tackled Wright’s Jesus and The Victory of God (JVG), though I have done both The New Testament and the People of God (NTPG)as well as The Resurrection of the Son of God (RSG). Together they form the first 3 volumes of Wright’s magnum opus, Christian Origins and the Question of God. Sharp-eyed readers will be aware that the correct order is NTPG then JVG then RSG. I am reading out of order, but I still wanted to know when his much-anticipated work on Pauline theology would be ready. The working title is Paul and the Faithfulness of God (PFG). At the start of this year, the expected publication date was November 2011. This was then put back, according to ntwrightpage, to 2012.

Keen to find out when it would be, I simply asked Tom, “Now that the For Everyone project is finished, what’s next?” The first answer was that he wanted to improve his golf handicap, now that he can play at St Andrews. This has dropped him a peg in my estimation, as I am not a fan of golf or its adherents. He went on to list a few other books that were coming out shortly. Some were revisions/modifications of earlier works but the one that took my interest was Simply Jesus, a follow up to Simply Christian. Only then did he get on to talking about PFG. The latest expected publication date is now “sometime in 2013.”

Probably the question that elicited the most interesting answer was when someone asked how Wright ensured that his own prejudices would not creep into the translation. Aside from getting it checked by Greek scholars who he knew and trusted (as well their research students!) he described some of the more traditional differences. This was of particular interest, as the chap sat behind me was a minister at, apparently, the only German-speaking Roman Catholic church in London. I wouldn’t have expected Wright to be flavour of the month amongst Catholics, given some of his views, so having a catholic there seemed a little (and I stress little) like Fred Phelps going to Greenbelt. Wright recounted how he was, “the Anglican observer at [some meeting of Catholics] at the Vatican,” in 2008. His description made it sound like a Catholic version of an Anglican synod, though I am not particularly well versed in the intricacies of high church hierarchical bureaucracies.

At this meeting, some of the African catholic leaders were advocating a move away from the Latin Vulgate, which has been a sticking point for centuries. Tom just mused what might have happened if this smidgeon of open-mindedness had been present in 1525, which prompted a round of nervous laughter from those present.

Overall, it was well worth making the effort to go down. I got my copy of RSG signed and I did decide to buy a copy of the NT translation. I’m not sure if Tom was annoyed that the book I asked him to sign was one that I hadn’t just bought, but then again he may have been pleased to see it had very clearly been read.

If you’ve managed to read this far and still have no idea who I’m talking about, then please see below a video of him talking at a Veritas forum a few years ago. His topic is very much in line with his book, Surprised by Hope, which I have almost finished reading and I hope to post a review of it online next week. Some of his ideas (not least, those on “hell”) have been quite controversial. He touches on that here briefly, though whether or not you agree with him, I think the video demonstrates him to be very learned, erudite and in possession of a very English wit.

The forthcoming reading

It was my birthday at the weekend. As I spend a large amount of my time commuting, I tend to read a lot. That’s why the tag “book review” is the most frequently used on this blog. The reason for a recent relative paucity over the couple of months has been because I’ve been reading much longer books. I am extremely grateful to my family who know me well and utilised the Amazon wishlist I set up and I got a lovely pile of books, along with a copious amount of chocolate.

I had a great day with most of the family, frantic kids & all. They seem to think I’m an OK uncle and I like giving cuddles and tickles and posing questions that make them think, questioning their assumptions. They, in turn, like to whisper to one another conspiratorially and try to trick me.

So on Saturday night I sat down and tried to order my reading. You may notice a tendency that my reading is roughly split between theology, science, fiction and “other,” where the latter may include history, business, philosophy or just anything that takes my fancy. I wanted to order it so I’d try and alternate the style of book I’d be reading, as well as who the book was from.

So here’s the list I’ve come up with. You can expect to see reviews of the following over the coming months:

The Return Of The Native by Thomas Hardy
Did St Paul Get Jesus Right? by David Wenham
Churchill’s Empire by Richard Toye
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
God’s Philosophers by James Hannam
The Historical Reliability Of The Gospels by Craig Blomberg
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
Map Addict by Mike Parker
Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Kenneth Bailey
The Limits Of Science by Peter Medawar
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
The Early Church by W.H.C. Frend
Histories by Herodotus
The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis
On Space And Time by various contributors including Alain Connes, John Polkinghorne & Roger Penrose
The Iliad by Homer
Jesus And The Victory Of God by N.T. Wright
The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

When I piled them up on top of one another, the pile was 16.75 inches high. I sometimes get asked how I manage to cope with 2.5-3.5 hours of commuting per day. With this lot on my bag, I’ll be looking forward to getting on an early slow train, where I can grab a seat and lose myself in each and every one of them.

Book Review: Lost Christianities by Bart Ehrman

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with this book. I had heard various things about Ehrman, though had not read anything of his before. Since he is a former student of Bruce Metzger, I expected extremely careful and thorough scholarship. At the same time, I had heard that his own beliefs had covered a gamut of viewpoints over the years from Christian to atheist to agnostic, and that his writings were deeply critical and challenging to modern day Christians. So, unsure of precisely what to expect, I opened his book with an open mind.

I have to start with a comment on Ehrman’s writing style and communication abilities: they are superb. He makes his case very cogently and acknowledges where there are doubts and possible objections to his propositions. Thoroughly honest in his approach, his model of writing is one that could well be followed by many others. Few theologians I have read have written with such clarity.

So what are these propositions? Well, he invents a new term for an old group known to any historian of church history. The early church leaders are now rebranded as “proto-orthodox.” That is, a group of people in the 2nd-4th centuries whose beliefs became what we now recognise as Christian orthodoxy. To summarise, imagine a young tree sapling. The traditional view of church history has been that “heretical” views and non-orthodox texts and opinions grew out of early Christianity as a kind of ‘branch’ that either was cut-off or died anyway, leaving the main trunk intact. The revisionist viewpoint espoused by Ehrman was that there were lots of saplings growing in parallel, and that in the battle for survival, most of the saplings were killed and the victors, being the ones who wrote the history, distorted the true picture of what happened. Ehrman’s hypothesis, crudely outlined above, owes a great deal to Walter Bauer, who is given due recognition and acknowledgement in the text.

This certainly should raise a few eyebrows amongst historically-minded Christians. For the first third of the book, which I thought were the most interesting, he looks at a few early non-canonical writings at the stories they contain as well as the stories behind their discovery and their authorship. Throughout this discourse, there is this thread of “proto-orthodox” though it seems entirely superfluous to the discussion, and no attempt is made to justify it. The central third of the book looks at the different bodies of beliefs, looking at the Ebionites, the Marcionites and there is a broad overview of the broad spectrum of belief which fell under the umbrella term of Gnosticism.

It is only in the last third of the book that Ehrman attempts to justify his proposition of the “proto-orthodox.” Crucial to this discussion is the authorship of the books of the New Testament. Here is where some of his arguments seem to lack coherency. For example, he states (quite correctly) that we have no surviving “original” documents but then goes on to argue that the “proto-orthodox” have altered the originals to suit their own doctrines. But if you do not know what the originals said, how can this be justified?

Likewise, I am well aware that there are controversies over the identity of the authors of the New Testament, but Ehrman does not really explore these. On a number of occasions, he states that the books of 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus and 2 Peter were probably forgeries, though no evidence to support this proposition is ever given. Instead we have reference to “most scholars” though these are not named or referenced. So, whilst being eager to get to grips with this more revisionist viewpoint, I was left frustrated that it was not well supported.

In conclusion, I do not find Ehrman’s revisionist definition of early Christians as “proto-orthodox” to be convincing. It is well-argued, but the evidence presented just doesn’t seem to provide sufficient weight to back up his proposition. The conclusion of the book is also slightly odd. Ehrman recognises that there are some elements of heretical groups that are making a comeback in one guise or another, and he seems to suggest that a plurality of belief and the resurrection of some gonostic or Marcionite thinking is necessarily a good thing. But to me, applying Occam’s Razor, the simplest and most logical explanation behind the demise of the heretical elements looked at here were because they were late inventions that grew out a pre-existing orthodoxy that was already in place from the time of Acts. These later ideas lacked that most important ingredient: truth. While having different opinions is perfectly welcome, I do not agree with Ehrman that this in itself is a good thing if it introduces untruth. I have great respect for his writing and his research, and would recommend this book to anyone interested in this history of early Christianity and the heretical beliefs that grew out of it. However, I would recommend it as part of a wider study, which I shall be doing myself. I have, as you may see, recently completed The New Testament And The People of God by N.T. Wright and on my table, waiting to be read this summer/autumn are Alister McGrath’s Heresy: A History of defending the truth and W.H.C. Frend’s The Early Church.

Book Review: The New Testament Documents – are they reliable? by F.F. Bruce

It has to be noted that it is quite a short book (123 pages excluding preface, bibliography, etc.) though it does pretty much what it says on the tin by looking at some of the evidence in support of the reliability of the New Testament. Regardless of whether you agree with Bruce’s analysis, it has been a hugely influential book in modern christian thought.

In Bruce’s analysis, he does skim on some of the detail which I admit frustrated me a little. For example, in the first chapter, he looks at the date of the authorship of the books of the New Testament. I felt that this was a little too brief and that there could be plenty of arguments posed for dates slightly later than Bruce supposes.

After looking at the dates, he begins to look at the contents of the gospels, the importance of Paul’s writings, the historical detail in Luke’s writing (in particular, the book of Acts), before going on to look at other evidence outside of the New Testament such as archaeological evidence and other non-christian written sources.

The book serves as a great introduction to the subject of biblical criticism as a defence for its authenticity, though it is by no means a comprehensive survey. The non-canonical writings of the early church and of the gnostics are given extremely little space. But it is nothing more than an introduction. For the open-minded sceptic, who is willing to engage with the evidence and is looking for a comprehensive review, this is not the most convincing case. There are some gems to be found, though most of them lie towards the front of the book.

In the version I have, there is a great preface written by N.T. Wright, in which he sums up quite well the best use for this book: “The [person] who reads Bruce today will want to supplement him by reading judiciously in more recent writers. But he remains an excellent foundation.”

Reader's Digest

Welcome to another of my readers’ digests.

This has been under composition for a little while, so I apologise if some of the stories linked to seem a little out of date. This one is quite short and sweet.

I am always fascinated by how the mind works, and this story from the Independent shows what can happen when things go wrong. I can barely imagine what it would be like to wake up one day and suddenly find I had aged nearly 20 years. It certainly made me have a quiet think about what I’d like to do with my life.

In the world of particle physics, some scientists in Japan have claimed that neutrinos may vary from one form to another. The full paper is here. I remember when I went to the cinema to be subjected to the awfulness that was 2012, that I nearly fell off my seat laughing at the prospect of neutrinos “mutating” to heat the earth. While that still seems far more in the realm of fantasy, this research, if true, may go 0.1% of the way towards seeing that as a possibility.

There’s an interesting piece in the New York Times about a new book by someone called Simon Baron-Cohen (I wonder if he’s related to Sacha) on the science of evil. It looks like it could be a thought-provoking read, though it won’t be jumping to the top of my reading list. The NY Times article also has a link to an extract from the book, if you’re interested.

More science, here. This time a black hole may have been observed destroying a nearby star. The paper can be found here

Has a new particle been detected? Can’t find the paper reference for this one. If anyone has it, let me know and I’ll add the link.

Finally, there’s a lovely article here in the Indy about books, which you may have worked out are of particular interest to me.