This is pretty fucked up, too. But not as scary as the Disney Weddings.
CC
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Must romance also be clichéd?
This post has been kicking around in my head for awhile, probably since I first read a magazine article a bit ago about what the average woman finds romantic.
It bugged me how clichéd it all was. Women liked flowers, stuffed animals, and long walks on the beach. All very predictable.
I guess this is how we get 2300 couples per year getting married in Walt Disney World. I had the third couple I know mention that they as adults love to go to Disney for a romantic vacation.
So what's the deal with that?
The guy tonight was telling me about how he and his wife were going to eat in the big castle with a view of the whole park.
Barf.
I did some Googling and found that Disney does a brisk business in honeymoons and romantic vacations.
And weddings. Carefully packaged weddings.
I kid y'all not. I love Mickey and Minnie. Could they act as Best Man and Maid of Honor at our wedding? is a question on the Disney wedding FAQ.
(Answer: "No," oddly enough. Though they will show up at your reception if you pay for it.)
I am so disturbed.
CC
It bugged me how clichéd it all was. Women liked flowers, stuffed animals, and long walks on the beach. All very predictable.
I guess this is how we get 2300 couples per year getting married in Walt Disney World. I had the third couple I know mention that they as adults love to go to Disney for a romantic vacation.
So what's the deal with that?
The guy tonight was telling me about how he and his wife were going to eat in the big castle with a view of the whole park.
Barf.
I did some Googling and found that Disney does a brisk business in honeymoons and romantic vacations.
And weddings. Carefully packaged weddings.
I kid y'all not. I love Mickey and Minnie. Could they act as Best Man and Maid of Honor at our wedding? is a question on the Disney wedding FAQ.
(Answer: "No," oddly enough. Though they will show up at your reception if you pay for it.)
I am so disturbed.
CC
Not too shabby
CC went to the 85th best public high school in the nation.
What really sucks is that our football rival was 80th.
CC
What really sucks is that our football rival was 80th.
CC
A new book I'm really enjoying
On my way back up north from Margaret's funeral, I stopped at the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, NC. It was a small town museum and quite charming for what it was. (Item: In addition to teaching, Margaret ran a small town museum, so the trip felt like something of a pilgrimage.)
At the time, I found the story of Bert Pfeiffer, a dutch artist obsessed with Gardner far more interested in Gardner's own. Pfeiffer survived a concentration camp only to become obsessed with Ava Gardner and spend the rest of his life endlessly painting her. Now that's a story.
Even though Gardner's own small-town-girl-made-good history has less pathos, I became interested in Gardner and have tivo'd several of her movies since coming back. I asked Edie to find me a copy of her autobiography. Edie came through and I started it tonight. It is really delightful, actually far better written than Katharine Hepburn's autobiography, and y'all know I'm loath to admit that anybody can do anything better than Kate.
Here's a passage I especially liked:
My parents' sedate form of religion didn't appeal to me, but Elva Mae, the sweeet little blakc girl who helped Mama out in the kitchen, used to take me to services at the Tee's Chapel. And I just fell in love with the singing and the preaching and the rest of that old time religion.
It would start with everything quiet and reverent. The preacher would warm up with a few quotes from his bible. Then, out of nowhere, he'd catch fire and give everyone hell. I'm here to tell you, there ain't much forgiveness in that old time religion. That particular savior was a mean son of a bitch. If you sinned, honey, he was going to get you, no doubt about it. "All of you down there in this congregation is sinner," the preacher would thunder, "An not sinner's going to escape hellfire and damnation, no sirree, no siree.
Crouching down next to Elva Mae,, I jsut knew I was one of the real dyed-in-the-wool sinners. Sinning when I broke a school house window during the summer so that Al and my friends could play in a classroom. Sinning when I hung out with Preston Lee and his brothers, boys who knew all the best cuss words and weren't afraid to teach me how to use them. Mama, though, would have a fit if she caught me saying them, and they slip out to this day. They sure do give a satisfying jolt to a sentence.
And most especially I was a sinner at watermelon harvest time, when we raided our neighbors' fields. Not that we needed to. So many watermelons were grown that lots were left to rot in the fields. But we were theives, we were excited by the dark notion of going out and stealing someone else's. And it was hard work, too. When you're six or seven, the damn things weigh a ton--you could barely struggle along with one in your arms. But it was worth it when you got into the shade of a tree and started munching.
My private catalogue of sins was invariably interrupted by a "shouting." A woman in the congregation would suddenly leap to her feet and scream "Oh, my Lord! Oh, my Lord! I"m in the arms of Jesus! I'm in the arms of Jesus! Let me pray in the arms of Jesus!"
That kind of outburst was like a red flag to the rest of the folks. All the sinners would go wild, shouting, praying, running down the aisles, leaping in the air. I guess it helped to drive the sinning out of them. I watched, holding my breath, my little eyeballs out on stalks. Then the frenzy would ebb out of them, the preacher would ease them back to normal, and we'd sing another hymn or two. Those lovely, surging, soaring spirituals sung in harmony and lifting the soul. Then we'd file out, peaceful and purified. And I'd plod home with Elva Mae, making pious resolutions about that watermelon-stealing stuff.
Helen Thomas rocks
Yes, the Stephen Colbert thing was funny. TheCSO and I watched it over the net on Sunday and we laughed in places.
But my favorite part was Helen Thomas.
What a cool woman! (Also, graduation speaker at McLean High school in 1994, which is the only time I've met her. She did a very good job. James Carville was a little better the next year, btu Thomas has had the more interesting life.)
CC
But my favorite part was Helen Thomas.
What a cool woman! (Also, graduation speaker at McLean High school in 1994, which is the only time I've met her. She did a very good job. James Carville was a little better the next year, btu Thomas has had the more interesting life.)
CC
Monday, May 01, 2006
Linguist Friend Remembers Galbraith
When friend CC informed me that Galbraith had died, my response was not so much a matter of sadness at his death as amazement that he had lived for so long in a world which by and large had rejected his message of economic liberalism of a sort very consistent with the ethics on which traditional Christianity and UUism largely agree. The long and honest obituary by Holcomb Noble and Douglas Martin in the New York Times will remind many of us of his contributions and foibles. I can add only one trifle, from the only occasion on which I met and conversed with him.
I graduated from high school at small secondary school at South Woodstock in eastern Vermont, where the boys’ dormitory was on a dirt road off a dirt road off a dirt road, and the students did all of the work except the teaching and accounting. Academically, it was not on a level with Phillips Andover, which I had left after a year, on encountering there a world of racism, prejudice, and physical brutality among students such as I had never seen even in growing up in southeastern Virginia. But Woodstock did stimulate me to think and read, and I had read Robert Heilbroner’s wonderful The Worldly Philosophers, which gives a good introduction to the basic ideas of economics and their history, and I had written about the American socialist utopias, one of which my paternal family came from England to join, specifically the one founded by Robert Owen in southern Indiana. It was the time of the Rockefeller report on the American economy, and that intrigued me so that I had plowed through it. Bruno Rossi, the MIT physicist father of one of my high school classmates, told me about the mathematical modeling of economic processes that his colleagues were engaged in, and that seemed exciting.
I had seen much of Harvard during the period when I was in my later elementary school years, and my father was transforming his MIT undergraduate studies in naval architecture to a graduate degree in architecture at Harvard. He would take me to concerts at Sanders Theater and explain the physical basis of Sabine’s experiments in acoustics conducted there, to the Leonardo exhibit at the Boston museum of science, etc. So, of course when it came time to apply to college, I really wanted to go back there. But I was very shy at that age, and I did not arrange the interviews and such that would fill out an application dossier, so that at the end of the spring, I found myself on the waiting list for entrance to Harvard, although I had two other very adequate acceptances.
However, my headmaster, David Bailey, not only came from an old Boston family and had himself bounced out of Harvard in some spectacular way, he was also a major figure in the Democratic party of Vermont, of whom there probably were far fewer members than cows in Vermont. This combined background gave him connections such that when it came time to arrange graduation speakers, he could draw on some interesting figures. This year, perhaps quite by accident, it was time for Kenneth Galbraith.
Graduation was a time of exultation for me, even though it looked like I would go to Princeton. At one point, I ran and took a running vault over one of the tall fences of the paddocks of the Green Mountain Horse Association, such was my sense of power. I have no memory at all of the content of Galbraith’s speech, but after the commencement talk, the speaker and the graduating students were traditionally invited for a (hitherto illegal) drink at the house of Buffy Dunker, also of formidable Boston stock and later to come out as a lesbian on national television. So, soon I found myself with the opportunity to talk in a natural and spirited way about my interests and reading in economics with Galbraith over drinks at Buffy’s house, which I recall as a great pleasure, since it was not a favorite subject among my fellow high school students in 1958. I suspect that conversation took the place of the missing college interview. Two weeks later, I received my acceptance to Harvard, where it took me two years to find myself academically, but where I did manage to get a bachelor’s and doctoral degrees, but not in economics. The undergraduate course in economics that I took seemed deadly dull and I did not handle it well, and I never met Galbraith again. It was the time of the cold war, and I had a natural fascination with the phenomena of language, so that I turned towards the study of East European languages and linguistics, with a few detours in the direction of experimental psychology in relation to speech. When later I turned to research in the physiology of speech production, the physical approach that seemed congenial to me (muscle mechanics etc.) matched very well the informal technical orientation that I had received from my father and his engineer friends. However, all of these fields have in common that one takes an analytic and quantitative approach to the phenomena of human social interaction. That, I suspect, is a matter of the tuning of one’s mind, no matter what is the subject of analysis.
I hope that Galbraith’s decease will renew interest in his way of looking at society and its economic mechanisms, and the human values implicit in governmental policy. Anything else that achieves the same result would also be productive, and much more welcome than the news of his death.
Linguist Friend
I graduated from high school at small secondary school at South Woodstock in eastern Vermont, where the boys’ dormitory was on a dirt road off a dirt road off a dirt road, and the students did all of the work except the teaching and accounting. Academically, it was not on a level with Phillips Andover, which I had left after a year, on encountering there a world of racism, prejudice, and physical brutality among students such as I had never seen even in growing up in southeastern Virginia. But Woodstock did stimulate me to think and read, and I had read Robert Heilbroner’s wonderful The Worldly Philosophers, which gives a good introduction to the basic ideas of economics and their history, and I had written about the American socialist utopias, one of which my paternal family came from England to join, specifically the one founded by Robert Owen in southern Indiana. It was the time of the Rockefeller report on the American economy, and that intrigued me so that I had plowed through it. Bruno Rossi, the MIT physicist father of one of my high school classmates, told me about the mathematical modeling of economic processes that his colleagues were engaged in, and that seemed exciting.
I had seen much of Harvard during the period when I was in my later elementary school years, and my father was transforming his MIT undergraduate studies in naval architecture to a graduate degree in architecture at Harvard. He would take me to concerts at Sanders Theater and explain the physical basis of Sabine’s experiments in acoustics conducted there, to the Leonardo exhibit at the Boston museum of science, etc. So, of course when it came time to apply to college, I really wanted to go back there. But I was very shy at that age, and I did not arrange the interviews and such that would fill out an application dossier, so that at the end of the spring, I found myself on the waiting list for entrance to Harvard, although I had two other very adequate acceptances.
However, my headmaster, David Bailey, not only came from an old Boston family and had himself bounced out of Harvard in some spectacular way, he was also a major figure in the Democratic party of Vermont, of whom there probably were far fewer members than cows in Vermont. This combined background gave him connections such that when it came time to arrange graduation speakers, he could draw on some interesting figures. This year, perhaps quite by accident, it was time for Kenneth Galbraith.
Graduation was a time of exultation for me, even though it looked like I would go to Princeton. At one point, I ran and took a running vault over one of the tall fences of the paddocks of the Green Mountain Horse Association, such was my sense of power. I have no memory at all of the content of Galbraith’s speech, but after the commencement talk, the speaker and the graduating students were traditionally invited for a (hitherto illegal) drink at the house of Buffy Dunker, also of formidable Boston stock and later to come out as a lesbian on national television. So, soon I found myself with the opportunity to talk in a natural and spirited way about my interests and reading in economics with Galbraith over drinks at Buffy’s house, which I recall as a great pleasure, since it was not a favorite subject among my fellow high school students in 1958. I suspect that conversation took the place of the missing college interview. Two weeks later, I received my acceptance to Harvard, where it took me two years to find myself academically, but where I did manage to get a bachelor’s and doctoral degrees, but not in economics. The undergraduate course in economics that I took seemed deadly dull and I did not handle it well, and I never met Galbraith again. It was the time of the cold war, and I had a natural fascination with the phenomena of language, so that I turned towards the study of East European languages and linguistics, with a few detours in the direction of experimental psychology in relation to speech. When later I turned to research in the physiology of speech production, the physical approach that seemed congenial to me (muscle mechanics etc.) matched very well the informal technical orientation that I had received from my father and his engineer friends. However, all of these fields have in common that one takes an analytic and quantitative approach to the phenomena of human social interaction. That, I suspect, is a matter of the tuning of one’s mind, no matter what is the subject of analysis.
I hope that Galbraith’s decease will renew interest in his way of looking at society and its economic mechanisms, and the human values implicit in governmental policy. Anything else that achieves the same result would also be productive, and much more welcome than the news of his death.
Linguist Friend
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Linguist Friend Reviews "Misquoting Jesus"
Everyone is aware of the hullaballoo about the announcement of the reconstruction of the text of the Coptic Gospel of Judas in recent weeks. It will be productive if it draws more attention to progress in knowledge of the early history of Christianity, although nothing I have seen so far about the text suggests that it contributes anything new to our understanding of the events surrounding the death of Jesus. It may indeed have obscured public awareness of an intriguing book that made the New York Times non-fiction best seller list for at least two weeks earlier this spring, Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005). The "misquoting" of the title refers to the processes by which changes occurred in the Greek text of the New Testament on the way from the original autographs to the surviving Greek manuscripts, early translations, and patristic citations which constitute the evidence used to reconstruct an approximation to the original Greek texts.
Ehrman, the chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, is the prolific author of three series of books. The first series consists of basic research monographs in New Testament studies, the second series consists of textbook-type overviews for clergy and scholars in training or practice, and the third series is a set of books intended for a broad audience of readers who wish to obtain an orientation to the ways of thinking and results of the scholarly study of the New Testament, the origins of Christianity, and the Hellenistic Jewish world from which it came. The first series might be exemplified by Ehrman's monograph The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993), the second by his textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction (3rd ed. 2003), and the third by the present Misquoting Jesus, one of the few works which have aimed to present the methods and significance of the text-critical study of the Greek New Testament to a broad audience.
Imagine as the ordinary reader an elderly retired gentleman whom I encountered recently with his granddaughter in a bookstore. He asked me to help him find for her an edition of the Bible in French. Ideally, he said, it would be a translation based on the King James or Authorized Version, which was his standard of religious truth as well as of literary excellence. I was driven to respond partly because I realized that he lived his faith in the sense that much of his time was occupied by visiting those who spend their lives in prison in that country which has a larger proportion of its population behind bars than any other. After a confirming visit to the website of the American Bible Society, I was able to recommend a careful French translation of the Bible to him, which I knew personally because it is on my own bookshelf, but I had to inform him that it was not exactly what he had asked for, since the King James's Version was ultimately based on an edition of the Greek NT published in 1516, the text of which did not profit from the results of modern scholarship on either its text or its content. I doubt that I convinced him of this, however. How can one communicate the significance of textual research to such a broad audience?
Ehrman answers this question well on the whole. He begins the book with a self-revealing account of his own religious development which may cost him part of his potential readership, since it narrates his own start from an Episcopalian family background, his long swing through evangelical education (Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College), and then how in graduate study at Princeton Theological Seminary he encountered scholarship of a quality that forced a restructuring of his system of religious belief in a much more progressive direction. He now writes from a point of view that seems to me to have much in common with that of many Unitarians who cannot find themselves within a Christian church, but respect the importance of Christian traditions in the past and their contribution in the present. Like the popular writings of Elaine Pagels, his works for a broad audience are written to share the results of modern scholarship with a broad audience. But while Pagels has focussed on narrower problems against the general background of how discoveries such as the Nag Hammadi texts have made us reassess the breadth and variability of early Christianity, Ehrman has often written broader and more systematic overviews (e.g. his Lost Christianities, 2003). Ehrman states that Misquoting Jesus is the first work to popularize the significance of textual criticism for the study of the NT. A worthy and readable predecessor as popular writing that provides a much wider canvas for the study of the biblical text is F.F. Bruce's The Books and the Parchments (4th ed. 1984). Here Bruce gives only one chapter to the issues of the establishment of the Greek text of the NT, but they are placed within the framework of where the whole Bible came from, both testaments and the apocrypha, so that users of the English Bible can see the Bible, and the necessity of its critical study, in a broad historical context.
Ehrman provides in his first chapter a brief and readable survey of the early Greek Christian literature of the first centuries, the initial stages of Christian canon formation, and the nature of the readers and reading of such literature. In the second chapter, he describes the process of transmission of Greek NT texts during the first three centuries by manual copying by nonprofessional scribes, and the sorts of changes that could result, both accidental and intentional alterations of the text, with the resulting problem of how to determine what was the original text on the basis of the surviving evidence. Just less than half of this chapter is taken up by discussion of examples of NT passages in which such textual variations are found.
This is followed in the third chapter by a discussion of the subsequent development of a class of professional scribes of Greek Christian texts, who made the process of textual transmission more accurate and systematic. However, manuscripts of the Latin translations of the biblical texts held the field in Western Europe until the adoption of printing in Europe. An overview of the first printed editions of the Greek NT and the collection of textual variants found in thousand of passages of the Greek NT is followed by a sketch of the sorts of errors and divergences found in the manuscripts.
The fourth chapter treats a fascinating topic, the development of the logical methodology for reconstruction of the NT text, as seen in the work of selected researchers from the French Catholic scholar Richard Simon (1638-1712) to the classical methodological framework of the Anglican scholars B.F.Westcott and F.J.A.Hort, which was first published as part of their edition of the Greek NT in 1881. Ehrman does not make clear that this methodology is a special case of the deductive process found in such disciplines as formal and mathematical logic, computer programming, and formal linguistics. Thus it becomes more understandable that Westcott and Hort were both the products of not only theological but also extensive scientific training, Westcott in mathematics, and Hort in general science to the extent that he participated in the administration of the advanced scientific examinations of students at Cambridge University (the tripos) and was perhaps the first ecclesiastical supporter of Darwin in England.
In the fifth chapter, Ehrman briefly summarizes the methods of scholarly textual reconstruction , and exemplifies them in three NT passages in which their application significantly affects our theological understanding of the NT. This chapter is clearly written and should speak to the general reader so that he will see the significance of text-critical scholarship.
In the sixth chapter, however, Ehrman has been unable to resist the temptation to inject into his book a special interest of his own, the study of theologically motivated alterations of the NT text. Primarily this section deals with textual changes which were motivated by the conflicting christologies current in the early church. This is a topic which Ehrman has considered in more detail in his monograph Orthodox Corruptions of Scripture (1993) noted above. It is an important topic, but its treatment in an introductory exposition should have been more conservative. While modern textual critics will agree with few reservations with the results of the methodology presented in the preceding chapters, there is much less agreement about some of the examples presented in detail in this chapter. Even after a second reading of the book, I was able to follow some of his points only by recourse to a critical edition of the Greek text, the United Bible Societies 4th edition, and Bruce Metzger's Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament2
(both 1994), standard works which do not regard some of the positions he espouses in this chapter as at all certain. Ehrman is likely to lose many of his readers here, or they might even go away from their reading with incorrect conclusions about the consensus of scholarship on some passages in the NT.
In the last substantive chapter, Ehrman deals with examples of deliberate scribal alterations in the text of the Greek NT which reflect social issues in the early Christian communities: the place of women, attitudes towards unconverted Jews, and attitudes towards pagan opponents. Ehrman attributes this process of deliberate change of the NT text primarily to the nonprofessional scribes of the second and third centuries. The discussions of social history here are substantial and will be interesting for a broad readership.
In his conclusion, Ehrman returns to the persona of his early years as an evangelical student faced with the unsettling recognition of uncertainty when faced with the textual evidence on which the NT is based. Comprehension of the scholarly process and history underlying modern printed texts of the Greek NT should help the reader appreciate the complexity of the chain of evidence on which translations are based. Like Ehrman's introduction, this chapter expounds a moving and convincing argument, gently stated in a way which perhaps can be achieved best by someone who, like Ehrman, has himself had to go through the reassessment of his attitudes towards the biblical text that Ehrman advocates. This part of the book, like the introduction, is very eloquent. Ehrman's book will be useful, not only to a broad lay readership, but also to remind ministers of what they may have studied and forgotten (or not studied), and to help them in communicating to their members the systematic reassessment of evidence, and the loss of doctrinal dogmatism, which should come from understanding the nature of textual scholarship.
LinguistFriend
Also, Mary Russell, a feminist theological scholar in Laurie King's novel, "A Monstrous Regiment of Women" (sequal to the Beekeeper's Apprentice), is researching this very subject.
Ehrman, the chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, is the prolific author of three series of books. The first series consists of basic research monographs in New Testament studies, the second series consists of textbook-type overviews for clergy and scholars in training or practice, and the third series is a set of books intended for a broad audience of readers who wish to obtain an orientation to the ways of thinking and results of the scholarly study of the New Testament, the origins of Christianity, and the Hellenistic Jewish world from which it came. The first series might be exemplified by Ehrman's monograph The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993), the second by his textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction (3rd ed. 2003), and the third by the present Misquoting Jesus, one of the few works which have aimed to present the methods and significance of the text-critical study of the Greek New Testament to a broad audience.
Imagine as the ordinary reader an elderly retired gentleman whom I encountered recently with his granddaughter in a bookstore. He asked me to help him find for her an edition of the Bible in French. Ideally, he said, it would be a translation based on the King James or Authorized Version, which was his standard of religious truth as well as of literary excellence. I was driven to respond partly because I realized that he lived his faith in the sense that much of his time was occupied by visiting those who spend their lives in prison in that country which has a larger proportion of its population behind bars than any other. After a confirming visit to the website of the American Bible Society, I was able to recommend a careful French translation of the Bible to him, which I knew personally because it is on my own bookshelf, but I had to inform him that it was not exactly what he had asked for, since the King James's Version was ultimately based on an edition of the Greek NT published in 1516, the text of which did not profit from the results of modern scholarship on either its text or its content. I doubt that I convinced him of this, however. How can one communicate the significance of textual research to such a broad audience?
Ehrman answers this question well on the whole. He begins the book with a self-revealing account of his own religious development which may cost him part of his potential readership, since it narrates his own start from an Episcopalian family background, his long swing through evangelical education (Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College), and then how in graduate study at Princeton Theological Seminary he encountered scholarship of a quality that forced a restructuring of his system of religious belief in a much more progressive direction. He now writes from a point of view that seems to me to have much in common with that of many Unitarians who cannot find themselves within a Christian church, but respect the importance of Christian traditions in the past and their contribution in the present. Like the popular writings of Elaine Pagels, his works for a broad audience are written to share the results of modern scholarship with a broad audience. But while Pagels has focussed on narrower problems against the general background of how discoveries such as the Nag Hammadi texts have made us reassess the breadth and variability of early Christianity, Ehrman has often written broader and more systematic overviews (e.g. his Lost Christianities, 2003). Ehrman states that Misquoting Jesus is the first work to popularize the significance of textual criticism for the study of the NT. A worthy and readable predecessor as popular writing that provides a much wider canvas for the study of the biblical text is F.F. Bruce's The Books and the Parchments (4th ed. 1984). Here Bruce gives only one chapter to the issues of the establishment of the Greek text of the NT, but they are placed within the framework of where the whole Bible came from, both testaments and the apocrypha, so that users of the English Bible can see the Bible, and the necessity of its critical study, in a broad historical context.
Ehrman provides in his first chapter a brief and readable survey of the early Greek Christian literature of the first centuries, the initial stages of Christian canon formation, and the nature of the readers and reading of such literature. In the second chapter, he describes the process of transmission of Greek NT texts during the first three centuries by manual copying by nonprofessional scribes, and the sorts of changes that could result, both accidental and intentional alterations of the text, with the resulting problem of how to determine what was the original text on the basis of the surviving evidence. Just less than half of this chapter is taken up by discussion of examples of NT passages in which such textual variations are found.
This is followed in the third chapter by a discussion of the subsequent development of a class of professional scribes of Greek Christian texts, who made the process of textual transmission more accurate and systematic. However, manuscripts of the Latin translations of the biblical texts held the field in Western Europe until the adoption of printing in Europe. An overview of the first printed editions of the Greek NT and the collection of textual variants found in thousand of passages of the Greek NT is followed by a sketch of the sorts of errors and divergences found in the manuscripts.
The fourth chapter treats a fascinating topic, the development of the logical methodology for reconstruction of the NT text, as seen in the work of selected researchers from the French Catholic scholar Richard Simon (1638-1712) to the classical methodological framework of the Anglican scholars B.F.Westcott and F.J.A.Hort, which was first published as part of their edition of the Greek NT in 1881. Ehrman does not make clear that this methodology is a special case of the deductive process found in such disciplines as formal and mathematical logic, computer programming, and formal linguistics. Thus it becomes more understandable that Westcott and Hort were both the products of not only theological but also extensive scientific training, Westcott in mathematics, and Hort in general science to the extent that he participated in the administration of the advanced scientific examinations of students at Cambridge University (the tripos) and was perhaps the first ecclesiastical supporter of Darwin in England.
In the fifth chapter, Ehrman briefly summarizes the methods of scholarly textual reconstruction , and exemplifies them in three NT passages in which their application significantly affects our theological understanding of the NT. This chapter is clearly written and should speak to the general reader so that he will see the significance of text-critical scholarship.
In the sixth chapter, however, Ehrman has been unable to resist the temptation to inject into his book a special interest of his own, the study of theologically motivated alterations of the NT text. Primarily this section deals with textual changes which were motivated by the conflicting christologies current in the early church. This is a topic which Ehrman has considered in more detail in his monograph Orthodox Corruptions of Scripture (1993) noted above. It is an important topic, but its treatment in an introductory exposition should have been more conservative. While modern textual critics will agree with few reservations with the results of the methodology presented in the preceding chapters, there is much less agreement about some of the examples presented in detail in this chapter. Even after a second reading of the book, I was able to follow some of his points only by recourse to a critical edition of the Greek text, the United Bible Societies 4th edition, and Bruce Metzger's Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament2
(both 1994), standard works which do not regard some of the positions he espouses in this chapter as at all certain. Ehrman is likely to lose many of his readers here, or they might even go away from their reading with incorrect conclusions about the consensus of scholarship on some passages in the NT.
In the last substantive chapter, Ehrman deals with examples of deliberate scribal alterations in the text of the Greek NT which reflect social issues in the early Christian communities: the place of women, attitudes towards unconverted Jews, and attitudes towards pagan opponents. Ehrman attributes this process of deliberate change of the NT text primarily to the nonprofessional scribes of the second and third centuries. The discussions of social history here are substantial and will be interesting for a broad readership.
In his conclusion, Ehrman returns to the persona of his early years as an evangelical student faced with the unsettling recognition of uncertainty when faced with the textual evidence on which the NT is based. Comprehension of the scholarly process and history underlying modern printed texts of the Greek NT should help the reader appreciate the complexity of the chain of evidence on which translations are based. Like Ehrman's introduction, this chapter expounds a moving and convincing argument, gently stated in a way which perhaps can be achieved best by someone who, like Ehrman, has himself had to go through the reassessment of his attitudes towards the biblical text that Ehrman advocates. This part of the book, like the introduction, is very eloquent. Ehrman's book will be useful, not only to a broad lay readership, but also to remind ministers of what they may have studied and forgotten (or not studied), and to help them in communicating to their members the systematic reassessment of evidence, and the loss of doctrinal dogmatism, which should come from understanding the nature of textual scholarship.
LinguistFriend
Also, Mary Russell, a feminist theological scholar in Laurie King's novel, "A Monstrous Regiment of Women" (sequal to the Beekeeper's Apprentice), is researching this very subject.
Quote of the day
No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
- W.H. Auden
- W.H. Auden
For What It’s Worth, I do understand “Jesus take the Wheel”
Some months ago, I put up a post making fun of Carrie Underwood’s song “Jesus take the Wheel.”
Since then, I have gotten comments off and on, a couple every months, telling me how stupid I am and how I don’t understand the metaphor. You can look at them here.
Finally, I got sick of it and posted this comment:
You know, just because I don’t like the song doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. The message is exactly the same as that of another song, Amazing Grace.
Yes, the woman once was lost and now she’s found, was blind but now she sees.
Amazing Grace is beautiful and powerful in its simplicity. The author of Amazing Grace didn’t have to resort to a ridiculous metaphor to make his point. Carrie Underwood did.
I’m not insulting y’alls faith. I’m saying it deserves better than a syrupy, crappy song like that one.
CC
I wonder if that will stop it.
CC
Since then, I have gotten comments off and on, a couple every months, telling me how stupid I am and how I don’t understand the metaphor. You can look at them here.
Finally, I got sick of it and posted this comment:
You know, just because I don’t like the song doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. The message is exactly the same as that of another song, Amazing Grace.
Yes, the woman once was lost and now she’s found, was blind but now she sees.
Amazing Grace is beautiful and powerful in its simplicity. The author of Amazing Grace didn’t have to resort to a ridiculous metaphor to make his point. Carrie Underwood did.
I’m not insulting y’alls faith. I’m saying it deserves better than a syrupy, crappy song like that one.
CC
I wonder if that will stop it.
CC
Adventures in Bad Legislation
According to this, a state legislator in Rhode Island is considering a bill to force theater owners to allow breastfeeding women to bring their children in to live performances and concerts for free.
To me, this can only bring to mind the last time I was in the movies and was interrupted by the screaming of a toddler.
It was the eleven o'clock showing of King Kong.
Can we, as a society, agree that there are just some places we shouldn't bring our little kids? As the daughter of a classical music aficianado, I can assure you that the many concerts I was taken to as a child were just hell for me.
Almost as bad as church.
CC
Saturday, April 29, 2006
A post on self-published authors
I can't imagine ever self-publishing anything. And I share this guy's disdain for those who do and make a fuss about being a "published author." When I worked for a newspaper in South Carolina, I would sometimes write about a new-self-published book that someone in town has written. None of them were any good, though I always wrote nice things because I knew their moms would read it. (This basic idea has many implications for small-town journalism.)
Probably my favorite was this guy, who apparently put the story up on the internet himself as I just found it by googling him. He was a nice chap, though the real excitement came from his dad, who lived outside of town and wanted to be put on the sewer system. The father complained that a main sewer line ran under his property. What the man did not understand was that this was the main sewer pipe going out of town and was pressurized. You just can't tap in to a pressureized sewer main without a whole bunch of extra equipment. If you try, you will be faced with a great deal of backflow very, very fast.
One time after one of his diatribes, the city manager and I just stared at one another, amazed that "massive sewage firehose" was so difficult a concept to understand.
But I'm getting a bit far afield from self-publishing, aren't I?
I've written quite a bit of erotica, enough that I sometimes imagine putting a book of it together. (I'd like to call it "Menage à Whatever.") I have written several novellas, a few erotic, one coming-of-age and a few literary, and am at work on what I hope will be my second completed novel. (The first one was literary and satire, the second one is satire, chicklit and a bit of mystery.) I haven't sent the first novel off to any agents because I thought it wasn't good enough. Maybe the second one will be. Maybe not.
Maybe someday I will write a novel so good, the publishers will buy the old ones. I'm not counting on it, but it did work for John Gardner.
Probably part of the reason I don't really care about being a "published author" is that in the technical sense I already am one. My college press ran a competition where the student who wrote the best 40 pages of writing got published. My novella "Home of the Chimichanga" was published my junior year. (Please don't try to find it. It isn't very good. When I write some really good fiction, I'll tell you how to get a copy, I promise.)
But anyway, winning that competition, and the ten or twelve copies of Home of the Chimichanga on my bookshelf are enough to take the shine of the words "published author."
The post I linked to above says that really famous writers call themselves "writers" rather than "published authors." Though I don't kid myself that I will ever support myself professionally with my fiction writing, the term I'd really like is "novelist," but the dictionary says that a novelist is "A writer of novels."
"Novels," in the plural.
So I guess I'd better get back to work.
CC
Probably my favorite was this guy, who apparently put the story up on the internet himself as I just found it by googling him. He was a nice chap, though the real excitement came from his dad, who lived outside of town and wanted to be put on the sewer system. The father complained that a main sewer line ran under his property. What the man did not understand was that this was the main sewer pipe going out of town and was pressurized. You just can't tap in to a pressureized sewer main without a whole bunch of extra equipment. If you try, you will be faced with a great deal of backflow very, very fast.
One time after one of his diatribes, the city manager and I just stared at one another, amazed that "massive sewage firehose" was so difficult a concept to understand.
But I'm getting a bit far afield from self-publishing, aren't I?
I've written quite a bit of erotica, enough that I sometimes imagine putting a book of it together. (I'd like to call it "Menage à Whatever.") I have written several novellas, a few erotic, one coming-of-age and a few literary, and am at work on what I hope will be my second completed novel. (The first one was literary and satire, the second one is satire, chicklit and a bit of mystery.) I haven't sent the first novel off to any agents because I thought it wasn't good enough. Maybe the second one will be. Maybe not.
Maybe someday I will write a novel so good, the publishers will buy the old ones. I'm not counting on it, but it did work for John Gardner.
Probably part of the reason I don't really care about being a "published author" is that in the technical sense I already am one. My college press ran a competition where the student who wrote the best 40 pages of writing got published. My novella "Home of the Chimichanga" was published my junior year. (Please don't try to find it. It isn't very good. When I write some really good fiction, I'll tell you how to get a copy, I promise.)
But anyway, winning that competition, and the ten or twelve copies of Home of the Chimichanga on my bookshelf are enough to take the shine of the words "published author."
The post I linked to above says that really famous writers call themselves "writers" rather than "published authors." Though I don't kid myself that I will ever support myself professionally with my fiction writing, the term I'd really like is "novelist," but the dictionary says that a novelist is "A writer of novels."
"Novels," in the plural.
So I guess I'd better get back to work.
CC
Thursday, April 27, 2006
On polluting our childrens' minds
"The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?"
- Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 1790
- Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 1790
Standard disclaimer for when UUism is insulted
Wrote this as a response to a bunch of cheesy attacks on UUism in the Salon thread.
I may keep this around. The need for it tends to come up.
Some people have good experiences with a religion. They like it and will defend it when they hear it insulted.
Some people have bad experiences with a religion, they will insult it because it hurt them.
People come to churches with different needs. (Some churches do tons of charity work, some don't. Some people WANT a church that does tons of charity work. Some don't. Some people want a minister who really challenges them, some want to be comforted...)
UU churches are especially varied. If you like one church, you won't like all of them. If you dislike one church, you probably won't dislike all of them.
Religions are like diets. You want to talk about the one that worked for you. At the same time, you have to keep in mind that it doesn't work for everybody.
At the same time, insulting someone because something worked for them that doesn't work for you doesn't make any sense at all to me.
CC
I may keep this around. The need for it tends to come up.
Some people have good experiences with a religion. They like it and will defend it when they hear it insulted.
Some people have bad experiences with a religion, they will insult it because it hurt them.
People come to churches with different needs. (Some churches do tons of charity work, some don't. Some people WANT a church that does tons of charity work. Some don't. Some people want a minister who really challenges them, some want to be comforted...)
UU churches are especially varied. If you like one church, you won't like all of them. If you dislike one church, you probably won't dislike all of them.
Religions are like diets. You want to talk about the one that worked for you. At the same time, you have to keep in mind that it doesn't work for everybody.
At the same time, insulting someone because something worked for them that doesn't work for you doesn't make any sense at all to me.
CC
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Too Freakin' Cool
This guy needed to make a cover photo for a new publication of "War of the Worlds"
So he went to Chinatown for some squid...
CC
The last word on the plagarist chick from Harvard
I've been following the Kaavya Viswanathan story on Dan Kennedy's always-nifty Media Nation.
I was planning a smartass response, but I can't top this.
CC
I was planning a smartass response, but I can't top this.
CC
Things only Washingtonians think about
I bet sending Condoleeza Rice a box of candy for Secretary's Day is a quick way to get canned from the State Department.
CC
CC
UUs make another well-known advice column
This HAS to be about OWL.
The nice thing about it is that it's a real problem. People's problems with OWL and such are most often irrational, such as people who pointlessly worry that the parents have no idea what's going on in the sex or drug education classes. (The churches that teach OWL seem to do tons of meetings with OWL parents and such. They are absolutely as informed as they care to be.)
I am certain that this boundary issues problem exists if only because my own church is so very careful to look for it. Both my application to be a YRUU leader and in my recent "how's it going" interview had questions about how active I was in the church outside of YRUU (fellowship dinner aside, not as much as I should be, but YRUU is a huge time suck) and how many friends I had outside the church (more than I have time to visit or hang out with.) This was all to make sure the high school kids weren't my only friends, which presumably leads to poor leadership and confiding weird stuff in the kids.
I was a little bit insulted by the question, (Adults who befriend mostly high school kids are not reasonable people. I should know, I dated several of them when I was a high school kid myself,) but it wasn't unreasonable to have been asked. I passed, of course, if anything, I don't feel bonded enough to the YRUUers because I haven't given it the time commitment I should. But suffice to say, these boundaries are an important thing to the people administering YRUU in my church and something every church should keep in mind.
CC
The nice thing about it is that it's a real problem. People's problems with OWL and such are most often irrational, such as people who pointlessly worry that the parents have no idea what's going on in the sex or drug education classes. (The churches that teach OWL seem to do tons of meetings with OWL parents and such. They are absolutely as informed as they care to be.)
I am certain that this boundary issues problem exists if only because my own church is so very careful to look for it. Both my application to be a YRUU leader and in my recent "how's it going" interview had questions about how active I was in the church outside of YRUU (fellowship dinner aside, not as much as I should be, but YRUU is a huge time suck) and how many friends I had outside the church (more than I have time to visit or hang out with.) This was all to make sure the high school kids weren't my only friends, which presumably leads to poor leadership and confiding weird stuff in the kids.
I was a little bit insulted by the question, (Adults who befriend mostly high school kids are not reasonable people. I should know, I dated several of them when I was a high school kid myself,) but it wasn't unreasonable to have been asked. I passed, of course, if anything, I don't feel bonded enough to the YRUUers because I haven't given it the time commitment I should. But suffice to say, these boundaries are an important thing to the people administering YRUU in my church and something every church should keep in mind.
CC
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Flight 93: Is it too soon?
So I've seen ads for the "United 93" movie that follows the action on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11 and I am the standard amount of freaked out.
Yes, I like the idea that the folk on flight 93 fought back, breached the cockpit and crashed the plane. No, I don't know if it is true. If it is true, it sounds like Hollywood, but I don't know if it should ever be a movie.
This feeling is, for me, mixed up with my unpleasant perception of the holocaust museum in Washington DC. If you've never been, it's hard to explain how distasteful I find it. Suffice to say, if the designers didn't think I would be sad enough without sad background music in places, an elevator that resembles a cattle car and being assigned the identity of an actual person who was there (they hand you a passport-sized booklet and you get to read various bits about your person's life throughout, finding out at the end what happened to them,) they well underestimated my imagination's response to a pile of shoes that had once belonged to people who were asked to remove them just before they were killed. The overtly theatrical stuff is to me distracting. (Are we really so stupid that the sadness of the situation must be so obvious?)
I've heard a lot of people complaining about the Flight 93 movie, how wrong it is, and how it is too soon to be making a movie about such tragedy. That said, everything I've read suggests that the director did everything he could to make this movie as absolutely respectful as he possible, down to listening carefully to complaints from the families of those not portrayed as action heroes. Ebert and whoever gave it two thumbs up.
But I didn't hear any of this about Hotel Rwanda. We Americans lined up in droves to see the tragedy there. If anybody considered whether showing a recent tragedy might be exploitive there, Roger Ebert certainly didn't.
Odd that a question that seems so obvious about an American tragedy doesn't even occur to us about an African one. I guess it doesn't occur to us when the tragedy feels more personal.
CC
Yes, I like the idea that the folk on flight 93 fought back, breached the cockpit and crashed the plane. No, I don't know if it is true. If it is true, it sounds like Hollywood, but I don't know if it should ever be a movie.
This feeling is, for me, mixed up with my unpleasant perception of the holocaust museum in Washington DC. If you've never been, it's hard to explain how distasteful I find it. Suffice to say, if the designers didn't think I would be sad enough without sad background music in places, an elevator that resembles a cattle car and being assigned the identity of an actual person who was there (they hand you a passport-sized booklet and you get to read various bits about your person's life throughout, finding out at the end what happened to them,) they well underestimated my imagination's response to a pile of shoes that had once belonged to people who were asked to remove them just before they were killed. The overtly theatrical stuff is to me distracting. (Are we really so stupid that the sadness of the situation must be so obvious?)
I've heard a lot of people complaining about the Flight 93 movie, how wrong it is, and how it is too soon to be making a movie about such tragedy. That said, everything I've read suggests that the director did everything he could to make this movie as absolutely respectful as he possible, down to listening carefully to complaints from the families of those not portrayed as action heroes. Ebert and whoever gave it two thumbs up.
But I didn't hear any of this about Hotel Rwanda. We Americans lined up in droves to see the tragedy there. If anybody considered whether showing a recent tragedy might be exploitive there, Roger Ebert certainly didn't.
Odd that a question that seems so obvious about an American tragedy doesn't even occur to us about an African one. I guess it doesn't occur to us when the tragedy feels more personal.
CC
A good role for Angelina Jolie?
TheCSO and I are lying on a futon in our TV room, vigorously discussing who should play Russell and Holmes in the movie version of Beekeeper's Apprentice.
We've settled on Patrick Stewart as Holmes. (A big enough name, smart, authoritative, and let's face it, a hottie for an old guy. Also, a good enough actor for the whole 60 year old man befriending a 15 year old girl to not come off as too freaky. If Stewart decided it wouldn't be freaky, it wouldn't be. Patrick Stewart is just that talented.)
But the question of Mary Russell has been much more difficult. Who in Hollywood has the acting chops to play Russell, but can look 15?
CC's would like Gweneyth Paltrow as she did a really good job as a lady professor in Possession, but Gwen just doesn't look 15 anymore. (Who does?)
A suggestion of the very talented and admittedly-young-looking Kirsten Dunst lead to a discussion of the many kinds of attractive and how Dunst is just too much the cheerleader to play Russell, though Dunst is very close to brilliant in Cat's Eye.
Then, half-kidding, TheCSO suggested Angelina Jolie. Angelina Jolie dressing up as a gypsy, climbing in through a window, etc, was easy enough to imagine, though we didn't think Angelina could do justice to Mary's scholarly side or convincingly disguise herself as a secretary.
It was there that the conversation took a twist. As far as CC and the CSO can recall, Angelina had stolen the show from the male lead in every movie we've ever seen her in.
Jolie is just so fierce and wonderful and powerful. I mean, come on, a lady who walks around with a vial of her boyfriend's blood around her neck doesn't fuck around. If you don't believe her acting can truly move you, rent "Original Sin." (Goodness, the title even SOUNDS like a good name for a Angelina Jolie movie. More seriously, she takes a role that a lesser actress would play as a standard issue femme fatale and makes it deeply complicated and full of a sort of divine mystery.)
At the same time, we can't think of a role she's really suited for, outside of action hero stuff. And even then, Wonder Woman seems lame and her Catwoman would eat any Batman alive.
It's amazing Brad Pitt can hold her attention.
CC
Ps. PB wrote an essay with a very different take on Jolie, which shows a nastier side that I can see but chose not to focus on in this post. I don't disagree that the maternal stuff is an act. I wouldn't want to be in between Jolie and anything she wants. But men's careers aren't usually judged on their personal lives.
We've settled on Patrick Stewart as Holmes. (A big enough name, smart, authoritative, and let's face it, a hottie for an old guy. Also, a good enough actor for the whole 60 year old man befriending a 15 year old girl to not come off as too freaky. If Stewart decided it wouldn't be freaky, it wouldn't be. Patrick Stewart is just that talented.)
But the question of Mary Russell has been much more difficult. Who in Hollywood has the acting chops to play Russell, but can look 15?
CC's would like Gweneyth Paltrow as she did a really good job as a lady professor in Possession, but Gwen just doesn't look 15 anymore. (Who does?)
A suggestion of the very talented and admittedly-young-looking Kirsten Dunst lead to a discussion of the many kinds of attractive and how Dunst is just too much the cheerleader to play Russell, though Dunst is very close to brilliant in Cat's Eye.
Then, half-kidding, TheCSO suggested Angelina Jolie. Angelina Jolie dressing up as a gypsy, climbing in through a window, etc, was easy enough to imagine, though we didn't think Angelina could do justice to Mary's scholarly side or convincingly disguise herself as a secretary.
It was there that the conversation took a twist. As far as CC and the CSO can recall, Angelina had stolen the show from the male lead in every movie we've ever seen her in.
Jolie is just so fierce and wonderful and powerful. I mean, come on, a lady who walks around with a vial of her boyfriend's blood around her neck doesn't fuck around. If you don't believe her acting can truly move you, rent "Original Sin." (Goodness, the title even SOUNDS like a good name for a Angelina Jolie movie. More seriously, she takes a role that a lesser actress would play as a standard issue femme fatale and makes it deeply complicated and full of a sort of divine mystery.)
At the same time, we can't think of a role she's really suited for, outside of action hero stuff. And even then, Wonder Woman seems lame and her Catwoman would eat any Batman alive.
It's amazing Brad Pitt can hold her attention.
CC
Ps. PB wrote an essay with a very different take on Jolie, which shows a nastier side that I can see but chose not to focus on in this post. I don't disagree that the maternal stuff is an act. I wouldn't want to be in between Jolie and anything she wants. But men's careers aren't usually judged on their personal lives.
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