Blue Cord

For those of you who are on Facebook, I started a group there for Bible bloggers (with the unimaginative name “Bible Bloggers”). I looked around and didn’t see any other groups for such people, so I went ahead and made one. It is primarily intended for people who blog about the Bible, but it is open to anyone who wishes to join. So, if you are a biblioblogger or just a fan of bibliobloggers, feel free to join if you have a Facebook account.

This month’s Review of Biblical Literature contains a review of Maria Brutti’s The Development of the High Priesthood during the Pre-Hasmonean Period. I had not heard of this book. It is published by Brill, but since I am not independently wealthy I cannot afford books published by Brill, so I rarely go by their exhibit at SBL meetings. I was excited when I saw the title, however, because of my interest in the history of the priesthood. I am not as concerned with the period that this book covers (301–152 BCE), but knowing the state of the priesthood at the point would make it possible to work backwards into the periods that do interest me.

Unfortunately, the book review, written by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, does not leave me hopeful about the book’s usefulness. Here is her opening paragraph, which sums up what she has to say in the rest of the review:

This erudite and meticulously researched book, the author’s revised doctoral thesis from the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome, leaves the reader with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the book constitutes a wealth of information about the pre-Hasmonean high priesthood. The author is very well read, confidently citing Anglo-Saxon, German, French, and Italian research, and she is fully in command of the primary Greek sources. On the other hand, the book is somewhat unsatisfactory. After reading the book, I have undoubtedly become more knowledgeable about the state of research in the field of the pre-Hasmonean high priests, but I do not know very much more about the high priests. Brutti does not pursue a specific thesis, nor does she advance a particular theory pertaining to the role of the Jerusalem high priests during the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid periods. Rather, the book is descriptive, as it outlines what we can or, more often, cannot know about the tasks and roles of the high priesthood during these time periods. Caution is a virtue, but this book is overly cautious, leaving the reader ever so slightly disappointed. [emphasis mine]

While I appreciate a good review of the literature and a survey of the data as much as the next scholar, those are only the first two steps in scholarship. Analysis is only the beginning. At some point we have to do a synthesis. It sounds like Brutti never gets around to that step. The italicized sentence in the paragraph above is particularly damning. When we read a book, we ultimately want to find out about the topic at hand, not just about the state of research on the subject.

I don’t think this book would be on my “to buy” list for the SBL this year even if I could afford it.

I was editing an article yesterday on the Acts of Philip, a 4th–5th century apocryphal work about the Apostle Philip. As I read it, I came across a line where the author says that Philip “converses with a penitent leopard.” It made me giggle, because obviously the author meant to say that Philip was talking with a penitent leper. Of course, the spell checker wouldn’t catch this, because both “leopard” and “leper” are valid words.

Just because I am a stickler for detail, however, I wanted to make absolutely sure that it was supposed to be a leper and not a leopard before I made the correction. So, I found the Acts of Philip online. And, lo and behold, it contains the story of Philip conversing with a leopard who is sorry for having attacked a goat (Acts Phil. 96–101).

So there you have it: a penitent leopard. I guess they can change their spots after all, at least metaphorically (Jer 13:23).

I just got final word today that I will be teaching two sections of “Introduction to Religious Studies” at Merrimack College this fall. Merrimack is a Roman Catholic liberal arts college in the Augustinian tradition. It is located about three miles from my apartment here in Massachusetts, which makes it much more convenient than teaching in Iowa (which I did last semester). Since I am only teaching two sections, I will be able to continue working as an editor on the New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible.

The SBL just announced a new book that I will have to pick up at the annual meeting this fall. It is entitled The Chronicler’s Genealogies: Towards an Understanding of 1 Chronicles 1–9. For most people, the endless lists of who begat whom and who forgot to begat are rather boring, but I love them. Although beset with problems, those genealogies provide lots of information about the priesthood in the postexilic period. In fact, I own Gary Knopper’s commentary on 1 Chronicles 1–9, but I never got around to buying the volume dealing with the rest of the book. Who needs a bunch of commentary on narratives when you could be reading about genealogies!