It's ... it's like witnessing a murder

How to make a Christmas (or, I guess, any seasonal) wreath out of a recycled book.

And it's clever. It's potentially neat-looking. It's better than throwing old books into landfills. It's ....

AAAUGH!

Seriously, this lady has a clever and useful idea. Even I throw a book in the trash sometimes, and usually some of its pages are good for a project like this. Damaged, already-dismantled books, GREAT, do it!

But when I watch her use good, sound books, not just the one her dog chewed, but the Peter Devries--

(Haha, you didn't think I caught that nice copy of a respectable author, did you? You tried to hide the book's identity, but my pause button was too clever for you!)

.... and then, when she suggests using a book with sentimental value to your family....!!

It's not her, or the Nature Conservancy's, fault. The simple fact is that run-of-the-mill copies of older books, even good copies, even non-junk authors, are not valued in this society anymore. Neither she nor the Conservancy made it that way, and those books she bought at the library sale and ripped to pieces for this wreath would probably have ended up in the dumpster after a few months of customer disinterest.

This is a better fate for them. I know, I know, OK?

But watching her rip out the pages from a tight, snugly bound and nice vintage paperback was like watching Jack the Ripper dismantle his victims.

Printing books in 1947!

I started out laughing at this video ... but quickly became absolutely fascinated!

Those were the days! Oh, and gotta love them hard-workin' "girls"!

Look these guys up in your Funk & Wagnalls!

I can't stop grabbing books that others bypass. Like this :

The New Archeological Discoveries : and Their Bearing upon the New Testament and upon the Life and Times of the Primitive Church. By Camden M. Cobern, D.D., Litt.D. Third edition: Funk & Wagnalls, 1918.



The used bookstore valued it at $12.50. They know their business and I usually find their prices distressingly fair and realistic. From what I see of used copies on amazon, the price is about right. Mass-printed undergraduate or popular level archeology books this old don't seem to sell for much, I guess because more recent discoveries have made many old finds obsolete. But while original copies of its several editions are dirt cheap, an academic reprint company made it available last year. For big bucks.

The photos alone (all pix in this post come from it) were worth 12.50 to me!


Cobern covers a lot of other finds, but Oxyrhynchus is one of his book's major focuses. I'd never heard of it, nor of Grenfell and Hunt, who thought the place might be a worthwhile dig, while other archeologists passed it by. I decided Nag Hammadi, Qumran and the like must have eclipsed Grenfell-Hunt's then-revolutionary finds, and that Cobern's enthusiasm was kind of an endearing display of Academic Nerd joy from a more innocent era.

In that I did the find, and the author of this book, a great injustice.


This fragment of Matthew from the third century is now only one, and no longer the oldest, of several gospel fragments from the early centuries when Christianity was an outlaw religion. But in 1897 it was the first one, the only one, and to scholars of the topic it was a real "Where were you when __?" event. Cobern was one of many who were blown away by the find:

The writer was working in London University when the first sensational discovery was made of a leaf from a pocket Bible which had been carried by an Egyptian Christian of the third century. [...]

Only those who have come personally into close touch with supremely important discoveries can understand with what eagerness this discolored leaf was examined by every one interested in the authenticity of the New Testament writings. It had been written generations before the great council of Constantine.

Another Very Big Deal at the time was the finding of fragments of previously unknown "sayings of Jesus" gospels. Grenfell and Hunt found an 8-verse fragment in 1897, another in 1903, and other small non-canonical gospel fragments over the years. Here's one verse, from the 1897 find :

Jesus saith, Except ye fast to the world, ye shall in no wise find the kingdom of God; and except ye make the sabbath a real sabbath, ye shall not see the Father.

Dr. Cobern loves the whole 8-verse passage, and explains what this verse meant theologically, which was to keep pure in heart and act, not to merely observe the seventh day. And he says:

When properly understood, this new "saying" seems an eternal word, a word for all time, and is in beautiful harmony with the teachings of Jesus recorded in the gospels.

They didn't know it for sure until years later, but this passage turned out to be -- uh-oh! -- the Gospel of Thomas! Banned and (a different, complete, copy) buried at Nag Hammadi, along with many Gnostic texts, where they were found in 1945.

Cobern likes it so much. The 1903 fragment was clearly from the Gospel of Thomas, and even then, some experts thought that the 1897 bit might be the same document. Cobern dutifully reports this, but you catch his tone. He's moved by the 1897 passage and really wants it to not be associated with that known-to-be-heretical Thomas thingy. However, he's a true scholar and doesn't close his eyes to the fact that it could be from Thomas.

At this point I still thought this delightful book about artifacts was pretty much an artifact itself. It was fun to visit a time when these discoveries were a glimpse of first light, when no Christian testaments earlier than Constantine's era had been seen, and when so little was previously known about life in those days, presented by a writer who manages to be both scholarly and emotionally engaged with it.

In search of more, the Wiki articles on Grenfell and Hunt are mere stubs, but an article on the site is pretty informative. Over on amazon, I used "search inside this book" and was kind of surprised to find only brief mentions, or none at all, of Grenfell, Hunt or Oxyrhynchus in Werner Keller's The Bible as History, Bart Ehrman's Lost Christianities, or Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church. It's a spot-check only, but, still...

More scholarly books cover Oxyrhychus more often. I didn't expect to be familiar with them, especially at scholarly book prices. Others more affordable still were specialist publications and flew below my radar.

But the short shrift given to Oxyrhynchus and to Grenfell and Hunt by the popular literature seems odd. The academic books make it sound important. OK, OK, discoveries that are "revolutionary at the time" do get superseded, but Edison and the Wright Brothers are still famous.

Oxyrhynchus is actually very important. Even now. More googling turned up a great website, Oxyrhynchus Online.

The director of the publication project at Oxford clearly has access to some great personal materials on Grenfell and Hunt. I liked Grenfell's not-so-adventurous brother who wrote to him that he must be off to that "beastly" Egypt again.

It looks like the attention Oxyrhynchus got at first was for its Biblical texts. When later finds pushed them to the back burner, the site's fame died off, when, in fact, it yielded unique material about non-Biblical matters. They're still publishing Oxyrhynchus texts. According to wiki, the project is up to 71 volumes. They're still deciphering things they couldn't read before, thanks to new imaging technology. Some of its classical lit is still the one-and-only source: part of an unknown play by Euripides, and a biography of him; a play by Menander; unknown poems by Pindar and Sappho - one was published for the first time in 2005.

And the everyday life documents (wills, deeds, lawsuits, wedding invitations, horoscopes, and lots of personal letters) which make up the bulk of the papyrus, are loaded with light on real people and how they lived, loved, complained, prayed, begged, and sued.

A little boy named Theon writes to his father, who did not take him along on a trip :

It was a fine thing of you not to take me to the city! If you won't take me to Alexandria [next time] I won't write you a letter or speak to you or say goodbye to you.

But his father had better bring him back a lyre, or else!

If you don't, I won't eat, I won't drink; there now!

Another scholar of typical Victorian sensibilities finds Theon to be a rather impudent child, but Cobern delights in this letter too, and thinks the boy and his father had a wonderful relationship.

And I delight in Cobern. Maybe I've just caught his infectious enthusiasm for Grenfell and Hunt's finds, but it sure looks to me like a lot of it still stands. I think Grenfell and Hunt deserve a holiday. Or at least a postage stamp.

Arithmancy 101

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]


When I started my original blog, I didn't intend a real focus, just whatever I felt like yammering about. But I did figure a theme that would pop up now and again is how I juggle being a Christian and a liberal. Not a problem, till you get to St. Paul. Paul has been evoked to keep women out of the priesthood, to say slavery isn't so bad, to call gay relationships an abomination. He's not the only, or the original, source of any of this but mention his name and lots of people understandably look daggers at you.

And that meant at some point explaining why I think St. Paul is neither God-appointed, nor Satan spawned. A half-done version has been sitting here in my word processor, inspired by a neat history book I found and wanted to share. Then the subject came up elsewhere, so maybe its time to dust this off.

I wondered for a long time why exactly we're supposed to treat Paul's words as The Word of God. There are plenty of sources on the formation of the New Testament canon, but I ran into some clues by accident, in this nifty little book that I read for a whole different reason, i.e., that I like book stuff.


BOOKS AND READERS IN THE EARLY CHURCH: A HISTORY OF EARLY CHRISTIAN TEXTS. HARRY Y GAMBLE. YALE U. Pr. 1995. (All quotes are from it, unless otherwise indicated.)

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Nascent Christianity was a scattered and, in the Roman empire, an outlaw movement. So. How do you keep a group not only going, but on the straight-and-narrow? Pressure and influence are comin' at it from all sides. Authorities who want to wipe it out. Local gods. The general tendency for any belief system to evolve and fashion new interpretations and rituals. You have to train it like a vine.

Today you'd keep your movement in-touch and on-message by internet and cell phones. In the 1st-to- 3rd centuries it was done with writing.

These numerous and far-flung Christian congregations, large and small, nevertheless retained a sharp awareness of their collective identity as the ecclesia katholike and affirmed their mutual relations through frequent communication.

Till the second century CE, the book as we know it barely existed. A "book" was a scroll. Cumbersome, single-sided, you needed both hands to hold it, you had to rewind afterwards (!) and forget leafing back to a previous passage if you needed it. It's not real hard to see why the codex --the bound pile of leaves between covers, essentially the book as we know it -- took over, and early Christianity had a lot to do with that. Codices had been used for books before, but hadn't caught on much, and were primarily a way to make early blank books for people to take their own notes in. Then the Christian movement came along.

The short version is that their literature needed to be easily portable, easy to reference, and easily hidden. You could get more text in the same space using a codex than using a scroll. If nothing else, you used both sides. You could also more easily flip to whatever passage dealt with a specific question.

Enter Paul. Advantage number one: he was one of the very earliest to write to far-flung congregations and guide them.

Advantage two: He struck exactly the right note:

One of the most urgent tasks of the Christian movement in its infancy was to support its convictions by showing their consistency with Jewish scriptures. ... Proper interpretation of scripture was...vital to their identity and agency as "the true Israel."... Paul frequently resorts to Jewish scripture in writing to Gentile Christian congregations.

Advantage three: He was considered just as "apostolic" as the Twelve. Eusebius says as much (Church History 3:24, written before 325 CE).

By Paul's self-proclamation, he equated his experience on the road to Damascus as delegation by God of the same level of authority that the Twelve had been given. His --to church authorities-- unimpeachable personal conduct and theology supported this. But another little factor plays in here.

Advantage four: The Mystical Number Seven

There is an old theory, mentioned in a number of ancient Christian sources, that the apostle had written to seven churches and that therefore, because the number seven symbolized totality or universality, Paul had addressed the church at large.

(This would have been an early ten-letter collection [1], some of which were attributed to Paul at the time but were later disproved.)

If the edition had consisted of a group of codices or scrolls, even so small a group as two, it could not have signified Paul's catholic relevance, for nothing would prevent the individual codices or scrolls from being taken separately and the sevenfold disposition of the letters thus being obscured or lost. ... The very nature of this edition therefore required its presentation as a physical unit, a single book.

This reverence for the number seven was pretty powerful stuff to the ancient world mentality. Heck, we're not over it yet. That Paul had been moved to address all of Christiankind only enhanced his reputation as one chosen, set apart.

Paul's Greatest Hits collection was too big for one scroll. Its total length would have been at least double a useable size, and triple the size of an average scroll. It was almost certainly passed around as a codex, a non-traditional format at the time, but one that allowed the collection to maintain that mystical seven-based integrity by existing in one volume. There's evidence -- though no surviving full copies -- that a single-volume "seven churches" edition of his letters was a familiar book by the early 2nd century when the pseudonymous writer of II Peter proclaimed Paul's apostolic status in 3:15-16.

Glimpsing what's behind the canonization of Paul's work actually helps me like the guy better than most liberals probably do. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but we pretty much all do the best we can, and Paul felt pressured. He believed the second coming was imminent, and -- now we're into my opinion here -- that changing societal or gender roles was pointless. Get the message out people, we do not have time to quibble about who teaches and who does the cooking when society is about to end anyway. While he tells one community not to allow women any authority, he acknowledges woman deacons in others (Romans 16, and possibly 1Timothy 3). What does it add up to? To me it makes sense as an instruction to not waste time sweeping a house that's about to burn down. However things are, leave them be, and put the effort into the real job.

His condemnation of same-sex relationships stems, I think, from the idea that God creates things to operate exactly One Correct Way, and that any small population that statistically diverges is "unnatural" and has to be the work of Satan. On this I have no trouble dismissing Paul without despising him for it.

Sometimes letting daylight fall on and dissolve the magic is a very good thing. Till we do, the choices falsely appear to be: take his words as those of God Himself ... or dismiss him as a power-mad fraud. Neither is necessary.

[1] Corinthians (1 & 2); Romans; Ephesians; Thessalonians (1 & 2); Galatians; Phillipians; Colossians & Philemon (grouped together).

History gets heavier

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]

What better day to pay homage to the histories of both the U.S. and this blog, than July 4th?

In August 2006, a brief discussion in r.a.c.s. about the increasing textbook weight that kids haul inspired me to raid my slightly weird collection of old schoolbooks and weigh the books to see if they really were getting heavier. I mean, why let a relatively boring topic fade away when it was such a great opportunity for a book collector to be pedantic?
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As I said in that usenet post, US history may not the be the best choice for proving the point. A high percentage of a 400-year-old settlement/200-year-old nation's history will really not have existed in the books of 100 years ago.
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We're a young country. Long may we live to learn from our mistakes and make it a better and better place.
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Anyway, I picked US history for my book weigh-in for the dumbest reason of all: I had the books. I have an eclectic bunch of old textbooks, but only on this topic could I assemble a relatively well-spaced-out timeline of books all geared to a single school level. There are a couple of substantial time gaps, but it provided one of the staples of internet discussion -- anecdotal evidence! And it stacked up:
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1872 - 1 lb, 1 oz. .......7.5 x 5 inches
1941 - 2 lbs, 7 oz. ... 8.25 x 6.25 inches
1960 - 3 lbs, 3 oz. .... 9.5 x 8.5 inches
1991 - 5 lbs, 11 oz. ... 10.25 x 8.25 inches
1998 - 6 lbs, 6 oz. .... 11 x 8.75 inches.
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Why I was also moved to take a picture of them at the same time, I couldn't tell you but there it is. I dimly recall thinking somebody might scoff that I had made up my figures. I mean, what normal person would clog up their home with this stuff and have it on hand? But this at least proved that the books existed. Then I thought, as I had a few times before: "I should start a website or a blog or something, where I could both post pictures and rant."

And a couple weeks later, I took a deep breath and plunged into the weblog world.

Happy Fourth, everybody. It's 9PM, the pyrotechnics have begun, and Downyflake, The Fireworks-Challenged Cat, has just jumped up to inform me that a Comforting Session will be expected.