Today I am luxuriating in reading.  It is a quiet week so far in Dibley, which is as well as the last one was utterly crazy.

In Markus Bockmuehl's Seeing the Word: Refocussing New Testament Study, Grand Rapids, Baker Academic 2006 I found this great quotation on page 37:

It is consdiered an embarrassment if a dissertation fails to engage with a relevant work published eighteen moths ago.  The entire nineteenth century, however, can be disregarded with impunity.  Scholars merrily copy from each other's cliched prejudices... It is still a distressingly small number... who bother to crack open the apposite volumes... or indeed who show any first-hand awareness of the two thousand years of Christian biblical interpretation.  By the late twentieth century, the Neutestamentler's cappucino has too frequently become all forth and no coffee.  What further encourages this trend is that the road to primary socurces has become so thoroughly covered with slippery hypotheses that few aspriring PhD students any longer fell safe to walk on it.

 

This made me smile and nod.  One of my ongoing fears is that I'll miss something published recently that does what I am trying to do.  More positively, I now find someone saying what I've felt for ages, that an awful lot of stuff is built on secondary (tertiary and beyond) sources.  Be it Spurgeon, Aquinas, Tillich, Tertullian, Wesley or whoever, most of what we think we know is often someones' interpretation of someone's quotation taken out of context.  As for 'old is irrelevent' well that;s exactly what I'm trying to counter...  And of course, as a latte drinker, I make sure that the coffee get well mixed with the milk!

I am enjoying this book - it is written in an engaging conversational style yet with great academic rigour (envy, spit), it is challenging yet not, at least so far, aggressive.  I guess it is really a book for people who have some clue about Biblical studies but the opening chapter, a reflection on Simon Marmion's Saint Luke Painting the Virgin Mary is worth reading inits own right - and may form a starter for ten for an act of worship at some point.