Figures from my Bible Study Class

We had the second session of the Bible Study Group last Wednesday afternoon. It went well, I think. I got some very gratifying feedback on it. E.g., one person wrote, "I can’t tell you how thrilling this class is (and I never thought I’d use that word in reference to Bible Study!). I am so grateful you are doing this." I did some things this week I didn't do the first session - as I get more used to Zoom. One was to do "screen share." That involved putting things up on the computer screen that everyone could see. Mostly what I put up was written material that I had people read aloud. But I have some pictures that I intended to put up too - I'll put them up here to give you an idea of some things we are talking about. Here is a photo of Brian McLaren:

Brian McLaren is a "Progressive" Christian who has recently published book titled Do I Stay Christian? We read this book for a book study group at the Guilford Church - several members of that group are also in Bible Study. I think you could say that it was their urging that I do Bible Study that got me "off the dime," so to speak and actually get a group going. One of his main points is that if one decides to continue to identify as a Christian today, one must rethink what that means in today's world. One cannot just coast along in the old habits and old language that characterized Christianity a few decades ago. That effort to rethink our faith in the light of urgent contemporary issues is at least part of my purpose in doing this class. So he is sort of "looking over my shoulder" as I move through this course. Another contemporary figure who many of us read on an almost daily basis is Fr. Richard Rohr, who is a Franciscan monk and head of the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico. He sends out a daily meditation which is always very insightful. He has written some things about the Gospel of John, which is our current topic of study, which I will be using in the course. Here is his photo:

Fr. Richard Rohr.*************** One of the tools I use in my own preparation for this course is a Greek-English Lexicon, the Liddell-Scott Unabridged Lexicon, which is a hefty tome. It is an amazing product of nineteenth-century British scholarship on the Greek language - done long before the age of computers when everything was done on note cards. I presume that hundreds of scholars were involved in reading literally thousands of Greek texts from the ancient world, spanning centuries, and recording the use of Greek words and their meaning in a variety of contexts. So for example, the article on the Greek word "Logos," which occurs in the first verse of the Gospel of John ("In the Beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God"), fills over six columns in the Liddell-Scott Lexicon, with hundreds of examples of its use and the variety of meanings it might have. Here is the title page from Liddell-Scott:

And here is a page from the article on the word "Logos":

The first page of the article on "Logos" in Liddell-Scott.**************** The massive work was edited by Henry George Liddell, an Oxford don. I cannot imagine what it meant for him to edit this work. I think it is beyond imagining. I also don't really know how much of the work was done by Scott, and how they divided it. I don't think there can be much doubt that it took over their lives for years, and perhaps decades. Here is Liddell's portrait:

Henry George Liddell.********************* He looks as though he could be pretty demanding - but then you would have to be to get a work like that Lexicon finished. However, he had a daughter, Alice, for whom Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland. Maybe he had a gentler side. I also want to mention one last thing - it has personal significance. I have a Bible in my library called The Bible: An American Translation. It is not widely known. It belonged to my father.

An American Translation of the Bible. Sort of the worse for wear, but then, so am I! We are about the same age. ******************* It was created by J. M. Powis Smith, who edited the translation of the Old Testament and translated much of it himself, and by Edgar Goodspeed, who translated the entire New Testament himself. It was published by the University of Chicago Press, at about the time my father was a student at Chicago Theological Seminary (c. 1930). He had both Smith and Goodspeed as teachers, I think.

J. M. Powis Smith, Hebraist. ********************** There are many autographs inside both the front and back covers of this Bible - most of them I think are my father's fellow students. He must have collected them. Some are of faculty - at the top of one page is the autograph of J.M. Powis Smith.

J.M.Powis Smith's autograph at the top of the page.******************* I don't see Edgar Goodspeed's autograph anywhere, but his is a name very familiar to me, not least because he also wrote a book called The Junior Bible, a translation, or you might better say a paraphrase, of the Bible written especially for young people, and my father gave that Bible to me when I was about eight years old, and it was my introduction to the Bible. Here is a portrait of Edgar Goodspeed - a very attractive man, I would say:

Edgar J. Goodspeed, New Testament Scholar and Translator.