Minor Thoughts from me to you

Also from The Best, Worst & Most Unusual, by Bruce Felton & Mark Fowler:

"In 1663 a noted orientalist presented to the French Academy a paper in which he concluded that Adam was 140 feet tall, Noah, 50 feet tall, Abraham, 40 feet tall, and Moses, 25."

There. Now at least when you read my Bible study notes here at Minor Thoughts over the next few months, you can't say there haven't been any worse.

I don't know how other people study God's Word, but I've settled into a sorta three-pronged approach; I simultaneously read through one commentary on the Old Testament and one on the New, while also just reading the Bible daily for fun, without looking up a single thing. The variety keeps me from studying pitfalls to which I've noticed I'm particularly prone, such as spending so much of my attention exploring the Hebrew legacy in the Torah that my spirit ends up horrifically starved for Jesus. So today I visited the Idaho Springs Public Library, a charmingly compact, creaky historical building in a charmingly compact, creek-y historical miner's town in Colorado ("cute", nay, "adorable", that's what the young lady would call it), and here's what I chose:

• The Torah: A Modern Commentary, by Gunther Plaut. Obviously, this is the Old Testament commentary I'll be reading, my textbook whilst I work my way again through the Humash. It's also the textbook for an entire denomination of Judaism, actually; since its publication the work has become the standard reader for Reform Jewdom. And boy howdy, am I so tickled to have it: I've already read Plaut's commentary on Genesis (Bereshit, in Hebrew), and if his respective commentaries on the remaining parts of the Pentateuch are as fairly-balanced (Plaut often includes not only Conservative and Orthodox interpretations of Scripture, but Christian as well), well-researched (he cites all his sources), and eye-opening (at least for an ignorant cuss like me), I won't be able to read this thing fast enough.

• The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. 1 of the Daily Study Bible Series, by William Barclay. This is what I grabbed off the shelf for my New Testament pick, but two chapters into it and I'm already thinking about returning it in favor of something else. William Barclay's a pretty famous theologian and his Daily Study Bible books are bestsellers, but there are plenty of good reasons to be uneasy about reading him. For one, he makes occasional references which he does not bother to cite, and makes leaps of logic (he fails to sell me on his ideas concerning authorship of the Gospels). For another, he is a heretic. Wikipedia claims him "a liberal theologian, denying both the inerrancy of scripture and the divinity of Christ. He described himself as a liberal evangelical. In his autobiography, he described himself as a universalist, believing all people will eventually be saved, an unorthodox position." Even assuming this is true, it might not be a deal breaker (I've learned more about the Old Testament from Jews, all of whom deny the divinity of Jesus, than I've learned from my pastors), but coupled with his other apparent faults... I think a second trip to the library's in order.

I was also finally going to read a book a friend of mine loaned to me eons ago, entitled The Search.. The hefty tome's authored by a Dr. Ron Charles and subtitled "A Historian's Search for Historical Jesus". It is quite possibly, to quote one Amazon reviewer, the "most informative book on the life of Jesus that has been printed in decades". But I'll never know, because despite supposedly possessing a B.A. in Theology, two M.A.s, two Ph.Ds, and one Th.D (whatever that is), Dr. Ron Charles never learned he's supposed to cite all his sources (though a Jamaican newspaper claims he used 160 of them). Either that, or he just didn't care enough to catalog them, in which case I don't care enough to read his book.

I assume the reason Dr. Charles had to self-publish his book is because every respectable book publisher agrees with me on this point. Or maybe the editors of those publishing houses just couldn't get past the frequent typos; in the acknowledgements section of The Search Dr. Charles thanks Michelle Thomas, Kim Stuckey, and Laura Wairs for their proofreading services, but it's thanks undeserved. The book's errors are numerous.

So, to review: a book published in 2003 that is supposed to summarize 33 years of research by an archaeologist with six university degrees who claims he's found Noah's Ark, had to be self-published, is full of technical errors, and has no citations. Oh, and the author's website, www.roncharles.com, is down, meaning the only mention of him Google can find is now an article in a Jamaican newspaper.

Anyone else reckon this Dr. Charles guy was a fraud who's number just eventually came up?

Anyway, I guess I should look on the bright side of all this. Hopefully my friend won't want me to send his book back now.

First Bible study entry starts tomorrow, most likely with a look at the first chapter of Exodus.