The Elephantine papyri – written as some of the books of the Bible are being written – is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things.
Category Archive: February 13
History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative.
We don’t actually know if the person who wrote the Gospel of John had a written copy of Thomas because we don’t know exactly when it was written.
The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
I have this magpie instinct for the next glittering object. There are one or two things I know I can’t write about, though: DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.
I got to thinking about the Book of Revelation that was written by a Jewish prophet who was also a follower of Jesus who hated the Roman Empire. I realized that the Book of Revelation could be a way to reflect on the issue of religion’s relationship to politics.
What is clear is that the Gospel of Judas has joined the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was.
I realized that conventional views of Christian faith that I’d heard when I was growing up were simply made up – and I realized that many parts of the story of the early Christian movement had been left out.
The Book of Revelation is all about the conflict, the contest between the forces of Good and Evil.
Somehow, the words don’t have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That’s how I start. Once I’m off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop – not that what I do is poetry.