Available Light

I woke early and rose while it was still dark. In the harbour below me, the orange streetlights made triangular reflections like a row of skinny, upside down Christmas trees. I made coffee. Lit a fire. Sat down at about 5.30, and by 6.25 this journey was over. During the last week or so, reading the epistles, I knew I was looking over people's shoulders as they wrote into arguments that are millennia gone. I was aware I was not consulting an oracle, but hearing  brief snatches of  one side only of  long and complex conversations. I was aware that the intended hearers were seldom individuals, but, usually,  groups. And, then, this morning, the  Book of Revelations It was hearing the account of a dream. It was as troubled and as violent, as you would expect from someone dreaming in a troubled and violent time, but there is a pattern and order to it and a progression. In the heavens which give meaning to this world, says the dreamer, all the seeming ha...

For years, I now realise, I have studied the New Testament, but not actually read it. Every time I've sat down with those familiar passages, as I have done pretty much every day for decades, it has been with a  text divided up into chapters and verses by Erasmus 1500 or so years after they were written. Every version of the Bible I own, except one, has copious footnotes and cross references to which I turn when befuddled. So now, I am reading it, not studying it, in the exception, my one version from which all that stuff has been deleted. It's just me and these old words. I'm reading each of the documents of the New Testament in one sitting, and leaving a few days between each one to give a bit of thinking space. This morning it was Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, so Philippians will roll around on Saturday or Sunday. I'll be finished by the end of the month, I think. What has been left out by omitting the divisions in the text and the explanatory material is ...

A couple of days ago I finished reading the First Testament. It's the first time in the history of my devotional life that I have read nothing but the First Testament for such an extended time- about 6 months. And it's the first time I have read it through using the Jewish ordering rather than the accepted Christian one. Take the same elements of a narrative and reorder them and you get a completely different story. We Christians tell a tale of a developing revelation; of a movement from the beginning of all things , through a salvation history to Jesus. The Jewish story is not so much about the past as about the present. It is about the law, by which is meant more than a set of rules and regulations. It is about the great ordering on which the universe is founded. It is a prophetic commentary in which society is critiqued against the standard of that ordering, and it is worship in the light of the law. By and large, I prefer the Jewish system, and wonder if I will ever re...

Last week, about a year after I had ordered it, my copy of Bibliotheca arrived. Bibliotheca is an edition of the Bible produced by Adam Lewis Greene. He aimed to restore a way of encountering the Biblical text which we have lost as our approach to the scripture has become more encyclopaedic and more cerebral. So here is a beautifully produced piece of the bookmaker's art, printed on fine paper and in a clear, attractive font, with a sewn binding and cloth covers so that it opens flat. It is printed in four volumes, with one extra containing the Apocrypha, each volume being 400-500 pages, and each about the size and weight of  a hardback novel. There are no chapter of verse numbers, and no textual apparatus of any kind; there is just the text, beautifully bound and printed on paper which is as lovely to touch as the firm covers. I am already part way through a reading of the whole Bible, so immediately swapped to Bibliotheca and unwittingly and gently brought myself face t...