Living Wittily

Gordon Fee as Exegete: Giving Paul his due and the importance of word order

Two examples of Fee's no nonsense exegetical comments:

"R F Collins argues (unconvincingly) that Paul has here taken over an earlier formula and adapted it to his own purposes. While all things are possible, not all possible things are equally probable. Indeed, it is of considerable interest that the most creative theologian in the early church is seen as not capable of being creative at points like this, but must be assumed to be borrowing from others - and that without evidence."

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On Paul's use of charis and shalom in the greeting:

"Paul salutes his brothers and sisters in Christ with "grace to you - and peace." It is worth noting that this is the invariable order of Paul's words, not "grace and peace to you" as in most translations. Very likely there is significance to this order: the grace of God and Christ is what is given to God's people; peace is what results from such a gift. Hence "grace to you - and peace."...The sum total of God's activity towards his human creatures is found in the word "grace"; God has given himself to his people bountifully and mercifully in Christ. Nothing is deserved, nothing can be achieved. The sum total of those benefits  as they are experienced by the recipients of God's grace is "peace", God's eschatological shalom, both now and to come."

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If the task of the exegete is to enable later readers to hear as clearly as possible, the voice of the one speaking in the text, then these two brief quotations are good examples of why Gordon Fee is a trusted guide. For myself, I wholly concur with his pedantic care in translating Paul's greeting "grace to you - and peace". Allowing the brief pause between the two both distinguishes and connects them in a way that is profoundly theological.

On another note, the Scottish Baptist College Blog is being revived into a discussion forum for issues that we as part of the Scottish Baptist community want to explore in conversation. In particular we want to explore areas of theological education, ministry formation, discipleship in 21st Century Culture, and we will include occasional book reviews. It will also contain news and comment from our College community and have some guest posts from students and others now and again. You might want to go look - I'll occasionally flag it up here as new material is added. 

Gordon Fee and the intellectual deference of a New Testament scholar.

There are occasional Bible commentaries that have a long shelf life, and then there are those that are hacked out to meet the voracious appetite of publishers for niche series. The carbon footprint of commentary mania is brontosauran in its scale. There are currently around 125 biblical commentary series in production in various North Western World publishers. You can see them here if you click on Series button on the upper menu bar. I'm not sure whether to describe this as ludicrous, wasteful, exegetical overkill, marketing madness, unbiblical abuse of creation gifts, or just plain stupid. But out there somewhere people are buying them, seduced by claims of niche market, latest scholarship, and that underlying assumption that if the book is about the Bible it must be justified.

So. When I buy a new commentary now (it was not always thus for me), I have to have a good reason. It has to give me what I don't have and really need. The fact that it rehearses what everyone else has said, or the concern to defend particular positions, or the claim that it now adds a different perspective isn't enough. Nor do I want a commentary that forecloses exegetical options because the publisher takes a particular theological line - and that goes both for the conservative and the critical.

For the discerning commentary reader and user there are certain names that are the gold standard. Gordon Fee is one. Now Professor Emeritus of New Testament Exegesis at Regent's College Vancouver, he is a retired Pentecostal scholar of singular standing across the denominations. His exegetical honesty, focused erudition, rigorous scholarship, and crisp no nonsense writing style laced with fun and gentle critique of others' positions, make him a joy to read. His First Corinthians and Philippians are amongst my most used volumes - I've read them both and used them constantly. His two massive exegetical studies of the Holy Spirit (God's Empowering Presence) and of Christology (Pauline Christology) as well as his up-front honest exegesis of the Pastoral Epistles, are full of help for those who want to break sweat doing some exegetical excavations.

So now I am slowly reading my way through his newest volume on the Thessalonian Epistles. I'm going to blog on Fee once a week for a while - just highlighting what makes him interesting, reliable, for me the commentator of choice on any book he chooses to work on. And not because he is always right, or says what I'd like to confirm my own exegetical prejudices; but because he is to be trusted with a text, which he treats with an intellectual deference that nonetheless tolerates the hard questions. And because he knows when to expose nonsense, question unexamined assumptions, and link up creative connections across the range of the Bible, while making sure that pastors and preachers, scholars and enquirers see both the wood and the trees, and learn to love the view. Tomorrow a few characteristic quotes from Fee to show that all the above isn't just another sales pitch for another commentary to take up further space in an already overpopulated market. 

Of the making of many books, and the pricing upwards of many books, there is no limit.

When it comes to possessing a book, like most bibliophiles I prefer a substantial stitched hardback. Especially if it is an important book. And because I just so enjoy handling a well bound book, printed on quality paper, where font and layout and editing and production standards each contribute to a book that is a joy to hold and behold, to handle and read. And if the price is halfway reasonable then here's my money. The book below is the hardback edition of George Herbert at £90 - I got it for half the price from a sensible bookseller in Cambridge. "A thing of beauty and a joy forever".

But I also want to write in praise of the well intentioned paperback. Sometimes the hardback is ridiculously expensive and impossible to justify - and there's no paperback edition. Take for example Susan Gillingham's Psalms Through the Centuries volume 1 - £57 and the second volume will be even more expensive. And no chance of a paperback version, despite the fact that this is a series of commentaries aimed at students! So either you borrow it from a library (if it has it), or from inter-library loan - but what if it's a book you want to read and refer to often, huh? Writing to the publisher of Gillingham's book to point out the unattainability of these prices for all but institutional libraries I received a courteous negative response, essentially the same as one I first encountered and learned to live with when I was twenty one and at University.

I still have an essay I did all those years ago on the hard to make case for the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy. I began with the disclaimer that much as I would like to establish the case for Mosaic authorship, the historical and textual evidence did not point that way. One of the most illuminating feedback comments I've ever had was pencilled in the margin, "Tough!" It was a hard response for a fragile young Evangelical, but one that has served me well - and I still have the essay. The lecturer was himself an agnostic who sympathised deeply with people of faith trying to re-negotiate the foundations of that faith by intellectual dialogue and critical thinking in what could seem a hostile environment.

The point is, the publisher's response for all its courteous explanations of why they couldn't afford to make the book affordable for individual purchasers, came down to that one word I learned to live with decades ago - "Tough!" Now there aren't many books I want to own that I'm not prepared to pay for, and do without other things to buy them. Choices about disposable income are real giveaway clues to our ethics, stewardship, taste, and peculiar but likeable daftness. But even I can't bring myself to spend £115 on, for example, the second volume of Michael Watts The Dissenters, a magisterial history that is simply unmatched in the subject field. The first volume was issued in both hardback and paperback - but not the second. Tough!

And likewise Carol Newsom's The Book of Job A Contest of Moral Imaginations at £66 - but a book of great originality, penetrative in its insight into how this magnificent text interprets us and our world, and our human brokenness and longing for wholeness, before we ever get near an interpretation of it. So at £66, "Tough!" But it has just been published at £13.99 in an Oxford Paperback. The lesson being, sometimes you can't get all you want - I'm still waiting for Gillingham on the Psalms to be affordable, and Watts Dissenters to not need a mortgage preceded by a credit check - so, "tough". But now and again life has unlooked for blessing - and something you want is not only affordable, but a bargain at twice the price - as is Newsom's work on Job, in paperback.

For those interested, Newsom's commentary on Job in the New Interpreter's Bible represents along with Sam Balentine's Smyth and Helwys volume on Job, the finest exegetical conversation on Job I know. And with Newsom bound in the same volume as Clinton McCann's commentary on Psalms, that NIB volume costing around £40 is simply gold at the price of lead. I exaggerate - but only very slightly.

Philippians - a huge commentary that should have been twice the size!

Earlier this year John Reumann's Anchor Bible commentary on Philippians was published. It has xxiv, + 805 pages. By any standards a massive volume. (By the way, I think the woodcuts used in the dustcovers of the Yale Anchor Commentaries are powerful images resonating with the biblical text). In the Preface readers are informed that Reumann's original manuscript was nearly halved to fit the publisher's demands. When it came into the College Library, given my interest in kenosis,  I had a read at Reumann's treatment of 2.5-11, the great Christ Hymn. The section was hard to read, frustrating to follow, and mostly made up of highly condensed notes. It felt like notes for a commentary rather than the notes of a commentary. Anyone people-watching in the library would have seen disappointment written in giant font bold italics underlined and filling the screen of my face.

The recent review of Reumann's work by James Dunn places the blame for the virtual un-useability of the volume on the publishers. Given Reumann worked on this commentary for over thirty years, the work should have been allowed two volumes, the same as Ephesians by Markus Barth. When it comes to metaphorical images, Dunn uses one to describe the failed editing process that is memorably incongruous and hilariously apt.

"Overall the volume gives the impression of being subjected to a form of liposuction with the resulting "lumpiness" caused by "oversuction"."

I refrain from offering any graphics. You can read the whole review over here. Meanwhile us Philippians buffs are now waiting for the next commentary blockbusters - Paul Holloway's volume in Hermeneia (still a few years off), and the new International Critical Commentary by N T Wright, the Bishop of Durham and storm centre of much debate about what Paul did and didn't mean - I hope Wright's will be published this side of the eschaton - otherwise there may be a few exegetical debates in heaven between Paul and N T Wright, or as his less charitable opponents call him, N T Wrong.

O Felix Culpa! The happy fault of having too many commentaries.....

Blame Jason. It's his fault. He started me off. One of my lifelong interests is how Scripture has been commented on through the centuries. I can be boringly enthusiastic about what I consider one of the richest veins of Christian reflection, combining devotional theology and biblical scholarship - the magnificent tradition of Christian biblical commentary. A couple of weeks ago Jason suggested several "travelling companions" for my sojourn with Colossians, which is all the excuse I need to desiderate.

I'm already well into Dunn's volume in the New International Greek Commentary, which along with O'Brien in the Word Biblical Commentary deals with the Greek text. Marianne Meye Thompson's Two Horizon Commentary and A T Lincoln in the New Intepreter's Bible provide hefty nudges in the right direction for theological reflection.  Colossians Remixed. Subverting the Empire, by Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmat I read a couple of years ago and found it a stunning eye opener to the political implications of Paul's vision of Christ, creation, church and cross ( these four inter-related themes in Colossians I'm currently preparing as a series of sermons). And if those aren't enough G B Caird deals with Colossians in the distilled elegance of his  Paul's Letters from Prison, and N T Wright's earliest published volume in the Tyndale series is still a wee gem.

From a generation earlier C F D Moule's New Cambridge Greek Testament is a wise and concise treatment in which Moule makes optimistic assumptions about the studen'ts competence in NT Greek, though his most important comments are now absorbed in the work of those who were fortunate enough to learn from him e.g. Jimmy Dunn and N T Wright. And Markus Barth's volume in the Anchor Bible might be good, though reviews were mixed - but that's because anyone who has used his two Anchor Bible volumes on Ephesians is likely to be disappointed by any subsequent work that tries to go beyond it in scope, penetration and independent conclusion. I love those two volumes, bought now 30 years ago and many a time browsed and some pages read for the sheer pleasure of it.

Recently published commentaries on Colossians might include (but not for me this time) the New International Critical Commentary by R McL Wilson; the Pillar volume by Douglas Moo; J L Sumney in the New Testament Library Series; C H Talbert in the Paidea series; and Ben Witherington's socio-rhetorical treatment of Ephesians and Colossians. But then there are older and too often neglected ones which I will peep into - J B Lightfoot's benchmark Greek commentary is obvious; Bishop Handley Carr Glynn Moule in the Cambridge Greek Testament from over a century ago, and whose writings on Paul's epistles are virtually Keswick holiness teaching with a deep Calvinist tinge; Alexander MacLaren's exposition in the old Expositor's Bible, a gem of Evangelical devotional theology from an unjustly neglected pastoral expositor.

From the continent Lohse in the Hermeneia series now over 35 years in print (which I once worked through page by page - and believe it did me good!), and Eduard Schweizer's theologically sharp exegesis as a stand alone engagement (I still think his commentary on Mark is in the top 4 of the Gospel Premiership). Ancient works include the homilies of Chrysostom, and treatments by Calvin, and (Jason tells me) Melancthon, and a big fat Banner of Truth reprint of Bishop Davenant's 17th Century Reformed commentary on which Spurgeon desiderated (probably not a felicitous expression).

In reality though, the whole commentary industry today is in danger of publication overkill and encouraged mediocrity, as publishers try to find yet another market niche nobody else has yet thought of and then try to persuade us that despite the multifarious options, this is a definite must have for the serious bible scholar. Aye right!

But meantime I have a few of the above as my panel of experts and "cloud of witnesses" who will try to keep me close to the text and open to God.

The first three bible commentaries I ever bought.....and read

My biblical library has two or three commentaries on each Bible book - and on a number of the more substantial books, quite a bit more than three. As newer or better commentaries become available (though newer doesn't always mean better), I happily weed out those that have been superseded. Which keeps my biblical work up to date and keeps my library within the limits of the bookshelves. But in all the culls and clearouts, the new additions and the jettisoned, there are commentaries I'd never let go.

The words 'benchmark', 'gold-standard', 'definitive' are too loosely thrown around by those who churn out the  publishers blurb, those literary spin doctors who endorse, commend and give borrowed authority. And sometimes they boldly say 'destined to become a classic'. Maybe so. But isn't a classic a book that has proved itself, that bears rereading, that has enduring value for its content and insights, that has the capacity to address universal human questions, or to transcend limits of time and idiom? Those amongst other critieria? So a 'classic in its field', say a classic commentary - what would that be? And which commentaries would any of us hold up as such an example?

I'm happy to hear suggested classics from those who use commentaries. Meantime the reason for this post was a revisit I made to one of the first commentaries I ever bought...and read. Not all commentaries are readable. By their nature they are somewhere between a reference book to be consulted on a word, phrase, verse or section of text, or to be one of several perspectives being weighed as part of the comparing of evidence, perspective and interpretation that helps overcome our subjective often distorting individual preferences. That's why I have several commentaries on each biblical book. Not all from the same publisher; or the same theological perspective; or with the same exegetical approach.

And amongst them all are several I bought in my earliest years of Christian study. Not many of them would be called classics, benchmarks or definitive. At least not by others. But from the start of my Christian life, my spiritual development has always been closely indexed to my exegetical growing up. Taking text seriously, reading Scripture and hearing the Word of Christ opening up the Scriptures; trying to read the Bible from a heart informed by honest study.

And in all those years some commentaries have been for me, and without the say-so of blurb writers, benchmarks, definitive of my approach to the text, and thus for me, classic commentaries. One of them is pictured here. Published in 1976, the year of my ordination. I paid £2.25 for it, in the John Smith University Bookshop of Stirling University. There isn't a single word of endorsement or publisher's blurb. So if the publisher were to reprint it (the only Amazon copy is currently priced at £46.25), I'd happily do a wee endorsement, thus:

" This commentary is written with elegant brevity and an unembarrassed enjoyment in explaining ancient texts in accessible language. In 220 pages we have "multum in parvo" - Ephesians in 94 pages and 24 footnotes. Caird is allergic to academic jargon and is the kind of scholar who knows so much about the text and its world that he feels no need to prove it by killing the text under an avalanche of scholarly see how much I know footnotes. This is a book all scholars should read and reckon with - as an example of commentary writing that serves the Church well by serving the text faithfully."

Or words to that effect! Wonder if Wipf and Stock would republish it? Think I'll suggest it......it's a classic.  

Ascension, Acts of the Apostles and indiscriminate indexes

On May 21, this Thursday, the Church celbrates the Ascension of Christ, and May 31st is Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit, then the following Sunday is Trinity Sunday. Decided I want to spend this high point of the Christian year and then into the "ordinary time post-Pentecost becoming familiar again with volume two of Luke's Gospel. We call it The Acts of the Apostles, but it's the story of the Gospel as it overflows from hearts into communities, then across cultural barriers, racial divisions and national boundaries.

So I'm reading my way through the new commentary on Acts by David Peterson. Now and again I'll include some of the story of the early Church in the occasional blog post. Instead of gazing wistfully at emergent church, I'm going to have a longish think about how the church emerged. I've a feeling the Holy Spirit had more than a little to do with it. The calls to co-operate with the Spirit, to be responsive to those prompts and nudges that knock us off our stride, to think new things and try again what previously "didn't work", to relinquish our grip on ideas we cherish and take into our hands trustfully that newness that by definition is unfamiliar, even untried.

In other words, we are back to questions of risk, impelled and compelled by the Spirit to innovative action, urged to subversive witness, shoved into places and circumstances where imaginative faith finds ways of undermining all those powers that frustrate the telling and living of the Good News. Peterson is a fine scholar and determined to provide reflections that do justice to the underlying theology of a book too easily assumed to be mainly history.

Now. One complaint and one compliment which I'll pass on to the publisher. To do with the indices. Compliment first. The subject index is substantial enough to be very user friendly and a helpful pointer to significant discussions - as it should be. But the author index is  so overloaded with citations that you are simply put off even trying to trace them. One writer has one work cited in the Bibliography, yet it is indexed over 150 times. But Krodel's brilliant commentary is cited once so gets one footnote! The standard commentary by the great C K Barrett has over 400 page references, and Witherington has over 300 - and all of them unsorted, a catena of numbers.

Come on!! Stop using computers to generate indices. There's no rationale or selection of the significant references, just a lumping together in consecutive page order of every citation. The result is an exercise in tedium that is simply a guaranteed turn away. Had the indexer taken a bit longer to edit this unsorted blizzarrd of data, by going through the citations retaining the most significant ones, then there might have been a point in the exercise. I want to know what Barrett thinks of the Jerusalem Council, but i don't need to know every time his name is bracketed in a footnote. As it is, the author index reads like the old logarithm tables - remember them? - and they are just as fun to use. 

'I know that my redeemer liveth...' Job, Balentine, Handel, Wesley and Maddy Prior!

Those of us who buy commentaries because it is our calling to study and preach scripture, have far too many options in what has become a crowded field, (especially with Evangelical publishers). There is an ecological ethic waiting to be discovered by publishers. Way at the start of my ministry I read and have followed W E Sangster's advice never to buy commentary sets. Find the best ones in a set and create your own "Best Set". That's even more important for someone like me who reads the things, providing they are well written. Amongst the tests of a good commentary is how they deal with the hard bits! Most exegetes can do the running commentary / say something about most things approach. But who unfankles textual knots? Who  hears and pays attention to theological tensions?  Which  commentary has the balance between raising and answering questions, and raises real questions without providing answers too controlled by unacknowledged personal agendas?

I've spent an hour or so chasing the 'test text' of the redeemer in Job 19.25. Briefly - Balentine finds the Christianisation of the text attractive but unsupportable. Though he isn't prepared to be closed to other interpretations - the way of wisdom, he thinks, may be to linger within the question that refuses to be answered - who will be the redeemer of the Jobs of this world? Amongst his more telling points - Job has not been asking or expecting to be delivered BY God, but is demanding to be vindicated before and delivered FROM God. All of which sounds very Brueggemannish! He also (following David Clines and Carol Newsom) proposes that v25 and v26a are separated from v26b and 27, so that the second of Job's affirmations is that he will indeed see God, in his flesh, before he dies. Thus he isn't postulating resurrection, but demanding and claiming vindication through a redeemer-advocate who will take up his case, and before a death that now seems certain.

That is a far too limited precis - and captures none of Balentine's subtlety and theological delicacy. Likewise, the treatment by Newsom in the New Interpreter's is a careful and nuanced argument along similar lines. Handel in the gorgeous aria from the Messiah may well have found a remarkable resonance for Christian theology in the passage - but these modern commentators think the force of Job's argument for pre-Christian readers / hearers is the sheer human determination to speak out against any system, theological or cultural, that unjustly inflicts suffering and is unresponsive to the cry of the innocent. And that in the context of Job, and in the context of our modern world, there is a crucial aptness that a text of such defiant faith should be heard with its original force.

Still. Is Handel's oratorio an entirely mistaken appropriation of a text that has comforted countless Christian believers? Why should our contemporary treatment of the text be privileged over the way the Church has found in this text strong resources of pastoral support and theological vision? I've just listened again to Handel, whose rendering of the text frames it in adoration and the persistence of faith. And I confess I find no destructive dissonance between the ultimate and glorious vision of the redeemed before the Redeemer, and the urgent moral enquiry of the sufferer who refuses to have human anguish rendered meaningless by an ultimate and inscrutable silence. They are of course two very different hermeneutical methods - but must they disqualify each other? The text is even further enhanced - and removed from strict context - by Charles Wesley - and then rendered even more creatively by Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band. Maddy Prior's voice does something entirely different from the soprano performing Handel's oratorio - there is an intimacy and personal responsiveness that takes seriously the first person singular..."I know...." When cleansed of its dogmatic stridency, "I know..." is personal appropriation of mercy and grateful affirmation of faith in the grace that redeems - or so Wesley.

  As one who invests personally - in money and study time - on what I try to ensure are good commentaries, I fully sympathise with the problem of choosing books wisely and within a tight budget. I've had to do it all my life! So. I still think Balentine's is a magnificent example of the commentary genre that does what I most want - wrestle with the text, honestly, skillfully, creatively and with theological sensitivity. Carol Newsom's work is bound with Clinton McCann on Psalms in volume IV of the New Interpreter's Bible and that volume costs about the same as Balentine, though it is one of the key volumes in the NIB. This isn't helping is it? I would find it very hard to do without either now - but if the NIB is in a library near you, why not treat yourself to Balentine. But I can hear at least one friend who is an OT scholar muttering about Clines' three volume masterpiece - and I just wish ........

Pastoral depth and theological reach: Balentine on The Book of Job

Some time ago I mentioned the commentary on Job by Sam Balentine. (And the other day I promised Robert a few extracts as a sampler). For a long time now I've read slowly through  a commentary as a kind of background music to other study. There is no pressure to read fast, the aim being a long slow conversation between biblical text, commentator and me listening in. Not all commentaries read easily because they're meant to be consulted, a resource available on demand. Still, I've persevered over a long while and found it for me a very satisfying form of lectio divina. It's taken me the best part of two months to read around half of Sam Balentine's commentary on Job, and I feel no compulsion to speed up the process - that would be like being part of a conversation where you rudely interrupt by saying to the other person, "Come on! Get on with it! Get to the point! We haven't all day!" You don't interrupt someone in a conversation who is speaking more sense than you are likely to.

So Balentine is being savoured sip by sip (think Sean the Baptist and an expensive but worth it Italian or Australian red wine!). Here are some of my pencil-marks-in- -the-margin extracts from Balentine.

The persistent voices of dissent in Hebraic tradition - Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, the anonymous pray-ers of the lament psalms, and especially Job - challenge orthodoxy with the problem scholars call theodicy. Suffering inevitably raises questions about God and justice, which defenders of the faith are compelled to answer. Theodicies come from those who, like Job's friends, seek to counter questions that impugn divine justice by pronouncing God 'Not Guilty'.

Such a verdict may of course be entirely justified, for as the witness of the scriptures makes clear, God will certainly punish the wicked. However, as the dialogues [of Job] unfold, Eliphaz and the friends exemplify how this truth may be overstated or misapplied. Theirs is the approach of those who maintain a safe distance from the suffering of others in order to defend doctrine at the expense of compassion. (page 109).

If our vantage point is the ash heap, then we look with the eyes of the sufferer and ponder the gap between the world and the world we have been shown. The world Eliphaz envisions summons Job to praise, but the broken world in which Job lives invites only lament. If doxology alone is acceptable in God's world, where then is the place for those who cannot as yet (if ever) speak this language?...Before we take up the ministry of comforting others, it is wise to ask ourselves if our intent is to help them find their place in God's world, or in ours. (page 120 and 121).

"Words of despair" speak a truth that must not only be heard but also seen and felt. If Job's friends would only pay attention to him as a person, if they would only look at him 'face to face,' then his face would make a moral claim on them that would change both their words and their attitudes. (page 129)

There aren't many commentaries on Job that are so pastorally oriented. I find that a surprising thought. Balentine's impatience with theodicies that seek to protect God from our deepest human questions and complaints gives his exegesis and comment a spiritual depth and theological reach that I have found deeply satisfying. This is a great commentary. Very different from Clines, (3 volumes in the Word Series) who can also write with pastoral and theological sensitivity, but with such informational detail that his work needs a different kind of study. But when complete it will be the benchmark in encyclopaedic coverage The commentary that comes closest to Balentine is that by Carol Newsom in the New Interpreter's Bible. At times I've checked Balentine against her work, because she is a remarkably lucid and searching contributor to the conversation about Job. Newsom has an independent mind, whose exposition is rich with pastoral intent, and who also writes beautifully. The next post on Job will be on the great Redeemer text in Job 19.25-27.

The amazing grace of biblical scholars!

"Amazing"! Amazing how often the word is amazingly overused. Overstatement is one of the most insiduous and pervasive linguistic diseases afflicting contemporary discourse. It's amazing we put up with it.  If most things are amazing, then jaw-dropping, eye-brow raising genuine astonishment becomes a redundant experience, and wonder is also out of a job.So when referring to human achievement, I try to use the word "amazing" to refer to those things which can be truly praised to the point of admitting I don't know how they did it, but in humble admiration I stand, (I use the word advisedly), amazed!

In which case I think Vincent Taylor's Commentary on the Gospel of Mark, published in 1952 is an amazing work of biblical scholarship and human endeavour.

Consider.

It was in process during and beyond the Second War. Taylor was a family man and an active Methodist Churchman. Travel to libraries was limited, the scale of the commentary was towards being a comprehensive summary of previous scholarship with Taylor's own independent judgement woven through. He was a practitioner of text, form, source and historical criticism, and by the time he wrote his commentary, a scholar immersed in study of NT christology and atonement, evident throughout his exegesis of the Markan passion story. And all this was done before PC's allowed cut and paste, painless re-drafting, footnote and bibliographic software, file back-up - and before the internet gave access to the bibliosphere and that republic of information communication called cyberspace.

 And there it stands. An amazing monument to meticulous, persistent, faithful, disciplined labour; described as a no-stone-left-unturned commentary. Part of the MacMillan series, those detailed examinations of text, syntax, Greco-Roman context, classical parallels, verbal studies - a thorough literary dissection aimed at all round textual explanation. The volume is a hefty repository of learning, set out in double columns of smallish print, few concessions to those untrained in the biblical languages, and here and there, in partial explanation of this labour of love, Taylor's own faith appropriation of the text.

I remember R E O White telling a story (whether apocryphal anecdote or true memory I never confirmed) of Vincent Taylor and ten tons of topsoil. Asked how he had managed to keep going at the commentary he recalled the delivery of ten tons of topsoil to his front drive at the manse. Over the summer he moved it round to the back of the house to rebuild the garden, shovel by shovel, barrowload by barrowload, till it was moved. The commentary was tackled in the same faithful incremental way.

Study of Mark's Gospel has moved beyond Taylor's work, and the concerns of contemporary scholarship are very different. Numerous and various forms of NT criticism have come and gone, pushing study of Mark's Gospel in excitingly different directions.  But few commentaries today are written out of a lifetime's textual cultivation of one allotment in the large acreage of biblical studies. Shovel by shovel, sentence by sentence, over the years, Taylor worked the text of Mark with the thorough patience of the gardener who knows the time it takes to build a garden, work the tilth of the soil, sow seeds and wait for worthwhile growth and eventual  fruit. For that reason, now and again, I open Vincent Taylor's Commentary on Mark, read him on some passage or other, and thank God for that unsung apostolic succession of  those who have given their lives to scholarly study of the biblical text. They are God's carefully chosen gifts to us.