"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.
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