We just watched Batman Begins tonight. I don't intend to give a detailed exposition on the movie right now, but I did want to make a few comments while they were still fresh in my mind.
Overall, I did not really care for the movie. There was no single point of failure, but it simply was not very interesting - or at least not as interesting as it might have been. It was not as dark as the 1989 Batman. They could have traded "dark" for "gritty" or even campy, but they didn't. This version just seemed somewhat flat. Probably the weakest point of the movie though is its depiction of Bruce Wayne's preparation to be Batman. Instead of being a motivated and focused person who is brilliant forensic scientist and an excellent martial artist, we get a character who is really good at beating people up (though he does get some ninja-like training along the way, but not of his own initiative) but not especially educated (it is implied he flunks out of Princeton) and who only becomes focused enough to really become a crime fighter after being rescued from a Chinese prison (where he is at because he is practicing crime - though he is not really a criminal, or so he claims, since he is stealing from Wayne Enterprises) by another crazy vigilante type. I found this change in the character to make Wayne a much less interesting person. Batman also did not really come across as very intimidating, despite that being an emphasis of the story. There is a Lower Wacker Drive cameo though; can't complain about Lower Wacker appearances.
By the way, with all of the massive revisions that can happen in comic book character's stories in such a brief period of time, is is any wonder mythological stories and other legends get so confused? (I was just reading the other day about the Arthurian legends - what a mess those were - but now that I think about what happens to comic book characters, I can see that we still have the same problem.)
This makes me want to go back and watch the 1989 movie, as well as maybe the animated series from the 1990s, just to see how they handled the early part of the story (I think their treatment may have been rather brief), though the animated series is definitely one of my favorite versions of the Batman story. But most of all it makes me want to go buy Batman Chronicles: Volume One which contains the first few Batman comics featuring Batman starting from 1939, and which can be had for about $15.
I made yet another exciting trip to the library, and I am very excited about my latest bounty.
I have now The New Testament : Its Background, Growth, and Content which turns out to be merely a very elementary introductory textbook, which was not what I was expecting. It isn't much use to me, though I note that it was rather readable and if I ever had to teach an elementary college or advanced high school class on the Bible I would probably consider it; it seems like it would make a decent one. On the other hand, I don't plan on teaching any such thing in the near future, so that does not help me much at this moment.
More useful is F. F. Bruce's The Canon of Scripture which is quite good based on what I have read so far. It sppears to have less citations than Metzger's treatment of the New Testament canon, which for a citation snob like me is a slight knock. It is also hard to read linearly: notes and footnotes frequently point at large sections to have to be read to understand the current spot - but then that is farily typical for a work of this sort (and one that Metzger's book shared). On the other hand, I found it to be quite readable, it covers the Old Testament as well as the New Testament, and it is very cheap (less than $20 for hardcover); I plan on buying it. It deserves far more attention than I have yet given it, so expect to hear more about it in the future.
In a similar vein I grabbed E. E. Ellis' The Making of the New Testament Documents (1999), which seems to be a sort of comprehensive, in depth look at the origins of the New Testament, more along the lines of what I was expecting to find in Metzger's book. This book seems more idiosyncratic than one would wish though. Ellis has several theories he is working through, and he seems to have some mostly unique assumptions. He gives the rather important document of I Clement a very early date in the late seventh decade - thirty years before the usually cited date! - and seems to think this is not controversial. I certainly don't know the history of the debate on the dating of I Clement, so for all I know this may be a perfectly reasonable position, but these sorts of early dates run through the whole thing. The result is that the whole thing comes across as very conservative, which makes some sense, since he is from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. It was interesting so far, though, but I am very curious about what sort of critical response it has received.
On a whim I planned on picking up Bart Ehrman's The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993). I haven't looked at it yet, but my impressions from reviews is that the title is a good indication of the content (not surprisingly... funny things those titles). But the opinion on these sorts of things is important to know. Some of it will be true, some I imagine will be exaggerated, but it will all be useful in its own way.
While I was looking for all these books, I saw by chance David Trobisch's book The First Edition of the New Testament (2000) which I had just read about, so I picked that up too. Trobisch's theory appears to be essentially that almost all New Testament texts we have today have their origin in a collection first published in the middle of the second century. He is not saying that the works are from that time - he does not concern himself with their original dates at all - but just that they all passed into a standard collection with consistent editing at a certain point. I am curious what the scholarly response to his book has been; I should track down some reviews. It does not sound entirely implausible, though it is a rather ambitious claim it seems to me (and it would appear his theory might leave more things unexplained than explained), but either way it should be useful. It is useful to consider any reasonable theory about the history of these texts it seems, if only so we know what sort of inferences one might be able to draw. (Or maybe it is just me who finds this interesting, but it is not really useful at all in fact, who knows?)
Finally, since I just read C. S. Lewis' "Space Trilogy" I got out two books related to that, namely The Lost Road by Tolkien which contains the short story of the same title which apparently came out the same conversation that read to Lewis writing Out of the Silent Planet and Discarded Image by Lewis on Medieval and Rennaisance art, some of the ideas of which figure in Perlandra, strangely enough. I was not able to get yet The World's Last Night: And Other Essays by Lewis which has his essay "Religion and Rocketry" or "Will We Lose God in Outer Space" (apparently it has gone under both titles). (On a related note, my confidence in Lews has so far been decreased by this first serious foray into his writing. Other reliable persons have found profit in him though, so for now I will give him the benefit of the doubt. I did not really care for the Space Trilogy much at all. Well, Out of the Silent Planet was not all that bad, and despite some serious flaws I rather liked it, but after reading the next two books, I had rather lost much of the taste for it. I may write more on this later.)
I also passed by, but did not get check out, several books reproducing certain manuscripts. I can't read Greek so it wouldn't do me any good anyway, and even if I could read Greek I would hardly be at the stage of my education where access to an unedited manuscript would be very useful, except as practice reading the original manuscripts, but then that was why I was mainly interested in them. Someday I hope to have such things on my bookshelf.
The conclusion is I have managed to find a wealth of extremely interesting reading material. This has also been a good reminder that I should be working on my Greek...
This does raise one question for me though: How do people survive without access to a university library? My advice to any young person who values their own education (or parent's who value their children's education) is to make sure they move to a city or town with a quality university library. And by quality I was thinking more like IU's than Valparaiso's, but at the very least one like Valparaiso's. Okay, now I may be speaking somewhat pretentiously. In all seriousness, though, I am reminded what an incredible place to live Bloomington is - thank God for it. I do add though, that sometimes the IU library is not the most convenient place to find books, namely some more popular works are better had from the public library or the bookstore. I find a combination of the the three sources to be indispensable.
I made the mistake of logging on to my ICQ account today, which meant that about 5 random people I had never heard of before were dying to talk to me. For all you young pip-squeaks, ICQ was the original instant messaging client, way before there was AIM. So, talking to some random Israeli teenager prompted my memory of the heady days back when instant messaging was young.
As I recall it, ICQ was originally positioned as Internet paging not "instant messaging." I suspect the idea was that you would use it to check if people were online and then tell them to go to some IRC channel or open up Pow-Wow (anybody remember that?) or check their e-mail or whatever. Anyways, that was how I figured I would use back when I first got an account in late 1996 - wow, nine years already - though in fact I always ended up just having a conversation in the ICQ client just like I use it now. Given the paging metaphor, ICQ would open a new window for every message sent originally, which was inconvenient, but my friends and I were too lazy to set up IRC or something like that, so we just talked in ICQ anyway. I actually didn't start using ICQ until fall of 1997, since no one I knew was using it before that, even though I had had an account for a year. But when I got to college, the technically savvy students were starting to use it by then. My account number is lower than 200,000; most of my friends had seven digit account numbers, so you can see how ICQ grew quickly.
ICQ always attracted random people looking to chat. A lot of internationals seem to hang on it still, as my experience today demonstrated. But I had forgotten what it was like to just start talking to some random person from across the world. Not very fun usually, in fact, though I have met some interesting people in the past. Pow-Wow - which was an actual chat client - was a lot like that too. I never did the IRC thing, but still, pretty similar. I just remember how exciting it was talking to people from all over the world. It wasn't really all that fun, but it was so novel. It's amazing how much we - or at least I - have come to take for granted in such a short period of time. Though "short period of time" - nine years of instant messaging, and I am only 26. That's the entire life span of my youngest sister, too! (Of course, IRC has been around almost as long as I have been, but I am thinking in terms of my own experiences.)
Sorry, just some random reminiscing.
I've put up an annotated bibliography of some of the books I have been reading. Not all of the are strictly about the New Testament, but all of them are somehow related to textual evidence of early Christianity.
I have been thinking about some related problems in the church for a long time, and planning on writing about it for the last couple weeks, but I still haven't gotten around to it. Until I actually present the case, let me merely outline the argument:
It seems clear that the church is to judge morality within the church, not outside it. The main evidence for this is to be found in some of the things Paul says in I Corinthians, as well as what Jesus says even earlier about judging, and for that matter his whole ministry (where he spends much time criticizing the Jewish religious establishment, but passes on opportunities to criticize the Romans). This is not to say that the church should not address immorality in the world, but the prime emphasis, as always, is the gospel ("Christ crucified" as Paul says in I Corinthians). There must here be some careful consideration of Jesus' teaching which tends to be quite moralistic, though we need also to take into account how he addresses his primary audiences and note that he is almost always addressing those who are supposedly already followers of God. (I don't feel entirely with this part of the argument - I may be reducing the evidence too violently - though I think I Corinthians by itself would be quite convincing.)
We need to next consider what judging those in the church entails. We know some things it definitely does - which are of primarty interest to this argument, and which I will address shortly - but it might also be useful to understand what is not to be judged, since, again, both Paul and Jesus make it clear that there is a type of judgment that is wrong or at least not advisable (one might, I suppose, take Paul's warning to the Corinthian church to not judge him to be less than a command). We do know some things that should be judged, though: sexual immorality (especially that brings bad repute to the church), whatever would cause lawsuits (some sort of material wrong, I suppose). These are all things we see in Paul's letter to the Corinthians. These are interesting cases, and they should be judged more often and consistently, as I think almost everyone (at least among evangelicals, anyway) agrees, though "church discipline" definitely faces some complexities in an era when it is easy to just go across the street to another church. Immorality is essentiall a local matter, and is not of primary interest to be in this argument. The issue of material wrongs is slightly interesting, especially so in conjuction with some more global issues we find when we look at Jesus' ministry. Jesus frequently criticizes the religious leadership for material injustice, hypocrisy, and, in one of my favorite stories, drives out (possibly even twice!) those trying to make money off of the faithful.
These are things that presumably we in the church - at least those who are "of much repute" in the church - should be judging. Today we have our own money changers in the church who merchandise the Bible, crucifixes, t-shirts, books, etc. We also have our frauds - e.g. many of the so-called televangelists. We happen to have hypocrites as well. Let's follow Jesus example and Paul's teaching and clean house before we go rant about the immorality of secular society. They don't know any better - we supposedly do. And we won't be any sort of alternative to their society until we clean up our own lives and our own community. It was not, as Paul reminds us in I Corinthians, fancy words that were convincing people, it was the power of the Spirit: the most careful apologetic is of little use when filled with hypocrisy and greed (we can probably all think of examples...).
So, that is the general argument I want to make. I just need to put it together. (Comments, as always, welcome.)
(A mostly-unrelated thought I have, but also from reading I Corinthians, is that we need to be careful how we view truth and knowledge and wisdom in the church, and not expect our definition to always fit that of the world even when studying the same topics, for example religion, or the Bible. And no matter how clever our arguments are, or good our evidence, it's the Spirit that convicts. And when we analyze things that we have, the Bible, history, and tradition, we need to look at them in a spiritual light. Especially, for example, I am thinking that we don't need to apply the sort of hack-saw approach to textual criticism that secular critics apply. But there are other implications as well. This is all inspired by the first three chapters of I Corinthians.)
Christian Peacemaker Teams had four of its workers kidnapped in Iraq this week. The Ted Olsen and Rob Moll have some interesting things to say about it on the Christianity Today Weblog. I sometimes think the CPT people are crazy (and they do sometimes have big mouths as well) but I have a lot of respect for their approach and, personally, I've even thought of trying something like CPT in the past. I am also reminded of the Southern Baptist missionaries killed in Iraq while I was in Jordan two years ago. I pray that these four will fare better. Let's keep praying for everyone in Iraq regardless of their nationality or role in the current difficult situation there.
