Lent Reading

There is a debate running around the house at the moment as to whether we should be giving up TV (not including DVDs) or sugar for Lent.  We did alcohol last year, and anyway a nice delivery from Avery's arrived on Saturday so that option is clearly excluded.

Whichever we decide, I am committing myself to picking up and reading Raymond Brown's The Death of the Messiah over Lent: synopsis in hand.  It is 1524 pages long, excluding indices, which amounts to about 38 pages per day.  There is lots of bibliography though, so it isn't as bad as it looks.  If i find anything interesting, I'll let you know.

NB, the Amazon link is to second hand copies of the hardback volumes, hopefully in their beautiful slipcase.  You can buy the single volumes in paperback if you wanted to - but as with well done beef...what is the point?

Comments

[Sean]

Hi Jim
Good to hear of your plans. Maybe we should all liaise at some stage, read the same book and have a conversation via the blogs.

[Jim Gordon]

Sean, I've never read Brown's encyclopedia on the Passion. But I have used it, learned from it, and admired the scholarship that wriote it. I don't doubt you will simply confirm again that he had few peers for that rare combination of thorough comprehensive scholarship and an implicit reverence for both the text and the task. My own reading is a couple of the volumes of P T Forsyth: The Person and Work of Christ, and The Cruciality of the Cross. Few could hammer words together with such force when it comes to stating what the Gospel is.