Friday, May 13, 2005
(9:09 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional
I apologize to my relatives for any offense that was given when one of my young cousins came across this page and found vulgar language. There is obviously some material here that is not appropriate for children, but it never crossed my mind that any child would find much interest in looking at this page.
I confess to being proud of the 222-comment thread below, and I'd like to give special thanks to "The Girl" for reinvigorating the conversation after I went to bed.
I confess that I finished the main works of Justin Martyr last night, skipping over those that Victorian scholars thought were spurious -- typically, once a few scholars start to suspect that a document is spurious, a snowball effect begins, so I figure it's unanimous by now. Perhaps philology as a discipline is biased toward spuriosity.
I also confess that as I was half-attentively skimming through three-page quotations from the Old Testament, I still managed to see footnotes that were clearly incorrect. Here's an example: Justin seems to believe that Jewish authorities have cut certain sections from the canonical books of the Bible that are especially helpful in proving that Jesus was the Messiah (he cites passages supposedly from Isaiah and Jeremiah). He also frequently quotes the sayings of Jesus from the Gospels. Okay, so when he says, toward the end, that he's going to limit himself to those scriptures that his Jewish interlocutors also accept -- so they drop a footnote and say, "Note that he is promising not to cite the New Testament." But in the very next sentence he clarifies that he's talking to the stuff supposedly cut out of the Old Testament, and on the next page he enters into a long analysis of one of Jesus' parables. A precocious sixth-grader could have written a more accurate footnote.
I confess that I'm a little worried about what the comment thread for the confessional is going to look like this week. But confess, confess!
