John Anderson has tagged us on what has now become another five-part meme. This one- “List the 5 primary sources that have most affected your scholarship, thoughts about antiquity, and/or understanding of the NT/OT.” Here goes-
1. Didache – Sheds great light on a early Christian community and is still useful as a confessional text. Not to mention the fun it presents for Greek students. If we had our druthers, every “New Believer” class would be reading the Didache.
2. Kebra Negast – “The Glory of the Kings”. A religious-imperial text of Ethiopia’s old Christian kingdom. The early parts of the text give extra-biblical information to biblical stories that largely serve Tewahedo christology and its larger narrative.
3. Tewahedo Bible – has 88 books, including all 4 Enochs plus other fun stuff. When we started learning Amharic, the first task we attempted was translating Amharic Genesis 1 and a few psalms. It was lots of fun and taught us a lot about (south) Semitic languages. While this Bible and the Kebra Negast are very late documents (9-10th cent CE), they are illuminating for Oriental Orthodox Christians and for those interested, like us.
4. The Republic – Read chapters of this work by Plato with David Adcock at HBU. It was an undergrad philosophy class, so it was taught with an English translation, but Dr. (I think his dissertation is done now) Adcock is very capable in classical Greek and encouraged those of us who could to struggle with the Greek text. He took time after class to answer questions and challenge us with more questions to think about as we (about 4 of us) slowly learned little amounts of classical Greek together. It was my first exposure to classical Greek and I wish I had more.
5. Canaanite Myths – The stories (particularly creation and flood) of El, Baal, Asherah, and friends which the primeval history of Genesis subverts.
We’d like to hear from everyone.
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