Now that final grades have been submitted, I received a copy of my student evaluations (typed and collated so I don’t know who they are from). The comments were typical (I’m great, they loved the classes, etc. :-)), though this one comment stood out:
Tyler is a great humorous teddy bear of Biblical knowledge. He is filled with joy, laughter, and Hebrew.
I’ve never had it put quite that way before!
Ah, nothing like the end of semester marking push to put someone in the mood for Christmas! Be that as it may, I am now finished (in more ways than one!). Marking is done; grades have been submitted. I am actually ahead of the game this semester since final grades are not due until this upcoming Friday. This is quite the accomplishment for me since I am usually one of the last professors to hand in grades.
Now I must turn my attention to a number of other important tasks before the next semester begins, including a number of blog posts that are needing some attention in my drafts folder.
I received a kind email the other day from the novelist Anne Rice. It appears that she came to my site looking for information on recent manuscript finds in Israel and wanted to convey thanks for my “interesting articles on many subjects.”
In turn, I thought I would put a plug in for her latest work, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt: A Novel (Knopf, 2005; Buy from Amazon.ca | Buy from Amazon.com). I recognize that for the blogosphere this is old news (the book came out over a year ago! That’s like eternity on the ‘net!), but it is a novel worth reading.
Christ the Lord is an engaging novel written from the perspective of a seven year old Jesus returning to Nazareth with his family after living in exile in Egypt to escape King Herod’s clutches. Writing a book about the adolescent Jesus was quite the departure for the author who made her mark on the literary world by writing about vampires, but the novel is wonderfully written and well-researched. Rice draws from a wide array of sources for her inspiration, including, of course, the canonical gospels (which are admittedly sparse on the topic of Jesus’ adolescence), but also apocryphal works like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, scholarly understandings of first century Palestine, and traditional Catholic teachings. The result is a compelling coming of age story.
That being said, this is a work of historical fiction and you shouldn’t base your theology on it (for example, one problem that Michael Pahl notes — and I agree with — concerns her portrayal of Jesus’ strong messianic consciousness; others would include her use of apocryphal material).
If you are interested in more information about Rice’s novel and potential film plans, you can check out her site.
I did it — I took the quiz. Like Rico, Jim West, James Spinti, I too am a Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm. Not quite sure if this is a good thing (I’m not sure whether “literati” sounds more ominous or more pretentious!), but the description pegs me in at least two areas:
You’re probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people’s grammatical mistakes make you insane.
I’m just thankful that I’m not a book snob like Stephen Carlson and Loren Rosson. 🙂 If only I could be a dedicated reader like Mark Goodacre — it just sounds better.
Nothing like a big stack of papers to grade to get you in the Christmas spirit! The silence of this blog is due to the heap of marking I have to get done in the next week.
If you are in the same predicament, you may enjoy this cartoon:
