In addition to the practical considerations surveyed in the previous blog, there is the intriguing theory that a certain significant early Christian set the precedent of using the codex: Paul. If even the author of 2 Peter (a late dating would be 70-110) knew of Paul’s letters as a collection (“all his letters”) and regarded them as Scripture (2 Peter 3:15-16), might they have been bound in codex form? Might this codex then have taken on some sort of iconic meaning?

Harry Gamble in Books and Readers in the Early Church suggests Paul’s letters as being a likely impetus for the popularity of the codex (Gamble, 59-65). Given the acknowledged authority of his letters (evidenced by 2 Peter 3:15-16), if an early collection of Paul’s letters to seven churches (and there is interesting evidence suggesting such a collection, which by seven would suggest universality) originally and repeatedly circulated in codex form, this would surely have made an impression.

Gamble estimates that if this collection of letters was put on a roll, it’s length would be about 80 feet long! That would be “double the maximum length of Greek rolls and roughly three times what may be regarded as a normal length. Because the length of rolls was determined by custom and convenience, a roll of such extent is extremely unlikely. For a book intended to be read and studied and thus regularly handled, as an edition of Paul’s letters assuredly was, a roll of such length is plainly inconceivable. If Paul’s letters were transcribed in a single book, as the features of the earliest recoverable edition required, that book must have been a codex, not a roll” (Gamble, 62-63). In Paul’s letters Gamble finds both the motive and the materials coming together for a codex form. As he points out, people wanted “random access” to Paul’s letters, not “sequential access.” And the codex offered that random access!

So (if this is how it happened) it was a brilliant publishing decision, whether by the author or his “publisher”! And did it ever catch on. First for Christian scriptures and eventually spreading to become the universally recognized form of a book. At least until the past few years.

Just think of Theophilus walking down the street with his codex, easily identifying himself as a Bible-carrying Christian.

And here’s a thought: will ebooks alter—or perhaps virtually eradicate—our textual footprints as the centuries roll out from this point on?

Still, we do not know why early Christians favored the codex for their Scripture. But we are not lacking possible explanations.

*The codex made it easier to access a text and consult various passages. Flipping pages and holding your place with a finger or two is far easier than scrolling through a long document (as computer users today have learned).

*The codex had a greater holding capacity than a scroll of manageable size. For one thing, the text could be written on two sides of a sheet.

*The codex may have been more portable than a scroll, and thus it might have appealed to itinerant evangelists. But this does not account for all of the codices that have been found. They weren’t all from traveling evangelists!

*The codex may have cost less. The savings on papyrus alone may have been 25% over the scroll. But there was the extra cost and complication of cutting papyrus sheets to size, making quires and binding them. And there is no indication of other cost-saving measures in early Christian codices (such as putting more words on a page or using smaller margins).

*The codex may have borne more similarity to the notebooks used in everyday business, and thus more familiar to socio-economic level of most Christians. By contrast, the scroll may have been associated with the upper and learned classes, and high-brow literature. But the notion that Christians belonged to the lower classes is outdated. And Jews and other religions used scrolls. Graham Stanton argued that the disciples of Jesus used one or more notebook devices to copy down saying of Jesus, and so the pattern was set. As interesting as this may be, it is quite speculative.

*Some have suggest that it was adopted because it could hold Four Gospels in one “book.” And while that is true, as I understand it, our first undisputed evidence for four bound Gospels + Acts comes from around AD 250 (P45, Chester Beatty), and there is generous evidence of earlier codices that seem to have had one, two or three Gospels.

One thing seems sure. While the Jews and other religious groups used the scroll for their religious texts, the Christian showed a marked and early preference for the codex for their Scriptural texts but not for their other religious texts (back to the scroll). So the effect would have been to distinguish these texts—perhaps prominently the Gospels—as Christian scriptural texts.

As an editor, all of this brings to mind a perennial question in publishing houses of our day: what size shall we print this book? Is it a mass-market paperback, a trade paperback, a 6x9 or a 7x10? Shall we publish it in paper or cloth? Shall we do it printed casebound? Or maybe even publish it only as an ebook! Whatever our choice, we are sending a subtle signal to our readership about the nature of the book. Will archeologists or codexologists two thousand years hence pick up the finer points? What messages are we still missing from the trash heaps of ancient Egypt? That is what Hurtado is pursuing in The Earliest Christian Artifacts.

Well, there is one more interesting theory as to how the codex became popular among Christians. And I will take that up in the next blog.

I sometimes find writers—even ones who really should know better—implying or stating that Rudolf Bultmann’s program of demythologizing was a kernel-from-husk operation. That is, Bultmann was attempting to strip away the husk of myth that encapsuled the historical kernel of Jesus in order to grasp the historically certifiable facts. This is critically mistaken and editorially annoying.

Ladd tells us that by demythologizing, Bultmann meant “translating the ancient mythologies into modern meanings.” Ladd goes on to point out that whereas liberal theologians rejected (as did Bultmann) “the objectivity of such alleged facts as preexistence, incarnation, virgin birth, miracles … liberal theologians simply cut these mythological elements out of the New Testament and tried to find the truth of the gospel in that which could be verified as trustworthy history” (Ladd, 22-23). As Ladd sums it up, “For liberalism, the historical Jesus, his personality and his teachings, were the true kernel of the gospel” (Ladd, 23). Here they found the famous four affirmations of Harnack: the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the supreme value of the human soul and the ethic of love.

But note what Ladd says of our man Rudolf: “Bultmann differs from the liberal theologians at two closely related points. He insists that the mythological forms in which the gospel is expressed cannot simply be cut out; they must be interpreted—demythologized. He also insists that Christian faith cannot rest on the findings of history as the liberal theologians thought. On the contrary, faith must be independent of history.” (Ladd, 23-24) G. B. Caird summed it up, “Because of eschatology Bultmann found himself forced (though far from unwilling) to demythologize the New Testament and leave us only the bodiless grin of existentialism.” (Caird, New Testament Theology, 242)

So it is mistaken and confusing to speak of demythologizing in the sense of stripping off the “myth” in the Gospel tradition. In fact, Bultmann did not think we could know much about the historical Jesus at all, other than that he existed. Demythologizing is a hermeneutical move involving the whole gospel package.

The second thing every student of theology should know is how to spell Bultmann’s name. I think most students get his last name right. It takes a double “n.” It’s the first name they have trouble with. It’s not Rudolph. That’s the name of a red-nosed reindeer of myth. It’s Rudolf! It ends with “f,” not “ph”! But alas! Even publishers can struggle with this. In the IVP book I’ve quoted above, the name is spelled correctly within the book, and even on the back cover. But when we turn to the spine of this slender book, what do we find? *Rudolph Bultmann! *

While I was tempted to blame this simple error on Kathy Lay (Burrows), our cover designer back in that day, I know her and her barbed wit. And I recall that she was well practiced in sticking it to the man. So I’m taking this misspelling as her subtly turning the tables on Bultmann and his evaluation of myth. And can it be a coincidence that Ladd describes Bultmann as “a short, rumpled, jolly looking man” (Ladd, 2)?

Once we have demythologizing sorted out, we can turn to the word deontology. That too is a deceptive term!

But maybe expectations have changed in this day of Facebook and tweeting and all. Shouldn’t we be prying open a little slit in the fence around the academic author’s life? There’d be risk in this—some of our readers might get the wrong idea when they learned the author likes to sip bourbon while playing poker. But who knows? Maybe we’d gain more readers than we’d lose.

In our publishing house, it’s the editor who generally writes the ata. And the editor doesn’t want to stick his or her neck out by being overly creative with the ata. We might embarrass the author and lose the opportunity to publish their next book.

Nevertheless, for some authors whose reputations are established, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to kick in some human interest. If it’s not People magazine stuff, at least a bit of Facebook profile. In the spirit of cowardice, let’s try this on some dead authors who can’t kick back: And besides, except for one, they're not our authors!

C. H. Dodd was a leading New Testament scholar of the twentieth century and the author of notable works on early Christian preaching, the parables of Jesus and the Fourth Gospel. A close friend wrote a limerick that played off Dodd’s small physical stature:

I think it extremely odd

That a little professor named Dodd

Should spell, if you please,

His name with three D’s

When one is sufficient for God. [1]

George Caird was Dean Ireland’s Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford, and the author of several studies and commentaries on the New Testament, including The Language and Imagery of the Bible. One of his doctoral students described him as “a tall figure who seemed to walk faster than anyone else, black Oxford gown trailing him in the breeze . . . always seemed to be out of the lecture hall before his listeners had written down his last word or had the opportunity to consider the meaning of what they had just heard.” [2]

Austin Farrar taught at Oxford University and was warden of Keble College. His writings range over philosophy, theology and New Testament exegesis, and are characterized by brilliant independent thinking and even whimsy. A student of his relates, “Farrer lectured with his back turned to the five of us who attended, while his fingers fiddled with the door knob.” [3]

C. S. Lewis taught English at Oxford and then Cambridge and is widely known as a defender of orthodox Christianity and as the beloved author of the Narnia books. But as one observer put it, "For curtness, it was hard to beat C. S. Lewis when he was present at his legendary Socratic Club. Forget about suffering fools gladly, he did not suffer very intelligent people gladly. If someone asked him a dumb question, Lewis would snap his head off.” [4]

By the way, we have nothing against British authors. We would gladly publish C. S. Lewis any day. And we'd do it headless if we had to.

[1] Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters, p. 382.
[2] Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters, p. 282.
[3] Lewis B. Smedes, My God and I, p. 87.
[4] Lewis B. Smedes, My God and I, p. 88.

When we first proposed this series as a worthy successor to the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, some met the idea with understandable caution: “Don’t we have Calvin’s and Luther’s commentaries?”

And we can now make the point by turning to the commentary on the phrase from Ephesians 1:5, “He predestined us for adoption.” Here we find excerpts from the following: Johannes Bugenhagen, Erasmus Sarcerius, John Calvin, Martin Bucer, Georg Maior, Robert Rollock, David Dickson. Except for Calvin and Bucer, many readers will never have heard of these commentators. But we can look them up in the “Biographical Sketches of Reformation-Era Figures.” And by the way, that is preceded by a helpful “Timeline of the Reformation,” which extends from 1337 to 1688 and includes events and figures located geographically. Throughout the commentary we have representatives of a variety of streams of the Protestant Reformation, including Arminius.

There is great value in the RCS—for exegetes, theologians and historians, for preachers, teachers, and anyone who wishes to study Scripture in the company of these doctors of the church as they converse over the text. Currently there is renewed interest in the history of biblical interpretation and the reception history of the Bible. And along side this is the growing circle of those focusing on the theological interpretation of Scripture. Like the ACCS before it, the RCS plants itself squarely in this arena of study, debate and practice.

Also just released is Timothy George’s companion book, Reading Scripture with the Reformers. I look forward to reading it.

I must add that the cover art, which appears on both George’s book and the RCS volumes, is a fascinating painting of the Protestant church in Lyon called “The Paradise.” The church was only in use from 1564 to 1567, when it was destroyed by fire. The detail in this painting, which shows a congregation listening to a preacher, is fascinating. The children look like miniature adults. And the congregation is a mixed lot—some in colorful clothes and others in black. Some are listening closely while others are walking about or conversing. But I particularly like the fact that a big white dog, sitting facing the pulpit, appears to be the most attentive of all! Creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. And, I’m sure (with a wag of the tail), for the RCS to be completed!

Look for the volume on Ezekiel and Daniel next spring.

*Texts tend to be anonymous

*No title page

*No “ownership”

*No copyright

*It’s a corporate enterprise, so as far as authorship goes, it’s like writing company promotion pieces or ad copy

*So you’ve got no platform

*No advertising

*No promotion

*We don’t give a fig for your “originality”—it’s all about tradition

*Uh … no royalties for you!

In other words, “author” is such a nasty modern convention, infused with individualistic notions of self-expression. Really, when it comes down to it, modern authors should be ashamed of themselves! (Or thank the Hellenistic era for starting to bring them to the fore.)

But for editors, well, here the news is much better!

*We’re scribes, and that’s no small thing

*We’re well trained scholars

*We make historical waves with our scribal culture

*We tinker with, expand and otherwise meddle with the text, and no one complains—there’s little distinction between us and the “author”

*Except that we might even get our name on the colophon (ancient title page)

The hoi polloi think of us as virtual wizards, particularly if we’re writing or reading in Sumerian, Akkadian or Egyptian. (How *did you do that?!)

*We memorize a lot of important canonical texts and can spout them off at will

*It’s a bit of a bummer that a lot of those texts are on divination or astrology, but it makes us popular at parties

*Uh … we get paid of course (by temple or court or patron)

In other words, you’d be better off being a scribe! (Or come to terms with the fact that authors are, in most cases, scribes under witness protection.)

The Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival is a grand celebration of an old technology and traditional material—wood. Which is to say, it’s a celebration of boats with wooden hulls rather than the now prevalent fiberglass, or “plastic,” which began to make its appearance in the 1960s and now dominates recreational boat building. It’s a celebration of boats made in the old way and the retrieval of skills nearly lost to newer technology.

The festival includes new wooden boats, evidence of the resurrection of this tradition. But most of them are old, many of them beautiful specimens in “bristol” condition and top working order (testimony to a passion calling for boundless patience, sweat and money). And most of them are sailing vessels, from sailing dinghies to magnificent schooners. The tradesmen who are maintaining this craft of building and repairing wooden boats—many of them in or around Port Townsend—are present, giving demonstrations and seminars and advertising their services. There are sailboat races, musicians performing nautical tunes, “pirates” wandering the grounds and a swelling tide of tall nautical tales being exchanged.

This set me to imagining a day—say, one hundred years hence—when people gather for an annual Paper Book Festival.

At the Paper Book Festival we have demonstrations of repairing book covers, the effective use of book markers, how to hold a book and turn its pages (including how to use your fingers to hold your place on multiple pages while you flip back and forth), how to use an index, the advantages of the paper book for “deep reading,” the construction of bookshelves and the making of book stands. In one corner of the festival grounds a small crowd listens to a reading from a paper book. Their attention is rapt, and they exchange approving smiles and sighs at the rustling of the turning of each page. There is even an area dedicated to feeling and smelling a variety of paper pages.

There are sessions too on why the paper book was such a great invention and a wonderful use of a renewable resource, the rapidly-growing poplar tree. Under a canopy there are musicians singing ballads of paper books on traditional wooden instruments. Then too there are seminars on papermaking, printing, binding and so forth for those who are exploring their options for getting into the trade. A seminar explores the ancient art of cover design and the significance of the three-dimensional form of the book. Some of the books and libraries on display have been handed down through several generations of a single family.

The crowd is of a predictable demographic, with many wearing traditional fabrics of cotton, wool and hemp. An unusual amount of facial hair is sported by the men, and a bottle blond among the women is a rarity. Honest faces prevail, and their furrowed brows, trained by the concentration of deep reading, are now a rarity across a culture shaped by the shallows of electronic media. Some children are even observed running barefoot.

In a far corner of the festival grounds there is a little-visited but interesting display of early twenty-first-century technology that brought an end to the paper-book industry—from the original Kindle (a quaint device, now yellowed with age) through the Blaze V and on to the iRetina.* And there are the now familiar if scolding warnings that these devices are proven causes of cancer and cultural demise.

This blog is a time capsule. What other suggestions do you have for the 2111 Paper Book Festival?

*Inspired by Al Hsu, invented by Josiah Hsu

So what can you look forward to? Well, we’ve just sent Justification: Five Views to the printer, and it’s coming out this fall. (I challenge you to read the endorsements and conclude you don’t need to bother with the book.) And next spring we will have Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views. These two have been simmering on separate burners of my editorial range.

But with one dish heading for the table now, I’m ready to prepare another. And I think I just heard the order come in. Right now there is a new evangelical controversy breaking out of the gate: the issue is biblicism and its premise of the clarity (or perspicuity, if you like technical terms) of Scripture. So how about The Clarity of Scripture: Five Biblical Views?

Perhaps we could have these views:

View 1. Some biblicists maintain that the obscurities of Scripture are only illusions, apparent difficulties with common sense solutions. I’m thinking we call this view Virtual Clarity: The Illusion of Obscurities.

View 2. Then there are those who maintain that clarity is all in the big stuff and it’s not about the small fry. Let’s call this view the Potentate of Clarity: The Big Stuff Rules.

View 3. Others seem to think that if we can just get our hands on the “originals,” everything will be clarified. I’m thinking of calling this Deep-Text Clarity, or The Quest for Clear Springs of Clarity.

View 4. Then there are those who invoke drama and story. We’ll call this Shakespearean Clarity: Theology As Drama Queen.

View 5. Finally, there is the argument that all things will be clear bye and bye. So we’ll have Eschatological Clarity: One Clear Day You’ll See Forever.

I’m going to insist, of course, that each position be argued strictly on biblical grounds.

We’re going public with this because we need an editor and contributors. As I see it, they need to have a track record of brinksmanship and maybe a flair for self-destruction. Any descendants of Eutychus out there?

At IVP Academic we fundamentally rely on the author, our outside readers and the editor. But that leaves a lot of territory to be covered, and no one has encyclopedic knowledge. I keep a fairly well-stocked library on hand, and I use it in my work. But sometimes a source that is cited is very specialized.

Nevertheless we editors do test facts, and when something feels not quite right, we sometimes have to don our Sherlock Holmes hat and grab the magnifying glass. And back in olden times, in the late twentieth century, when there was no Google and the web was without form and void, we had to use our wits to locate a reference.

I recall back in the 1990s I was trying to find a quote from Barth’s Church Dogmatics that had been cited in an article for one of our Black Dictionaries. I used to save up these little nuggets for a trip to a theological library. In this case, I could have asked the author, but that would have been a bit more complicated than it is today and might cost some time. And besides, it was just one item on a list of things needing investigation. In this case I had no more than a sentence or two to work with, and I thought my chances of locating this quote were something like finding a needle in a haystack. But it was worth a try.

And what do you know? With some intelligent selection of volume, part and pages, I was delighted to be able to locate the quote within ten minutes. It was a memorable success that today, with Barth’s CD in digital format, hardly makes an impression.

As editorial detective Hercule Le Peau tells it, “Back in the stone age, if a quotation in a manuscript looked wrong (a word missing or misspelled, or no page reference, etc.), I’d put a query to the author in the margin pleading with him or her to please check it. That was a dicey proposition since they might not have the book, or even if they did, not be able to find the quote in the book. Now, editor as digital detective, I get an answer in .078954462 seconds. I copy a whole sentence or two into Google, hit return, and the thing pops up. Bingo.”

So now we have a veritable fact-checking department at our fingertips.

Detective T. J. (aka “Jim”) Hoover relates a more recent incident. An author was quoting Clement from Eusebius that “Mark accompanied Peter on all his journeys.” The author was making a lot of the “all,” which seemed a bit strange. So Detective Hoover started checking online translations of Eusebius. And there are several. Nearly all say something like “Mark accompanied Peter for a long time.” “On all his journeys” and “for a long time” are not really the same thing, or so it seemed to Detective Hoover. So he checked the Greek through Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG).

TLG has ὡς ἂν ἀκολουθήσαντα αὐτῷ πόρρωθεν καὶ μεμνημένον τῶν λεχθέντων.

There was no “all” at all. But this wasn’t really inimical to the author’s point, though it did suggest that he ought not stress the “all.” But then Detective Hoover got wondering where the author got his translation. So he Googled the translation itself and soon uncovered several online instances. But, lo and behold, they ALL miscited Eusebius as Church History 4.14 rather than CH 6.14, suggesting a common source. And that turned out to be The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911, which regrettably had other mistranslations within the same paragraph. Eusebius CH 4.14 has nothing whatever to do with Mark and Peter.

So informed intelligence is still required.

Sometimes I’ll get queries from proofreaders or copyeditors who have checked a Scripture reference in a manuscript and found it obviously wrong. They are sometimes amazed at how quickly I’m able to correct it. But what they don’t realize (and I don’t tell them) is that I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve. With some modest training in textual criticism, I know all about dittography, haplography, metathesis, homoioteleuton and homoioarkton. And this training comes in handy for detecting and correcting contemporary scribal errors!

“Poirot, he sees things, Madame. It is a habit he cannot change.”

Three years he’d been at sea, fulfilling his destiny, consuming his inheritance and barely escaping the jaws of death. But now the hour had come, and he set his course for home. His wizened flesh bore the wounds of his wanderings as he beat his course up the Strait. But his heart was strong with resolve, and a strange joy infected his will. He would not—could not—rest ‘til he’d broached his natal waters.

That evening I’d been watching the salmon entering the mouth of a creek that empties into a salt-water bay a short distance from my house. The salmon were returning to spawn. The scene inspired me to try that mini-story, but I think I only got as far as a first chapter. Nevertheless, the exercise in making it concise—enforced by Facebook—is a good one. I had to keep paring away until it was under the limit yet still interesting. And I gave myself a time limit too. You gotta just do it. And then gather up the courage to put it out there. As I read it now, I want to tinker and rewrite. But it’s done.

You can also use Facebook to describe a scene, perhaps humorous or satirical, and get in a writing exercise that forces you to be concise. After seeing a depressingly misguided video by Jesus-seminar types, I wrote this:

The tired looking Jesus-seminar lineup, now in their old liberal dotage, drones on about saving Jesus from the church and points us toward the marvelous experience of the divine that can be discovered in ancient Gospels of all varieties but the Franchise of Four. Shop-worn assertions are paraded in a silly carnival of late-modern doubt and soiled-chiffon spirituality.

I’ve thought it would be fun—surely this is being done—if you had a critical mass of “friends,” to start a story and have people add sentences or paragraphs as “comments.” See where it goes! But for some reason, comments don’t seem to have the 420-character limit, so the discipline of “Be concise!” would need to be enforced.

I must confess that in my writing I’m always breaking through the word limit and then begging for grace. Human editors can be plied and bribed. But Facebook is an austere master who knows no mercy. Submit your creativity to its discipline and your writing will be better for it.

Perhaps that’s why when I’m experiencing something interesting or unusual, I very quickly start to assemble the event into a story, with the hope that it will amuse as well as relate the events. Almost unconsciously I go to work on it, trying out various renditions, working out amusing angles, chuckling at the possible responses from friends and family. And now, yes, I try out bits of stories and vignettes in Facebook postings.

I make no claim to being a good storyteller. But like the exercise of description, I think exercising our storytelling muscles is good practice for writers and other communicators. For some good tips on storytelling, see Andy Unedited.

I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of manipulating our environment to extend our brains. I suppose it all started with early humans carving on cave walls as a way to store historical data. Now we have ebooks, computers, and cell phones to store our memories. And we have schools to program our brains. But it goes much deeper than that. Even a house is a device for storing data. Specifically, a house stores data on how it was built. A skilled builder can study a house and build another just like it.

Everything we create becomes a de facto data storage device and brain accessory. A wall can be a physical storage device for land survey data, it can be a reminder of history, and it can be a trigger of personal memories.

A business is also a way to store data. As a restaurant owner, I was fascinated at how employees came and went, but their best ideas often stayed with the business, especially in the kitchen. The restaurant was like a giant data filter. The bad ideas were tested and deleted while the good ideas stayed, most often without being written down.

Publishing is a great example of this, since while publishing is not rocket science, in its full scope it is complicated and consists of many parts, practices and decisions. And over time wisdom is stitched into the fabric of a publishing house, into its practices and procedures, its culture and character. A publishing house becomes a complex corporate memory device. It is interesting over the years to see new folks enter this “memory device” with new ideas and critiques of the way things are done. I’m just guessing, but I think that over time most of them come to appreciate the why’s and wherefore’s of this memory device they’ve entered and the accumulated wisdom that has been built into its fabric. And over time, many of them leave their own fingerprints by way of improvements great and small. But these improvements are built on an existing information infrastructure and are carried along by the current of time and practice into the future. The first obligation of someone who wishes to bring about change is to take the time to truly understand what already is. Really understand it. Innovations built on casual acquaintance or misunderstanding can be destructive or counterproductive.

We can also think of the church as “a way to store data,” or (as I prefer) spiritual wisdom and truth. Like the restaurant, it is a giant data/wisdom filter. Theology and practice is tested, the bad is deleted and the good stays. Some of it is “written down” (in a formal, discursive sense) but much of it is retained in architecture, furnishings, images, postures/gestures, sacraments, music, liturgy, seasons, ways of thought and life, etc. Sure, this is called “institutionalized religion.” And that sounds bad to committed individualists and libertarians. But the church is not unique in this respect. We can see this across various human endeavors. I’ll talk about an example in my next blog.

And this, for obvious reasons, leads me to speak of books and reading.

If you’re an author, even if you’re hardcore linear and think paragliding is an irresponsible reading habit, there’s really not much point in trying to foil drop-in readers. They might in fact read the entire book if they like the cut of your landing field. Besides, if they bought the book, they rightly feel they can read it however they want. (This is the way I responded to Richard Hays’s just plea that his readers not just turn to the chapters on ethical issues at the back of The Moral Vision of the New Testament. Well, give me an updraft. I couldn’t resist!) When writing or editing a book, it’s always worth asking how you might accommodate those who paraglide into the text.

What can you do?

Refer back to previous points in the book on which your present argument depends. But try to avoid a pedantic tone when you do so.

Use clear chapter titles and subheads as clues to orient drop-in readers. Cute titles might be fun, but I’m thinking of a particular book in which the clever chapter titles utterly frustrate drop-in reading. And it’s a book that many readers will want to consult rather than read in its entirety.

Occasionally offer brief reviews of how the argument has proceeded so far. You might do this near the beginning of a chapter or at a point that marks a crucial turn in your argument.

Include summaries at the end of chapters. This is one of the least obtrusive and most effective places to offer assistance to your drop-in readers, and it can provide a segue to the next chapter for your linear readers. Practiced paragliders know to look here.

A well-constructed index, of course, is a virtual GPS for paragliding readers. If you are an author, the task of indexing comes at the point when you’re likely to be least engaged with your book. But if you think of it as an opportunity to display the hidden treasures of your book and point to connections that might otherwise be missed, you just might discover some new energy for your labor.

There are other strategies of course, but these are a start. And maybe some of you paragliders have pet peeves you’d like to share. (And if you paraglided into this blog and are confused, start at the beginning.)

When my students ask if we really need yet another commentary on such-and-such a biblical book, I sometimes tell them that, even if we do not need another commentary, we can always do with more commentary writers. What I mean is that we must constantly produce people who wrestle with the biblical texts, or pretty soon no one will be able to do it very well. Normally great commentators arise out of a plethora of people writing commentaries. This is, of course, a polite way of conceding that many commentaries are not all that memorable. They contribute little by way of freshness, genuine insight, or mature scholarship. They are simply the price to pay for major contributions.

Because in reality, this is the way it is with so much of life, isn’t it? How many baseball games and wannabes did it take to produce a Babe Ruth or a Willie Mays? How many weekend and late-night poets did it take to foster the culture that produced a Robert Frost or a Gerard Manley Hopkins? How many hometown jazz pianists or saxophonists did it take to create a Thelonius Monk or a John Coltrane?

A lot of us would be happy to learn that what we’ve done—and even done very well—is compost for greatness. There’s nothing wrong with that!

And what does Carson say about Michaels’s commentary? “This commentary by Michaels is one of the major contributions.”