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?

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.

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!

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?”

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.

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:

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’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.

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

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.