Ken Brown has tagged me with the Kevin Scull variation of his original five books meme. (Thanks, Ken.) The rules are:
1.) List the 5 primary sources that have most affected your scholarship, thoughts about antiquity, and/or understanding of the NT/OT.
2.) Books from the Bible are off limits unless you really want to list one, I certainly will not chastise you for it.
3.) Finally, choose individual works if you can. This will be more interesting than listing the entire corpus of Cicero as one of your choices.
Hmm. This is not easy – witness the most blatant flouting of rule 3 by Rob who, for one of his picks, lists the corpus of Ante and Post Nicene Fathers. Does this rule against a whole corpus exclude the Mishnah for example, or is the Mishnah so influenced by the post bar Kochba situation that it can’t easily count as a primary source in the first place, rather than a difficult witness to earlier traditions? What is a primary source in this context – could I choose Eusebius because of the importance of the fragments of Papias? (Note how significant Papias is to a huge swathe of Bauckham’s historical work, for example.) Further, I take rule 2 to mean I can’t list Sirach or 1 Maccabees for example – much listed in other responses.
So, here’s today’s version of what might well look different tomorrow.
1. The Didache. As a document that may well be roughly contemporaneous with Matthew and Luke, this really helps flesh out the picture of the early Christian movement.
2. Josephus, Jewish War. Josephus seems quite happy to play fast and loose with descriptions and events as long as it shows him in a good light, nonetheless this seems quite indispensable.
3. Jubilees seems, together with my next choice, to be one text that helps fill out the alien mindset which is the milieu of the beginnings of Christian thought.
4. 1 Enoch. As above, but wondering whether a) it counts as an individual work and b) in the light of Jude (to say nothing of the Ethiopian Church) whether it should count as Bible.
5. A final selection is really difficult. I’m strongly tempted to go for either 1 Clement or one or other of the letters of Ignatius, not least because they are far more important for refuting a certain style of Protestant Romanticism about the early Church. In the end, however, I feel I need to go for one or other of the Scrolls, and plump for the Community Rule, as much as a representative selection as for its own intrinsic value.
I’m so late to this party, that nearly everyone has been tagged, so if you’ve been tagged before, sorry, count this as a reminder. So, I tag John Hobbins, Eric Sowell, Daniel Kirk, Chris Brady and Alan Bandy.
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Too funny Doug. I’ve never been one for rules.
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