Day 1 (DDRD 2,766) May 28, 2025
Read to page xxxiv.
Day 2 (DDRD 2,767) May 29, 2025
Read to page 30. Hard going, actually, but worth it.
Had a nice surprise early on in today's reading: A rather extensive reference (with several piquant quotations) from Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, which was one of my early DDRs (finished the third volume July 5, 2020, which was my 997th DDR Day).
Another nice surprise: a few more pages on and mention was made of "the excellent" Jane Schlanger, and a quote which covered 3/4ths of a page followed that comment. It inspired me to go looking again for The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene. Once again, however, my search was frustrated by the fact that it is only available at pretty high prices. Then I had a bit of inspiration and looked for it on World Cat...and lo and behold, there is a copy at the Southern Baptist Seminary, which is just a few miles down the road. I don't think they'd let me check it out, but they might do it through interlibrary loan so I put in a request for it. 🤞
Forgot to mention this:
Fits in nicely with the whole Jesus Goes to India hypothesis.
✋️ me if this sounds familiar:
"...they appointed to the office ignoble and low-born individuals, in order to gain accomplices in their impious crimes...." (214, Josephus in Jewish War)
Day 3 (DDRD 2,768) May 30, 2025
Read to page 60. Still a little difficult, but still quite interesting. Although I am anxious to get to Jesus.
Crossan quotes Thomas Carney's "splendid book," The Shape of the Past:
"In theory, at least, modern governmental bureaucracy is supposed to be a "rational, planned organization to maximize efficiency and productivity," but "there was in antiquity no concept of bureaucracy as a rationally ordered, politically neutral instrumentality, meant to serve the public...bureaucrats in this tradition were officials regulating a subject population in the interests of an overlord." (50)
🎾 anyone?
P.S. Just for the record, I'm 1/4th of the way through Never Flinch.
Day 4 (DDRD 2,769) May 31, 2025
Read to page 90. Still no sign of Jesus. Scanned ahead and it looks like another 100 pages before He shows up. 😦
Almost 2000 years ago, Musonius Rufus said, "Both women and men have the same reason, senses, body, and 'inclination' to virtue, goodness and justice." You'd think we'd have caught up to him by now.
Day 5 (DDRD 2,770) June 1, 2025
Read to page 120. Some quick references to Jesus (He's coming!), and quite a bit about the Sicari (which put me in the mood to rewatch Sicario and it's sequel).
In other news, got to the halfway point in Never Flinch (is that a bad title or what?) and am going to read a bit more. AND Stephen King gave me a new word:
https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/moue
Speaking of NF, there have been no horror elements whatsoever in this book at this point. (Though there was a vague allusion to something from one of the previous Holly books.) Stephen King don't need no stinkin' horror.
Day 6 (DDRD 2,771) June 2, 2025
Read to page 150.
I thought this was interesting, especially in the context of teaching: "...the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups [are] foot-dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on. These...forms of class struggle...require little or no coordination or planning; they make use of implicit understandings and informal networks; they often represent a form of individual self-help; they typically avoid any direct, symbolic confrontation with authority...."
And as for Never Flinch...152 pages to go, and it's due tomorrow. 😬
Addendum: page 344 for Never Flinch, 96 pages to go.
Addendum 2: Somewhere along the way...in some ad on my feed...I ran across a book by one Barbara Thiering:
Well, you KNOW I had to get my peepers on that. And Internet Archive came through on that, so soooooon. But I really wanted a hard copy, and I really didn't want to pay for it. Especially not some of the exorbitant prices I saw online. So I went to the library website to see if they perhaps would have a copy of this book. I doubted it, as it is obviously going to be on the controversial side of things, but you never know. Put Barbara's name into the search box and only came up with one hit, which was not this book: Jesus & the riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls : unlocking th secrets of His life story. Well. That would do. So I went to put it on reserve, and lo and behold found yet another book that had been consigned to Remote Shelving. My rule is that if I search for a book and see where it is kept and it has made it to Remote Shelving, I must check it out. I regard this as essentially the same as saving a person from the auto-da-fé. Or from life in solitary, at least.
Day 7 (DDRD 2,772) June 3, 2025
Woke up at 4:07 am (Facebook call from my daughter, who doesn't think that I need to sleep) and decided to go all in on Never Flinch (due today) and managed to polish it off. Not a great read, but a page-turner nonetheless. More news at 11.
Also...
From Half-Price Books. @ $2 each, how could I not buy these?
Ahem As for The DDR...didn't get started until late, and only read to page 160.
Day 8 (DDRD 2,773) June 4, 2025
Read to page 200. Was hoping to make it to Jesus today, but no. It's easy to see why the Romans were so jumpy about Saviors, though. As Tim Rice put it, "You Jews produce message by the sackful."
"He became an object of terror to all men by plundering those he came across in his desire for great possessions and his ambition for royal rank, a prize he expected to obtain not through the practice of virtue but through excessive ill-treatment of others." (200, from Josephus on Judas--but not that Judas)
Day 9 (DDRD 2,774) June 5, 2025
Read to page 238. Made it to Jesus!!!
New word (for me, at least):
fissiparous
adjective
fis·sip·a·rous fi-ˈsi-p(ə-)rəs
: tending to break or split up into parts : divisive
fissiparous tendencies within a political party
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fissiparous
Meanwhile, at the library:
I've got a feeling (a feeling deep inside) that this is going to be Holy Blood, Holy Grail level stuff.
Here's a little taste from the Foreword by Sr. Leonie Star: "Modern literature makes much of the concept of 'subtext,' those ideas lying below the surface words of the text. Some of the biblical interpretations of the last century have accepted that there is a second meaning lying below the words of the gospels-- this meaning is usually seen as either mythical or allegorical. Thiering's view of the underlying meaning is radically different--she sees in it an actual chronicle of events, portraying the history of Jesus." (ix)
Day 10 (DDRD 2,775) June 6, 2025
Read to page 268.
There was a reference to a verse from Amis (3:12) which was so startling that I had to look it up on Bible Gateway. Sure enough--
12 This is what the Lord says: “As a shepherd rescues from the lion’s mouth only two leg bones or a piece of an ear, so will the Israelites living in Samaria be rescued, with only the head of a bed and a piece of fabric from a couch."
Yowza! That's some 🥶 💩!
In other news...I read a couple of dozen pages in the Barbara Thiering book. I'm not giving up yet, but I am smelling ozone.
Day 11 (DDRD 2,776) June 7, 2025
Read to page 300.
Day 12 (DDRD 2,777) June 8, 2025
Read to page 330.
"Early Christian communities symbolically retroacted their own activities back into the life of Jesys." (328) Hence you can have wise men or shepherds at the birth, but not both...and one of the four says one of the two was saved.
Day 13 (DDRD 2,778) June 9, 2025
Read to page 360. This book is kind of interesting, but not REALLY interesting. No Ah ha! moments. I'm ready for it to be over.
Day 14 (DDRD 2,779) June 10, 2025
Read to page 378.
Actually, some interesting stuff today, but I just pooped out.
Day 15 (DDRD 2,780) June 11, 2025
Read to page 410.
This seems unnecessarily smart assy:
So...56 (-ish) more text pages to go, so time to think about What Comes Next. I'm thinking about going for The Man Without Qualities...1,774 pages in two volumes. I've read good things about it, but...that's a spicey a-meat-a-ball. And I am not wanting to bite off more than I can chew. Then again, you don't know how much you can chew until you have a bite, do you? 😬
