Happy New Year

... and a belated Happy Christmas!

Among my gifts (which, ok, I selected myself – but Anja at least wrapped!):

• Hammann's biography of Rudolf Bultmann (Yeeeesssssssss!). Anja and I picked my copy up direct from Mohr in Tübingen while visiting her family for Christmas J. For a hardback Mohr Siebeck book, €49 is a good price.
  
• Charles Freeman's A New History of Early Christianity (a deeper skim of which has actually not yet inspired me: too much loose reasoning. But we shall see.)
  
• Hans Küng, Disputed Truth. Memoirs II. This one looks even more entertaining than his first volume. He is a genuinely warm person, he encourages fresh research and when he puts 'pen to paper' I always sit up and listen. He is a rare genius and thus always worth engaging with (yes, even by those who would ultimately reject aspects of his 'correlationist' programme)
  
• A little book, a conversation with Eberhard Jüngel: Die Leidenschaft, Gott zu denken: Ein Gespräch über Denk- und Lebenserfahrungen. This was fun to read but at €14.80 for only 84 pages, this was too expensive. Couldn't help myself, though. In one memorable moment, he explained his difference to Pannenberg: 'what was of course in no way my thing - that was the apologetic basic position of Pannenberg. And that distinguishes me still from him' (54, my dodgy translation). It seems to me that an apologetic Grundhaltung remains particularly inappropriate for biblical scholars, and Tom Wright has rightly been critiqued (by e.g. Dale Allison and James Crossley) for his apologetically motivated remarks concerning Matthew 27:52-53 ('The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many'). Of course, it is quite silly to dismiss Wright's otherwise brilliant proposals on the basis of this example – something some are also prone to do!

Of course, I think it a real pity that my friend Jim West has decided to stop blogging. But I hope that he will return to it after a break.