A laborious intellectual history of the origin and interpretation of the Gospels. New Testament scholar Dungan (Religious Studies/Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville) here traces the history of the synoptic problem from the 1st century to the 20th. One part of the problem refers to the priority of Mark’s gospel (generally thought to be written around 70 c.e., before Matthew or Luke). Dungan questions the conventional wisdom that Mark had to be written first because it’s the most sparse of the three, with no original resurrection account and terribly written Greek. Elsewhere, Dungan challenges scholars’ theory of “Q,” the hypothetical source which, in addition to Mark, allegedly formed the basis for Matthew and Luke (materials found in the latter two gospels that are not present in Mark have long been imagined to trace back to a lost gospel source named Q). These renegade arguments are very promising, but it takes Dungan nearly 350 pages to actually get to them. The preceding sections develop an overly lengthy and tedious history of gospel interpretation through the centuries. Dungan’s writing style is unimaginative, essentially following an annotated outline complete with bullets and ubiquitous subheadings. His constant use of ordinal numbers is confusing (“Part Two concludes with . . . the fourth component of the Third Form of the Synoptic Problem,” he writes, in a hopeless attempt to clarify the course of his argument). That said, one gets the sense that Dungan’s heart is in the right place; he asks provocative questions of the text and, more importantly, his fellow critics. He is quite rightly convinced that biblical scholarship has been mired in a Euro-American, white male paradigm for far too long and that there is no such thing as value-neutral textual criticism. Fellow biblical scholars may appreciate the first 350 pages, but general readers who were not aware that the synoptic “problem” was indeed a problem will only gain insights from the last section, if at all.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-47192-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
