Lection and Liturgy

I’m never quite sure whether to be astonished at how much of value survives from the ancient world, or regretful that there are so many things we don’t know. But all our descriptions of the ancient world, including the world(s) of the early Christians, are a mix of things we know, and our best (often very well educated) guesses. But there’s also an awful lot of knowledge that, frankly, is simply missing.  A lot of that has to do with culture. It’s a slippery word and people write books trying to describe it, but one way to think of culture is “the things everyone knows but no-one bothers to explain”.  Culture: the things everyone knows but no-one explains A trivial example might help. When someone says “Can you pass the salt, please?”, we instinctively reach for the container with one hole in the lid. But almost certainly, someone describing the scene would simply say: “She passed the salt.” They would not think to write: “Emily looked at the table. There were two containers t...

The books that go to make up the bible were written for reading aloud. This is generally true of books in the ancient world. There’s a story from St Augustine that underlines this point. He was a North African bishop in the late fourth and early fifth century, who was also one of the cleverest and well-educated men of his day. In his Confessions he thinks it worthy of comment that, Ambrose, bishop of Milan, always read silently. Reading aloud was the norm, even for the highly educated who read on their own. 1 For most people, in a society where the majority could not read, the only way they encountered books at all, was through other people reading to them or for them. There are places where, in different ways, that practice shows through in the pages of the bible. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians is commonly believed by scholars to be the first book of the New Testament to have been written, sometime around the year AD 50. As he comes to an end, Paul says: ...

On sabbatical early in 2019 I was trying to write the first draft of what I hoped might be a simple introduction to the bible for those who have to read from it in public worship. As I worked, I came to realise that it would be too long to be the sort of book which might be attractive to the kind of audience I had in mind. I put it away for a few months, but thought after I’d let the first draft settle a bit, perhaps the second draft might be a (long) series of blogs. Now it feels right to resurrect the idea, and so partly as the vehicle for this series, and partly for other posts on worship, prayer and liturgy, I launched a new site in autumn 2019. Then I realised thatI wouldn't be purchasing that web domain in perpetuity. One solution is to back it up to Blogger, tidying up as I go along. Hence this site! The index page will lead you through it in "book" order i.e. the order it would be in if you were reading it as a conventional book. Most introductions to the...