As if you needed James to tell you that I'm a sporadic blogger! That's largely why I moved from blogspot to .Mac, where I can post content and then leave it alone for weeks on end. Kind of him to recommend this site anyway.

So I picked up John Barton's (or at Wiki) Reading the Old Testament again yesterday and am now reading it for the second time. It's proving to be an interesting exercise in that it was one of the first books I read at St Andrews, before I'd decided to definitely pursue the PhD. (The book is now in a second, expanded edition—first 1984, then 1996—but I do not have this available to me yet.) It was in a course with James, as it happens.

I've been working in Childs quite a bit since that first reading, and one of the things that seems so clear to me now is how much Barton takes Barr's 1980 criticism of IOTS on board. Barr worried that the fundamentalists would misuse Childs. Barton's case of the "disappearing redactor" similarly blurs the distinctiveness of Childs' actual position with the likes of G Wenham (cf. "The Coherence of the Flood Narrative," VT 20, 1978), and even worse, with "fundamentalist opponents of non-conservative biblical criticism" for whom, "when the magic box that contained the redactor is opened, not only is the redactor gone, but Moses himself has stepped into his shoes: a very frightening prospect indeed for a higher critic of any kind" (p57 in 1984 edition, but apparently the same in 1996).

As Fergus Kerr quipped in a seminar last week, it is always very instructive to ask who or what a thinker is afraid of.

For the rest of you who aren't particularly bothered what one OT guy said about another, I hope your weekend is as sunny as ours is shaping up to be.

Tags: PhD