Re: what's everybody reading

[Don Smith <dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu>]

Peter wrote:

> Don wrote:
> > It was the UK edition, too, so it was fun to try to spot what they would
> > probably change in the US edition.

> Hmmm, wonder how either edition would compare to the Canadian edition.

No idea.  The UK editions are rather squat books, with bicolor covers in bold,
primary colors, with a painting on the front.  The US versions are taller (done
gone and messed up the pattern on the bookshelf with this one ;-)), and have
much darker color schemes.  The US version of the first one inexplicibly
changed the famous "Philosopher's Stone" to the obscure "Sorcerer's Stone".
The main difference in the new one was I noticed a line when one of the Weasley
twins was talking about how hard the fifth year of school was, he said "George
and I managed to keep our peckers up somehow."  When I got home from Africa, I
went to the bookstore and looked up that spot in the US edition and found:
"George and I managed to keep our spirits up somehow."  :-)

> > . . . part III of "A Marginal Jew" by John Meier . . .

> Oh, how is that?  I still haven't gotten around to picking it up yet --
> seems hard to believe it's been nearly a decade since part II.

No kidding!  And Meier had some kind of drastic, life-threatening illness in
the meantime.  Hopefully he will make it to finish part four.  I'm really
looking forward to how he tackles the passion narratives.  The third one is
about the same as the second one -- it's divided into two parts: Jesus's
followers and Jesus's opponents.  The dissection of what kinds of people
followed Jesus and what we can glean about who they were and what roles they
fell into was fascinating.  I'm starting the opponents section now, and it's
proving more frustrating, only because he buys the party line about Essenes
living at Qumran, which I do not, and it's frustrating to see him be *sooo*
critical and careful about *every* assumption and Ansatz with respect to all
the other source material, but then accept as a given with no critical
examination that there were Essenes at Qumran who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Since I don't accept that the evidence supports that conclusion, any argument
about how Jesus relates to "the community at Qumran" is (to me) meaningless and
irrelevant.  

Yours,
-- 
Don Smith                           Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                                http://www.rotse.net/dasmith/

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