Post intelligent and civil comments. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the NLM
I've been reading excerpts of the Baker book on google books and lets just say she has many ideas which depart from orthodox Christianity. I'm not sure the promotion of her book is a good idea.
Brian,
That's not a surprise. I wouldn't expect anything different. This is why I've noted it isn't a Catholic text, but that there may be items of Catholic interest therein.
I wouldn't suggest this is as a text for catechesis, or to introduce someone to the subject. It's a book for scholarly interest.
For my part, the fact of a non-Catholic picking up on these themes is interesting and I'm curious to see how they approach it.
Hi Shawn,
many thanks for putting this one up. The colloquium was a wonderful event with very eminent people responding to Margaret Barker's book. More to follow on the T&T Clark blog. Margaret Barker is not a Catholic. She is an eminent scholar and I think there is hardly anybody out there who has such a working knowlegde of extra biblical texts and early Christian writings in the original languages. As she put it humbly at the colloquium she sees herself as a scholar who is flying over the material in a helicopter and just describes what she finds. There is much more work to do, and much of the evidence she writes about still needs to be interpreted and understood. She might not be a Catholic, but her conclusions strongly support traditional Catholic and Orthodox understandings of the liturgy and its origins.
Coming from a free church background (Margaret is a Methodist lay preacher) one could hardly accuse her of working with a hidden agenda. She was not looking for what she found in the end. She has virtually no experience of Roman Catholic liturgy. It was quite moving when she described how after years of research in the temple tradition she attended a proper Eastern Orthodox episcopal liturgy and immediately saw the Great High Priest coming to life in the bishop. The prayers for the vesting clearly had temple roots!
Cheers
Tom
PS Review copies are on the way!
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