Apparently Erasmus wasn't kidding when he wrote, 'When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes'. I'm not quite as book mad as that, but on occasion I have been known to buy an expensive book.
In June 1991 a book was announced that at the time seemed, and was, an eye-watering price. This was before online comparisons and discounts. Understanding the Fourth Gospel by John Ashton was the first major survey and analysis of Johannine scholarship from Bultmann onwards. Published by Oxford University Press it was beautifully produced in hardback, at 600 pages, by a publishing house who produced amongst the finest examples of book-building and book-binding of volumes intended never to wear out. In 1991 it cost £65, today the equivalent of £177.
I ordered it and turned up at Blackwell's in Old Aberdeen with book tokens and a late birthday present, and came away happier than I ever did driving away a new car. So, yes, Erasmus wasn't far wrong about how priorities are quickly reshuffled when books enter the equation! (The current price of the extensively revised second edition from the publisher is £162, with a softcover at £37.99). For the avoidance of doubt, I would have bought the softcover if there had been one!
At College in the 1970's I worked through the Greek text of John's gospel under the guidance of R.E.O White, whose love of the Greek Testament was such that more than once he was accosted on the bus by someone reading over his shoulder and asking him what he was reading. He was never sure how far his enthusiasm for the Greek New Testament rubbed off on the enquirers. But it rubbed off on me. He passed that love of the NT text on to many of his students, myself included. I was captivated by his close exegesis and the wide range of secondary voices he introduced. Ever since I've tried to keep up with scholarly study of the Fourth Gospel, and that as a means to the end of preaching it well, and allowing it to be formative in my own spiritual life and practice.
John Ashton's book found its place alongside Raymond Brown's 2 volume masterpiece in the Anchor Commentary; the three volume Schnackenburg which remains an intimidating invitation to dive in at the deep end; and C K Barrett, the commentary we used in college. I still have it, still consult it, and no other commentary has displaced it from that special place reserved for those books that were like a mountain to climb, but the view from the top made the effort worthwhile.
Monographs have kept coming and I have a selection that has grown slowly with the years. In close second to Ashton is my copy of John A T Robinson's The Priority of John, which I read throughout Lent in 1986. Bishop John Robinson is one of my heroes. He was a careful scholar, quite prepared to swim against the stream of the 'established' consensus in New Testament scholarship. His own spirituality was warm and enquiring, his intellectual honesty and learning beyond question. He was seriously and pastorally responsive to people struggling to make sense of the whole Christian thing in a secular society driven by consumer competitiveness and cultural flux in the second half of the 20th Century.
His book on John is a remarkable piece of argumentation, based on careful if at times eccentric detective work. The Priority of John is theologically penetrating in his opening up of the passion story in John, one of the most moving sections of the book, given that Robinson was terminally ill during the writing of it. They were intended as the Bampton Lectures but were never delivered.
There's much more on my John shelves, and they keep coming. But these two books, by two scholars called John, on a Gospel called John, are special. They are gifts to the church, and have been gifts to me in my own attempts at deep diving into the Fourth Gospel. With apologies to Erasmus, I'm glad that when I had a little money, I was able to buy and read them, and, with thanks to God, still have enough over for food and clothes.
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