Weekend Reading

I've gathered from the latest History Carnival (thanks to Siris for the link) a few posts that might be of interest to bibliobloggers.

The question of forgery brings up for many the case of the Vinland Map, a forged document purporting to illustrate Viking settlements in North America. Read about it here.

This post purports to prove (tongue-in-cheekily) that Harry Truman was a Vulcan. On the serious side, it is a salutary caution not to read too much into merely verbal parallels, a tendency that biblical scholars are sometimes guilty of indulging.

Paul Musgrave argues against the view that language death should be encouraged, not deplored. For those of us who work with minority languages, and find joy in the diversity, his post is welcome. It concludes with some interesting observations about Irish language and identity. (And it's long. I'm not complaining, I'm just jealous. Don't you people have jobs?)

Brandon@Siris, spurred by the appearance of the TNIV, discusses the argument of Paul in Ephesians 5: a good example of the fruitful results to be gained when philosophers read the Bible (sounds like a Fox special, "When Philosophers..."). I noticed at a conference on Biblical scholarship and Philosophy a few years ago that, in general, the philosophers, who were supposed to be humbly learning from the best in biblical scholarship, were asking hard questions about evidence, argument, confirmation, and unexamined background beliefs that the biblical scholars couldn't deal with. And I'm not talking about liberal philosophers undermining conservative scholars, but the other way around: Christian philosophers were dismantling the underlying assumptions of liberal NT scholarship, and raising quite a few hackles in the process. It was fun, like watching the Christians eat the lions for once. (Proceedings of the conference available in Stump, Eleonore, and Thomas Flint, eds. Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Theology. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1993.)

ADDENDUM (2/26): Readers who enjoyed "Readings" by Czeslaw Milosz (a post that got a surprising amount of e-mail) might enjoy this article about Milosz in The New Pantagruel.