Tuesday, January 26, 2016

The Letter of Jude

This book strikes me as the outlyingest of the Greek scriptures.  Even by virtue of authorship it is singular among those books adopted as canonical by the early church.  There seems to be some confusion about the identity of this Jude.  Was he a brother of Jesus?  Or one of the original 12 apostles?  It would seem to depend on whom you ask.  My religious upbringing asserted the former.  In either case, nearly nothing is known about him, as compared with Peter, John, Paul et al.  As with the book attributed to James, it appears I will need to take it largely on its content.

1:2 Contrasting this salutation with those of Paul and Peter, one would expect the book to be less concerned with "grace" and more with love".

1:4 A recurring theme.  Jude adds his voice to those other writers in defending the church against apostasy.

1:6 Whence does this bit of theology come?  A reference from some apocryphal book?  Not found in any of the canonical books, to my knowledge.  And yet it is treated as established fact here.

1:9 Yet another unfamiliar reference--apocryphal even by Catholic standards.

1:14 And a reference to the book of Enoch--not exactly mainstream.

1:23 Well, at least we can see why "grace" was left out of his salutation. 

Of all the many epistles that have been lost to history, and still more that have been preserved but refused canonicity, how did this one manage to be included?  I can find no other answer than that the Jonathon Edwardsian fire and brimstone appealed to the sensibilities of those in charge of such decisions.  y my original count, I have one more book to go in this little project.  But the more I read, the more I want to add to the list books that have been inexplicably excluded.

Jaws

Well, that was unexpected.  I suspected that this film earned its place on the AFI's list of 100 influential movies by virtue of its social impact, rather than its quality.  And for the first third of the movie, I was comfortable in my assessment: it was a serviceable, but unremarkable monster movie. 

But then they got in the boat.  At that moment it went from being cinematic to theatrical, in the sense of being suitable for the stage, rather than the screen.  In fact, I can easily imagine the best actors of our time being drawn to the roles of three men trapped in a life and death struggle with a force of nature.  Working title: Two and a Half Men (badum tssss). And the movie never backtracked; it never went back to land and remembered that it was a monster movie.  Once those men got in a boat, it became a dramatic character study, and so it remained.