Dear Friends,
Step into my study. Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!
One of the problems I am running into with this Pipe & Dram feature—a problem I should have foreseen, but didn’t—is that often my own studies are not particularly eclectic. I wonder if it will get tiresome for you if I keep banging on about one particular writer or book. Keeping that in mind, I will try to keep our visits as interesting as I can.
As you all know, I have embarked on a longterm project and I don’t really know if I will be able to complete it before I die. I have decided to read the Church Fathers in their entirety. It will take a very long time because (A) it isn’t the only thing I’m reading, and (B) thirty-eight massive volumes is daunting. To give you some idea, the print in these volumes is small; I estimate there are, on average, 800 words per page, and approximately 600 pages per volume. That makes over 22,000 pages, and a whopping 18.2 million words. And I am not breezing through them, but rather annotating in the margins as I go.
This past week I finally finished reading the entire extant corpus of the works of Justin, the Martyr (circa A.D. 100-165). It was a deeply enriching experience. Having read many secondhand summaries or portrayals of Justin, his thought, and his approach throughout my academic life I can safely say that I did not quite meet the man I expected. I will say more about some of those common caricatures and how they do not hold up very well in a future meeting.
Today I want to share a bit about the historical record we have of his actual martyrdom. The account contains some scholarly difficulties (there is a variant manuscript that inserts the fanciful idea that Justin was poisoned by hemlock—fitting for the convert from Greek philosophy to die like Socrates), but on the whole it has abundant marks of authenticity. It is simple and straightforward without pious or miraculous embellishments one often finds in martyr accounts.
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