It’s a running joke, I guess, that some pockets of the Academy may have run out of things to write about. We start performing exegesis on the exegetes. This is a recent title via the Society of Biblical Literature: The Flesh Was Made Word: A Metahistorical Critique of the Contemporary Quest of the Historical Jesus.  Here’s a description, lifted entirely from the SBL’s online bookstore:

The ‘historical Jesus’ still remains elusive. Who was Jesus? What really happened? How can we know for sure? The latest quest for the truth about him comes at a time marked by radical uncertainty and postmodern scepticism about master narratives, along with a loss of confidence in the traditional methods of historical analysis. In this context, Susan Lochrie Graham approaches the old debates from an entirely new direction. Armed with a ‘metahistorical’ approach adapted from the work of Hayden White, the philosopher of history, she reads the work of four representative historical Jesus writers: John P. Meier, N.T. Wright, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and John Dominic Crossan. The analysis brings to light the deep literary structures of their portraits, showing the differing plots and rhetorical concepts that shape them, and the types of argument that are deployed by each writer. This ground-breaking critical investigation exposes the theological and cultural meanings embedded in all historical Jesus writing, showing how narrative forms function ideologically. It concludes with fresh answers to questions both about the methods we use and about the social implications of the contemporary quest of the historical Jesus, and proposes different directions for future research.

It rewards a careful reading: she’s doing to the Historical Jesus scholars’ books what they do to the Evangelists’ books! And now I’ve done the same to her book. (Also, note that the subjects of her book are still alive and publishing.)

It’s irrational. I have a completely irrational reaction to the words “brown bag lunch.” Any event whose title leads off with “brown bag” has lost my attendance even before I know what it is about. “Come to a brown bag lunch with the President of the United States!” Sorry. Can’t make it. I’ll be somewhere else actually eating lunch.

The brown bag lunch is not for the faint of heart. Not for those faint with hunger. Not for the fair-weather enthusiast. Like the tiny working groups at academic conferences, everyone who’s there is there because he’s really, really interested. It comes with bragging rights. “I went to hear so-and-so, and I assure you, I did it for the substance of the subject matter and my own academic or professional betterment, not for any free pizza.”

I don’t know about you, but I find myself daily sucked back down to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. (That’s where food is, right?) The foresight to pack a lunch comes only after self-actualization.

But as often as not, I will skip a brown bag lunch only to skip lunch anyway! Madness!

I might skip lunch to meet the President. But only if nobody mentions brown bags.