Page 123 Meme

Posted by Alan Knox on Feb 3, 2008 in blog links, books | 3 comments

I’ve watched this meme travel around for a while, and now James from Idle musings of a bookseller has tagged me. Here are the rules:

• Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more (no cheating!)
• Find page 123
• Find the first five sentences
• Post the next three sentences
• Tag five people

There is a 2 foot tall (at least) stack of books on my bedside table. The top book at the time that I read this tag was An Introduction to the Gospel of John by Raymond E. Brown. Page 123 is part of Chapter 4 – “Proposed Influences on the Religious Thought of the Fourth Gospel” – in a section called “Gnosticism and John”. Skipping the first five sentences, here are the next three sentences which concern the position of H. Koester:

Only after expulsion from the synagogue did the Johanine Christians begin to form their own cultic structures (baptism, eucharist) and develop their own form of miracle stories (syncretistic with pagan stories and a view of Jesus as a divine being on earth) and sayings of Jesus (comparable to those in the Gospel of Thomas). In the latter, gnosis arises for the first time, and this increases in long dialogues based on the sayings (cf. the Nag Hammadi writing Dialogue of the Savior, which is earlier in development than John). Then the evangelist formulated “I am” sayings and introduced the Jesus-the-redeemer myth by way of answering Gnostic interpretations – contrast the Acts of John where Jesus was not really incarnate and did not die.

I bet that quote will lead to some interesting search hits…

So, now I am supposed to tag five people. I am going to try to tag five people who have not been tagged for this meme, and who I have not tagged before for any meme. However, if I do not tag you, and you want to take part in this meme, please do so.

I tag Aaron, Joe, Kerri, Mike, and Michael – in alphabetical order. If you decide to take part, please leave a comment here so that we can read your entry.