On the Perpetual Strangeness of the Bible

Michael Edwards (Author)

9780813950532

Paperback / softback, published 31 October 2023

136 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.5 cm, 0.272 kg

The language of the Bible can be beautiful but profoundly elusive, possessing a strangeness that only deepens the committed reader’s sense of its impenetrability. Based on the 2022 Richard E. Myers lectures given by renowned literary scholar Michael Edwards—the first Englishman ever elected to the Académie française—this book offers a close reading of the Bible itself, directing attention to the text rather than to commentaries or to ostensible lessons to be discovered by paraphrase.

Edwards explores the apparently simple instruction in Proverbs to eat honey and reveals unexpected complexity. He sounds the unfathomable depths of St. Paul’s revelation that the Christian has "died" and yet now lives in Christ—and goes on to ask what it would mean to take the awesome expression "the kingdom of heaven is at hand" seriously. Three final meditations complete the movement by scrutinizing the visionary world of Revelation: the riddle of the work’s composition, of its images, and of the enigmatic time in which its events occur.

• 1. Preliminary
• 2. On Eating Honey
• 3. Paul on Life and Death
• 4. Heaven is Here
• 5. Seeing Revelation: The Writing
• 6. Seeing Revelation: The Images
• 7. Seeing Revelation: The Timing