When John desires Mary or Mary desires John, what does either of them want? What is meant by innocence, passion, love and arousal, desire, perversion and shame? These are just a few of the questions Roger Scruton addresses in this thought-provoking intellectual adventure. Beginning from purely philosophical premises, and ranging over human life, art and institutions, he surveys the entire field of sexuality; equally dissatisfied with puritanism and permissiveness, he argues for a radical break with recent theories. Upholding traditional morality - though in terms that may shock many of its practitioners - his argument gravitates to that which is candid, serene and consoling in the experience of sexual love.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Dart writes engagingly in language accessible to any fairly literate adult, and this book may well encourage intelligent laity to take biblical scholarship more seriously.” –Religious Studies Review, April, July 2004 (Religious Studies Review )
About the Author
John Dart, news editor of Christian Century magazine and a religion writer at the Los Angeles Times for 30 years, has written extensively about New Testament research. He won a 2004 American Academy of Religion award for in-depth reporting on religion. His books include The Laughing Savior: The Discovery and Significance of the Nag Hammadi Gnosti Library; The Gospel of Thomas: Unearthing the Lost Worlds of Jesus; and Deities & Deadlines. Dart has won numerous reporting awards.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Potentially Ground-Breaking Study of Mark,
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This review is from: Decoding Mark (Paperback)
This title is for those who take a serious, learned interest in the gospels. Long considered the simplest of the gospels, Mark may actually be the most subtle - and artful - of the four. The key to Mark is the chiasms, mirror-like patterns that tend to bracket certain scenes and events, a long-forgotten practice that was common in the Classical world. The odd repetitions and confusing syntax in Mark, often seen as a product of the author's poor Greek, are actually hints to the chiastic code. Through Mr. Dart's careful research of chiasms in Mark, he reaches several startling conclusions.
First, the entire gospel is built of multiple chiastic patterns, in a way that brackets the gospel's pivotal themes. Second, the so-called "Lost Gospel of Mark," sometimes seen as a later (and suppressed) addition, was actually a key element of the original gospel, a point which Mr. Dart contends is proven within the gospel's chiastic patterns. Third, Mark had an agenda to diminish the role of Jesus's family and the traditional apostles. The conclusion, as best I can deduce it, is that Mark deliberately shifted the theme of Jesus's teachings beyond the established hieararchy of the "Jesus Movement" within Judaism toward the universality that became Christianity. The author disputes the homoerotic connotations often associated with the Secret Gospel of Mark, contending that the scene in question suggests a long-lost ritual quest for oneness, and that the scene may have been Mark's fictional creation anyway. If you see your faith as a quest for deeper meaning, if you can live with the "open door" of doubt, and if you just can't resist a deeply compelling mystery right at the core of western culture's deepest foundations, then this book is for you. I give it four stars rather than five because I believe the author put too much emphasis on specific chiastic patterns and too little on the ultimate meaning of his findings. Still, this title may ultimately prove revolutionary in answering some of Christianity's deepest questions.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lots of Good and Interesting Ideas Well Presented,
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This review is from: Decoding Mark (Hardcover)
As a journalist, John Dart has a nice, easy to understand and charming style. He presents a hypothesis that he's obviously excited about, and it is a hypothesis well worth considering.He suggests that the gospel writer Mark organized his work around a series of chiasms (basically words and ideas arranged in a mirrored form: A, B, C, B', A'). Using this concept, he finds evidence that Morton's Smith's "Secret Gospel of Mark" along with a number of passages from Luke were in the original Gospel of Mark, while a section in the middle of Mark 6:47-8:26 was added later. Another important hypothesis is that the original writer put in 16 miracles for Jesus to match the number of miracles done by the Jewish prophet Elisha. A later editor added 8 more to have him outdo Elisha. I would have liked to have seen a bit more references to the gospels of Matthew and John, for example can you find these chiasms or other chiastic patterns in them? And it would have been nice to have more speculation about the author Mark and why he hated the disciples and Jesus' family so much, although there are a few paragraphs on this. Altogether a fascinating, pleasant and enjoyable book for anyone interested in the gospels or any serious students of ancient literature and history.
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