Word: greekness
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Editor's note: In a riveting exercise in biblical scholarship and storytelling, Reynolds Price translated the Greek texts of Mark and John, then wrote his own narrative in Three Gospels (1996). We asked Price, a prolific novelist (Kate Vaiden, the trilogy A Great Circle, Roxanna Slade and the forthcoming children's novel A Perfect Friend), to take another look at episodes in Jesus' life and craft a new Gospel based on the historical evidence and his reading of the Bible. He adds a chapter in which his erudition and imagination take a leap into an unexplored moment after Christ...
...only substantial biographical sources are the New Testament Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, brief documents written in colloquial Greek late in the generation of those who knew Jesus first- or secondhand. By the end of the 2nd century, these four had become the basic canonical texts of the mainline Christianity of Rome and the Middle East...
...curious reader can also find survivors in several modern editions of New Testament Apocrypha (from the Greek apokruphos, "hidden")--scraps of other Gospels, letters, apocalypses, acts of the apostles and other figures related to Jesus. Some of them offer occasionally striking, even comic, moments. There are numerous stories about the young Jesus, for instance--a sometimes amusing, sometimes dangerous superchild playmate. And there may be actual moments of history in the mostly fictional tales of the acts of John the Beloved, Peter, Paul and others...
...empty. As in Grozny, some residents are holed up in apartment blocks that look to Western eyes as if they have been rendered uninhabitable by artillery fire. The city has no lights, no gas, no work. As our convoy drives up to the Gudermes administrative office with its fake Greek columns, we are met by a crowd of local citizens. We assume they have been bused in to voice their support and enthusiasm for the Russian presence. In fact, they have come to complain. Russian troops--in particular the special assignment police unit, a heavily militarized unit with a reputation...
...While one can question the substance of West, one cannot help but be impressed by the volume of his work. Twenty books by West since 1982 are listed in the front of the Reader. His future projects are no less ambitious: West plans a collaboration on African-American and Greek literature with Elemi Mavromatidou along with a long term project on Checkov and Coltrane and more ventuers into literary criticism. His next published works will be Heart of American Darkness, and I Ain't Noways Tired, a "bold venture in intellectual biography modeled on black musical forms...