What's in the Box?

Books and a Story

I received a shipment.

This happens not infrequently.

I feel no shame to say that I am in the happy place of having ordered so many things at various times (typically books) from various places around the world (or have such things being shipped to me), that I actually forget what’s coming sometimes.

It’s a special treat when a package arrives and you don’t exactly remember what it might be, or have lost track of a tracking number and timeline.

So, what’s in the box?

This time, however, I knew. I usually get a renewed book budget in the Spring from work, and this year I’ve managed to purchase some books important to me and special to my research.

I once scored a line across an expensive book when cutting open the box. I’ve since been much more careful; thankfully these were well-packed, and my blade is sharp.

They’re in the box.

What came is the complete (well, up until 2024) series of 10 volumes of New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, which were published between 1981 and 2011 under the auspices of the Ancient History Documentary Research Centre at Macquarie University in Australia. There is one new volume (11a, 2024), which, I suppose, I now need to acquire as well.

The importance and usefulness of these volumes for the field of New Testament / Early Christianity is hard to overstate. They are full of editions of inscriptions, papyri, and various documents that shed light on the New Testament and early Christian world, illuminating and illustrating ancient religion, social culture, politics and laws, geography, archaeology, and everyday life. They include comprehensive indexes, penetrating articles on important subjects, and world-class treatments on language and texts from the perspective of ancient history and by specialists in the field.

In one sense, and for those who know, these volumes pick up the sensibilities of projects undertaken in previous generations, by Adolf Deissmann especially (Light from the Ancient East), and others.

I’ve used these volumes in my own research, have read from them, and will continue to do so now that I have had the blessing of acquiring them. They are all in new condition, and most of the 10 came from a local used and rare bookshop, Cardinal Books, in London Ontario—and were a steal!

Here they be:

One develops an aesthetic attraction to the patchwork of designs that grow in long series such as this one.

As I say, they are valuable in their own right.

But they have taken on a bit of a special significance for me because of a friendship begun with the man who chaired the project from the early days until relatively recent years, and for longer than anyone else, Paul Barnett.

A Short Recounting

I sent the email on January 15th of this year, not really knowing what to expect.

I was well into the publishing process (almost complete now) with Routledge books, the publisher of my forthcoming monograph. At that stage, I was encouraged to solicit endorsements from scholars who had relevant expertise and can provide a “blurb” for the book. This is not the same thing as peer review, which was done anonymously and organized by the publisher, with long reports I needed to address. The endorsements are an added way for an author to commend his or her work to the field by having attached to it a short recommendation from a senior scholar or two.

I already had one endorsement from my former PhD supervisor, Stanley Porter, who is a world-class scholar and an expert in the field and areas I researched in for the book. This alone is extremely valuable, and I did not want much more really (books with too many blurbs start looking almost defensive, or like the publisher is trying to sell copies based on the names of the endorsers).

In fact, I only wanted one more, from someone who (1) was an expert in the material with different expertise than most others who had looked at it (i.e., an ancient historian); (2) was a senior scholar with a good reputation in the field; and (3) was someone I interact with in the book. It goes without saying that a request for endorsement should be made cautiously and carefully, since one doesn’t want to presume sympathy to one’s material, or to be pushy or come across as desperate. So I knew I’d need to find someone I already had a good reason to think would be sympathetic to my work.

Paul Barnett was an easy choice.

I had read good swaths of some of his (many) other books, including Jesus and the Rise of Early Christianity; Jesus and the Logic of History; Making the Gospels; etc., but it was his work on Paul in Syria and on the historical contexts of Paul’s missions that were so helpful to me. This is in addition to his work with the New Documents series, which I’ll come back to below.

He also has an international reputation as a serious critical historian, but is firmly in the, for lack of a better term, “British” tradition of optimistic historiography with respect to the New Testament. And he has been a major contemporary figure in championing the historical study of the New Testament (and not just the world around it) as a worthwhile and important scholarly endeavour; this is something I try to promote in my work.

The email was fairly straightforward: introduce myself, introduce my work and the work in question, and then make the request.

Then response came later that day

Dear Nathan,

Warm greetings and congratulations on completing your PhD and the writing of this imposing study.

I could begin to look at it in a few days and count it an honor to do so.

Paul

Then began a correspondence.

Over the next couple months I both received Dr. Barnett’s gracious endorsement (which was certainly a gift, given his status as a scholar and advanced age), but much more besides.

Over many emails he shared with me more of his life story, his experiences in school, as an academic starting out, as a scholar and as a churchman, and as a father and beyond.

The kind of personal encouragement I received reminds me how starkly different Christian higher education can be from secular academia. While these Christian scholars may work in secular institutions (like Barnett did), and publish, research, and collaborate with secular academics, the discourse from an earnest believer to a younger one is so warm, supportive, selfless, positive, and the like. I experienced the same thing through graduate school with my supervisor and other professors.

When you hear about the predatory, dog-eat-dog, zero-sum game afoot in many anecdotes of grad school in other fields, it does—all things considered—give the sense that someone different is going on between believing scholars. Now, there are certainly abuses in Christian institutions too; I think I can say that they tend to be the less academically rigorous ones and tend to be in America, but it is besides my point to linger on them. I simply want to reflect on how positive experiences can be as a rule in certain quarters.

The tale to tell today, however, is of Barnett, who tells me now of his latest project on Mark’s Gospel, and the difficulty that comes with advanced age and an inability to make it to libraries for research.

It was almost 65 years ago that he had completed a BD (Bachelor of Divinity) and was subsequently appointed to a lectureship at Moore Theological College in Australia. He subsequently pursued further studies in Ancient History and Greek, in the University of Sydney (MA in History), which was perhaps Australia’s most prestigious academic degree in history at the time and which dated from the pre-PhD era. His MA work was on “Disturbances in Judea 4 BC-AD 73,” and this led to a PhD at London on the “Jewish Eschatological Prophets AD 40-70 in their Theological and Political Setting.”

Barnett then went on to Macquarie university as master of Robert Menzies College. At the time, the university had begun emphasizing research, and the project New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity had gotten underway, placed from the early days under the chairmanship of Barnett, who was becoming a well-known expert in the field of ancient history and early Christianity.

One of the things Barnett contributed to was the study of the New Testament as a historical corpus to be treated under the rubric of ancient history, since many in the field of ancient history would bypass the New Testament to focus either on its later effects (early Christianity) or the world around it. So “New Testament history” often meant history around the New Testament rather than the actual historical study of the New Testament. His book Is the New Testament History? speaks to the issue, where he promotes a seriously positive answer to that question.

Barnett would go on to publish many more books and commentaries, typically beloved by fellow experts and well informed in primary sources, geography, archaeology, and even theory of history. He chaired the New Documents initiative in association with Macquarie for well over twenty years since its inception in 1980. In the ninth volume, E. A. Judge (himself a historian of renown) offered a worthy tribute to Barnett in the opening pages.

Along the way, Barnett had been ordained in the 1960s as a priest in the Anglican Church of Australia, eventually becoming the Bishop of Sydney and, at the 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours for Australia, a Member of the Order of Australia (AM). This, “for significant service to the Anglican Church of Australia,” which doubtless included his scholarly work.

One gift that Barnett has is an ability to write simple and uncluttered academic prose that makes his creative academic work easy to read by laypeople. I highly recommend some of his more popular books.

What has meant most to me is the personal advice about developing as a scholar and about ministry. There are few who do both, and so Barnett’s advice is so valuable to me. Even more than that, is the benefit of hearing the reminiscences of a long and faithful Christian life.

He spoke to me with great emphasis on the importance of getting on the ground on the sites of one’s research, something he has done for decades, and sent along some photos.

I’ll sign off with one here.

It is a photo of great interest to me, and by his account, of great meaning to him. In Acts 16:11 three companions (Paul, Silas, and Timothy) set out from Alexandria Troas, heeding a call to go to Macedonia and to “proclaim the Gospel to [the Macedonians].” This embarking by this trio becomes, in turn, a keystone of my own reconstruction of Luke’s story of Paul in Acts, but I’ll not dwell on that here.

Only, I’ll share the sight of the sea from the very same locale, as it is now, with ruins that once stood more proudly before the eyes of our ancient friends.

Below, what remains of the wharf at Alexandria Troas.

Courtesy of Paul Barnett.