Thomas Aquinas: A Very Short Introduction by Fergus Kerr
Oxford University Press, £7.99
Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction by Eric H Cline
Oxford University Press, £7.99
The Oxford University Press series of Very Short Introductions are the Twitter of academic literature. An eclectic pocket-size collection, each fewer than 200 pages, covering any subject a university don might fancy writing about. I’ve just read one, eye-catchingly entitled Nothing, which turned out to be a sprint through particle physics.
And if the editors of the Very Short Introductions have not yet thought of your own special interest you can be sure they soon will. Just a flick through a few of the As gives us some idea of the range: African History, Anarchism, Anglicanism, Antisemitism and Autism.
But these little books are far from being an idiot’s guide to whatever it is they are on about. They are aimed at the informed amateur who already knows something of the subject under examination. Fergus Kerr’s Thomas Aquinas requires at least a passing acquaintance with classical philosophy and medieval apologetics.
Kerr assumes you already have the basics of the Thomist Five Ways, explaining why there must be a God, and he takes for granted that you have been thinking about theodicy, that bit of theology which deals with the nature of evil, before delving into his book.
So I hesitate to recommend the Very Short Introductions to a general readership. There are many better books out there designed for the beginner. Eric Cline’s Biblical Archaeology, though, is the exception. Written by a practising Biblical bone kicker – currently excavating the site of Armageddon at Megiddo in Israel – Cline is so excited and enthusiastic about the digging trade he comes across as a modern-day Indiana Jones.
Steven Spielberg should buy this book; it might give him a few ideas for future screenplays. Take the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of them was written on copper and took years to unravel using a lathe at the Manchester Institute of Technology. It then had to be cut into segments and pieced together again to be read. The scroll turned out to be a treasure map pointing the way to 64 different sites which promised fortunes in gold and silver. Repeated attempts to unearth these treasure troves have ended in failure, possibly because the instructions are so vague.
Cline gives us a flavour: “In the ruin which is in the valley pass under the steps leading to the east forty cubits…there is a chest of money and its total is the weight of 17 talents.” If it whets your appetite for archeological adventure that works out as 1,275lb of precious metal.
What Biblical archaeology does not do is prove the truth of the stories in the Bible. The Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob may well have been wandering around the deserts of the Middle East in the early second millennium BC but, if so, the evidence has yet to be found. Similarly the Exodus, the departure of the Hebrews from Egypt, is so far real only in the annual Jewish festival of Passover.
One important discovery in Caesarea was an inscription dating to AD30 mentioning Pontius Pilate as Prefect of Judea, a title only previously known from the New Testament. Nothing about Jesus, though.
But archeologists can always find work in the Holy Land, ever since Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, supplied them with state workers in the hope their excavations would help forge an identity for the new country. Add to that the forgers and crooked dealers in antiquities hoping to make a dishonest dollar and Spielberg has all the colourful characters he needs for another major motion picture.
Nigel Nelson
