Not your typical Bible stories: just in time for the holidays

bible-imageThis time of the year makes me feel curious -- biblically curious. Is that true for you? I find myself thinking about wise men from the East, a blazing bright star, and all those other props and costumes in the stories of Jesus' birth. How much of it was real? How much of it was invented by evangelists vividly alive to the power of myth?

I don't even have to ask the questions myself if I don't want to: There's ABC News correspondent Christiane Amanpour on the tube, posing these and other questions about Bible stories in a prime-time special called "Back to the Beginning."

And I also have a fascinating book on the table in front of me: "From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends" by Avigdor Shinan and Yair Zakovitch (University of Nebraska Press/Jewish Publication Society).

My first reaction?

Somebody at University of Nebraska Press has a pretty subversive sense of timing -- why else do you publish a book like this in the same month when major Christian and Jewish holidays are observed?

My second reaction?

What an amazing book. An amazing, fascinating book.

The authors, both professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explore the reality -- and deeper mythic dimensions -- of questions that Ms. Amanpour, unfortunately, doesn't cover in her fancy two-part primetime special.

"Israel's break with its pagan past was hardly instantaneous and certainly not painless," the authors write. In fact, the books of the Old Testament (which this book focuses on) preserve that battle with the pagan past. You find bits of strange myth and odd questions strewn throughout -- like fragments from an explosion that have been scattered across a field.

"Though the writers of the Bible may have lived hundreds of years apart," Shinan and Zakovitch add, "they spoke with one another through their writings.... the Bible is not merely a collection of books but a network of connections in which stories talk to poems and laws to prophecies..."

Part of that conversation involves interesting questions, including:

-- What is the manna that fell from Heaven and fed the Israelites?

-- If it wasn't David, then who really killed the Philistine warrior Goliath?

-- Did the serpent in Eden have legs and arms long before Adam and Eve arrived?

-- Samson/Heracles/Jesus ... did you know there are connections among them?

-- Did you know that the Psalms contain echoes of earlier stories about God the Creator's primordial wars against dragons and the ocean?

This hardly scratches the surface of a provocative, engaging book that is clearly the distillation of a lifetime's worth of study.

In the questions above in boldface, as with much else in Holy Scripture,  the authors locate forgotten, older traditions and pagan observances.

They remind any reader -- one who is willing to relax his or her literalist death-grip on the Bible -- that enduring stories, much like a mighty river, are fed by countless, sometimes unexpected sources.

"The two-way journey from the Hebrew Bible to the writings that were earlier, later, and contemporary to it and then back to the pages of the Bible convinces us," the authors emphasize, "that, while it is good to study one body of literature in depth, that study cannot be in isolation: the many cultures and literatures that influenced it must also be taken into consideration.... Only by examining the entire mosaic, including each stone and its color, shade, and hue, will we be able to fully understand this extraordinary work...."

Such a lesson leads to greater understanding and, hopefully, to more tolerance among cultures.

At any time of year, that message would be welcome. At this time of year, that message is also something else.

It's a gift.

A frustrated failure and his masterpiece: new in bookstores

"The Last Supper," painting by Leonardo Da Vinci: If only we all could fail like this. Dan Brown thinks he knows Leonardo's secrets; so does Javier Serra and plenty of other novelists; but it's Ross King who's the true authority. With "Leonardo and 'The Last Supper' " (Walker & Company), he reveals the real circumstances -- minus all that business about Mary Magdalene and the Priory of Sion -- that led to the Renaissance genius' creation of his masterpiece.

Leonardo was in middle age when the project to paint Jesus and his Apostles came along--following a string of unfinished commissions.

What was the most recent, humiliating one?  It involved 75 pounds of bronze: The bronze had been intended for Leonardo's statue of Milan's Francesco Sforza astride a horse, but it was melted instead into cannon balls.

All Leonardo's planning, all his hopes ... gone (literally) in a puff of smoke from a cannon's mouth.

ross-king-leonardo-and-the-last-supperKing deftly reconstructs everything -- Leonardo's circumstances and his execution of the painting, the historical context of 15th century Italy -- and infuses the figure of the artist himself with a fresh bloom, devoid of caricature.

That is no small feat: Some critics have treated the maestro from Vinci like an accidental genius or somebody's crazy uncle, a dabbler who was a bit nutty and lost in a cloud of experimentation in a messy studio.

That negative image seemed further reinforced a few years ago: Remember when the alarming news was announced that "The Last Supper" was disintegrating thanks to Leonardo's painting method? That surely didn't help his case either.

Ah, but wait, King points out, waving a cautionary finger, Leonardo created a special surface with a primer coat of lead white in order to "enhance the mural's luminosity" -- to make that solemn biblical scene glow with a timeless quality on the convent wall. That's hardly the strategy of a madman.

"Over the course of three years," King writes, "[Leonardo] managed -- almost for the only time in his life -- to harness and concentrate his relentless energies and restless obsessions. The result was 450 square feet of pigment and plaster, and a work of art utterly unlike anything ever seen before -- and something unquestionably superior to the efforts of even the greatest masters of the previous century."

Here, as in his books about Machiavelli and Michelangelo, King clearly demonstrates why he is the friend of every armchair traveler eager to understand life as it was actually experienced in the Italian past.

If someone in your family happens to share this historical appetite, well, then, you have just stumbled on an ideal holiday gift for them in "Leonardo and 'The Last Supper,' " haven't you?

Battle of the Buddhas: new in bookstores

Standing in a retail line on this infamous day, Black Friday, I heard someone (couldn't help hearing) on their cellphone behind me.

"It's crazy, but I'm good. I've done a lot of shopping," the person said. "I'm just trying to be Zen about it."

That's a great goal for dealing with the shopping madness, but what does it mean to be Zen?

Ask Donald S. Lopez Jr., and he'll probably tell you that most of us really have no idea what it means.

His new book, "The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life" (Yale University Press), is all about how a scientific version of the Buddha has belly-bumped the authentic, ancient one into a corner.

"The Scientific Buddha is a pale reflection of the Buddha born in Asia," the author writes as he explores the Buddha's original teachings and how they've been misunderstood in the West. The real Buddha, he adds, "entered our world in order to destroy it."

Instead, he's the one who's getting destroyed:

  • by the self-help movement
  • by the gospel of mindfulness - a term found on the tips of tongues everywhere
  • by discussions of mindful eating, mindful children, mindful coffee breaks .... on and on.

The tone of Lopez' book isn't judgmental -- with his academic bonafides, he certainly could preach if he wanted to -- it's measured and careful. A chapter on Buddhist meditation is stunning: Lopez guides us through the meanings of bhavana, a word usually translated as "meditation" that Lopez says means so much more: "cultivating, producing, manifesting, imagining, suffusing, and reflecting."All of this, he points out, gets lost in translation.

That's Lopez' argument, and we should all listen to him because he's a big deal in the world of Buddhism scholarship. His book (very brief: about 130 pages) is fascinating, powerful, enlightening, necessary ... and a little irritating.

Fine, the person behind me in line may not know anything about why Siddhartha Gautama sat down under the bodhi tree -- or maybe he does, how can I assume? -- but the important thing is that he was trying to stay calm and civilized while I was impatiently biting on my fingernails. I admire that.

Can't simple steps lead to deeper insights? Anyone trying to "be Zen" in the checkout line at the department store may one day get much closer to understanding the insights in Lopez' excellent book.

For now, at least, they're coping with Black Friday much better than I did.

Ancient H2O: new in bookstores

Realms like Westeros, in George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire," or Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast are imaginary landscapes -- places that exist only in the reader's mind. Until about 80 or 90 years ago, you could have added my Southern California to the list of imaginary topographies.  More than 22 million people consider my region their home today, but that number would have stunned scientists in the early 20th century. This land lacked a single element to support such an enormous population: Water.

But sunny SoCal is hardly the first region to ever grapple with natural resources: Steven Mithen's "Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World" (Harvard University Press) supplies a marvelous tour of long ago civilizations whose fates rested on water and making it available to their populations.Request Feedback

That marvelous face on the cover says it all, doesn't it?

Sumerians, Nabataeans ("masters of the desert," says Mithen), Minoans, Mayans, the Hohokam--Mithen's book is a fascinating survey of the many civilizations affected by a resource that we take for granted.

Find a comfortable chair, pour yourself a tall glass of water if you're thirsty, and spend a few hours reading about ancient efforts at hydraulics and irrigation described with evocative, often personalized prose. Then, once you're finished, take a sip and remember how lucky you are.

 

Relic, relique, reliquus: Part 2

Besides having a great name, Ransom Riggs is a good fellow (we once sat on a panel together at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books) who's in the habit of making relics. Sort of.

As I was thinking about Umberto Eco and my personal artifacts in a previous post, Riggs came to mind. The plot of his novel "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" was influenced by all the unusual black-and-white vintage photographs scattered throughout the book. The pics don't belong to his family history, they're not self-generated: No, he acquired them at flea markets. They were context-less when he found them: no captions, nothing to explain them.

That left him free to invent his own stories (reminds me a little of what Chris Van Allsburg does in his children's book "The Chronicles of Harris Burdick"). Riggs also does the same in a new book, "Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued from the Past" (It Books).

I wish I had the energy to rove like him through flea markets for interesting old spars of knowledge, dim wares of price (E.P.). That doesn't mean I'm without my own relics, though. A few are:

icon of St. Nicholas (previously mentioned)

rocks and shells (from many places)

a tarnished ruble (from Kiev)

Shiva Nataraja figurine (from a departed close friend)

Drawings by my sons (obvious)

My father's chunky $5 ring (obvious too)

A daruma doll

Movie ticket (first date with my wife)

So, now that I've shared some of mine, turn to your own shelves and desk drawers. You must have relics.

What are yours?