In the new Jan 26/09 edition of The Nation, Anthony Grafton’s review of a 2008 academic-press volume—Morton Smith and Gershom Scholem: Correspondence, 1945-1982, by Guy G. Stroumsa, ed.—takes one more crack at the gay-Jesus/Secret Mark controversy, but with rather tentative conclusions:

I believe that Smith really found his letter, and that Scholem gave him the framework into which he inserted it. But that’s just what I think. Many will disagree. This time, the professor is the Cheshire cat. He smiles and is gone.

[read the review]

For one academic insider’s view of this story, check out these postings on Secret Mark, from Apocryphicity.

• Charlotte Gray
• André Alexis
• A. L. Kennedy
• Alberto Manguel

Here’s the Globe’s description of the panel, and the inside scoop on the selection process from three members.  

Favourite quotes:

“For the record, here are the books I haven’t read on our list: Das Kapital, The Wealth of Nations, The Koran, Principia Mathematica, half of Freud’s entertaining but (to me) interminable Interpretation of Dreams, half of Galileo’s Starry Messenger and Other Dialogues, and most of Wollenstonecraft’s Vindication (dreary beyond measure).” — André Alexis

“Trying to decide impossibilities such as whether Shakespeare should be represented by Hamlet or King Lear gave me something approaching a mild migraine.” – A. L. Kennedy

“I was taken aback when both Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians were axed. I was unable to convince my colleagues that these books reshaped their genres, besides being more accessible than a couple of our final choices ( The Mahabharata, anyone?) Bloomsbury, I guess, now has as much traction as the Chicago School of Neo-cons.” – Charlotte Gray

“I sent my fellow-panelists a querulous note explaining that I wanted to write about a book penned by a woman. ‘I am not making this point to be politically correct, but because I do not see me and my reading tastes completely reflected in the list so far.’ Our Great Books looked too like the kind of history syllabus taught half a century ago — all wars and laws, chaps and maps — that had nearly put me off history for life.” – Charlotte Gray

By the way, as part of the new Globe Books, Martin Levin has a new blog, and so does the section.

Vicar has ‘horrifying’ statue of crucifixion removed from church
Resin sculpture that ‘scared children and deterred worshippers’ to be replaced by steel cross

[IM thread from this morning:]

ajh: there’s something profound in that, but I am writing code so can’t articulate it. it gets my conservative hackles all up, though.

me: it’s the Photoshop century.

ajh: awesome. gotta wonder how many of those kids were on their way back from Batman Begins, though.

maybe if Batman was on the cross it would be OK!

me: he died for George Clooney’s sins, and then came back from the dead for another round of profitable sequels.

ajh: or was it Val Kilmer? I always get these creation stories mixed up…

“Prophet Sharing: The Good Book Is the Best Seller”

My attention was especially attracted by this ‘graph:

It’s an astonishing fact that year after year, the Bible is the best-selling book in America—even though 90% of households already have at least one copy. The text doesn’t vary, except in translation. The tremendous sales volume, an estimated 25 million copies sold each year, is largely driven by innovations in design, color, style and the ultimate niche marketing.

According to this Wikipedia article, in all-time global sales, the Bible looks pretty far ahead of any competition, with estimates ranging from 2.5 to 6 billion copies sold.  The only other book even in its league is Mao’s Little Red Book.

At the end of the article, readers are invited to submit their own picks of the greatest books, but submitters are asked to exclude 29 authors as “likely consensus choices”—and it so happens that this includes 14 authors/works that were entirely passed over by the Globe list:

• Tao Te Ching
• Bhagavad-Gita (part of the Mahabharata, I realize, but see earlier discussion)
• Confucius
• Aristotle
• Aeschylus
• Euripides
• Aristophanes
• Virgil
• Hobbes
• Locke
• Hegel
• Emerson
• Thoreau
• Einstein

I believe I’ll be coming back to the Harvard Classics in a future post.