New friend

Apologies to my faithful readers! It seems that all I do these days is pop in every now and then to apologize. Though I guess I'm not really that sorry because I've been swamped with finishing up my degree at Duke and moving on to pursue doctoral work. I will keep you posted with regard to where we'll end up in the Fall! Anyway, back to the topic at hand: technology. I went to the Duke Divinity library today to discover a new machine in place of an old scanner:

I guess it's some new amazing scanner that looked world's apart from the usual flatbed scanner that you see at libraries or your office where you just lay your books flat with a plastic flap on top to cover it. There are two really efficient aspects to the scanner: (1) you just keep the book laid out with pages facing up, so it moves rather quickly when you can just flip the page and continue to scan, and the more amazing part (2) the scanner comes with a pedal like a piano where you just step on it to scan! Today I probably scanned about 50 pages of material and what normally would have taken at least 15-20 minutes to do, I think I finished in less than 10. I don't know where we'll end up yet, but I do hope the next library will also have my new bestfriend, Bookeye 4.

Thomas

It appears that the next few months has a number of books out on the Gospel of Thomas:

If Amazon's date is correct (Mar. 31, 2012), this book in the SNTS monograph series by Prof. Simon Gathercole is the first one to hit the shelves. It'll probably be a very good book that helps set the tone for how NT scholars understand the direction of influence between the Gospel of Thomas and the canonical Gospels. Unfortunately, unless you have a lot of cash or access to a library that carries this book, the price ($95) is quite prohibitive.

I'm not familiar with Prof. Christopher Skinner's work, but a quick scan in my library database shows that he's already done work in GThom, which is probably why he is a good person to write a book that provides an overview of recent discussions on this fascinating book. It's due out in May and the best part about this book so far is that it is quite affordable ($6.40 on Amazon!). I'll probably try to get my hands on this book esp. given its light footprint on my wallet.

Last, but definitely not least, is this book from one of my teachers at Duke, Prof. Mark Goodacre. As the title suggests, he will probably go at this by way of looking at the Synoptic Gospels and GThom closely. I always enjoy reading his work as they are very accessible but at the same time interesting and provocative, so I expect this should be a good read for those interested in this text. It's out in June and a tad over $25 on Amazon.








All three of these books sound interesting right now as I'm taking a class with Dr. Goodacre on the Non-Canonical Gospels. Keep a lookout for these books and borrow/purchase them when they become available.