Monday, August 28, 2006

While killing time on a 3-hour layover in Nashville, Tennessee, I have this one overwhelming thought.

I'm tired of traveling!

The last six weeks have been crazy. My body clock doesn't seem to know what time zone I'm in. Living out of suitcases makes me wonder how the business travelers do it. During the next 48 hours, I will have set foot in seven different states.

But it's nearly over.

And I can't wait.

I can't wait to get back to my new family at Woodward Park. Can't wait to get back to my girls who've lived without their daddy for six weeks. And I can't wait to get back to my bride, my darling Mandy, who has endured the demands of being a "single mom" for the last six weeks.

After one more scheduled trip in October to speak at the National Soujourners Convention in Marshall, Texas, I am committing to no more travel for a year unless it involves my girls going with me!

They say the longest part of any journey is the last leg toward home. Right now, I am experiencing that first-hand.

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Because of my travel schedule, I'll be out of pocket until Thursday. Don't give up on my blog, though, because come Thursday, I'll be back to the Monday through Friday routine of giving you something from my personal study to sink your teeth into.

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My beloved Rangers are officially on life support. With the A's winning two of three in Arlington this weekend, it will take a miracle the likes of the 1977 Yankees and Bucky Dent for the Rangers to have any hopes of playing into October. I'm not counting on it.

But listen, all you Fresno A's fans, I'll gladly jump on the A's bandwagon...but only for the playoff run. Protocol demands rooting for the division rival in the playoffs...but only for the playoffs.

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Finally, a nugget on the Bible to tide you over till Thursday culled from N.T. Wright this morning on the flight from Columbus to Nashville.

"It needs to be stressed that our evidence for the text of the New Testament is in a completely different league than our evidence for every single other book from the ancient world. We know major Greek authors such as Plato and Sophocles, and even Homer, through a small handful of manuscripts, many of them medieval. We know Roman authors such as Tacitus and Pliny through similarly few copies -- in some cases just one or two, and many of them again very late. By contrast, we possess literally hundreds of early manuscripts of some or all of the New Testament, putting us in an unrivaled position to work back from the small variations which creep into any manuscript tradition and discern the likely original text. When I say early, by the way, I mean from the first six or seven centuries, which is many centuries earlier than the oldest surviving manuscripts of most classical authors. We have dozens of New Testament manuscripts from the third and fourth centuries, and a few from as early as the second century.

Pressure on the church to firm up its list of authoritative books didn't come, as is sometimes supposed today, from a desire to present a socially or politically acceptable theology; these debates were going through periods of fierce, if intermittent, persecution. Rather, the impetus came from those who offered rival 'canons.' Some of these cut out key passages from the main books, as was done by Marcion, a Roman teacher in the second century. Others added new books with different teachings, as was done by the Gnostics (remember the DaVinci Code?) as part of their claim to possess secret teachings of what Jesus and the apostles 'really' said"
(From Simply Christian, p. 178-9).