A Last after Trinity 2008

Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my word shall never pass away.

How do you think of the novel, Mrs Fitzgerald?
Long silence. I suppose I think of the novel... as something oblong.

Vincent Taylor, The Text of the New Testament, second edition, 1963, 18 shillings net, second-hand copy, according to the flyleaf once the property of Illegible McGoughlin:
the original autographs of the New Testament which it has pleased God not to protect from the accidents and fortunes of scribal transmission.

The solidity of the book: the fluidity of the text. Books are solid, oblong, portable, can prop up tables, stop bullets (allegedly), in political or personal extremity can light fires. They can get lost. They can be rediscovered during building work: 2 Kings 22. The people return from exile to a book. One of the reasons why books are oblong in the first place, and not cylindrical, is the way Christians spread round the Mediterranean in the first century.

At the same time, the fluidity of the text: manuscripts, battles over hand-copied bibles (to every cow its calf, to every copy its book), misreadings, well-meaning emendments, untranslatable verses, and ordinary misprints (‘printers have persecuted me without a cause’, Ps 119, 1702). Whereas ‘Now Barabbas was a publisher’ is not a misprint but an exasperated remark by a Scottish poet.

Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my word shall never pass away.

Non-endings. Mark: women running. Matthew: the Great Commission. Luke: waiting for the Spirit. John: the world could not hold the books that would be written.

‘... in the interests of truth.’
The word made its mark. Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective. And yet there was no guarantee of this. Truth ensures trust, but not victory, or even happiness. But the BBC had clung tenaciously to its first notion, droning quietly on, at intervals from dawn to midnight, telling, as far as possible, exactly what happened. An idea so unfamiliar was bound to upset many of the other authorities, but they had got used to it little by little, and the listeners had always expected it.