“The City of Ephesus” by Sandra Glahn

Today, the city of Ephesus may be mostly ruins investigated by archaeologists and tourists. But at one time, it was the chief city of what we call Asia Minor. Rome made it the capital of the province of Asia, and it was an important center of religious worship of the goddess Diana or Artemis.  

Ephesus was also a significant setting for the Apostle Paul’s missionary journeys. In the Book of Acts, it’s known for a riot caused by silversmiths angered by Paul’s healing of a possessed slave girl, for Paul’s letter to the church there, and his farewell discussion with the Ephesian elders, the one in which he warned about the wolves devouring the lambs. Timothy ministered there.

 

Dr. Sandra Glahn, who’s written more than 20 books and aims to make research accessible, has written The City of Ephesus: A Short History, a concise, well-written account of the story of Ephesus, focusing on the period from 100 B.C. to 100 A.D. 

 

Glahn details the importance of the temple of Artemis. The goddess was believed to protect the city, women in childbirth, and even a protector of wealth, serving as something like a depository. People came, she writes, from Europe, Asia, and Egypt to pay homage. When Paul cast the demon from the slave girl, it didn’t take much for the girl’s owner, resenting the loss of income, to transfer his anxiety to the silversmiths who profited from the Artemis cult.

 

She details the social, political, and religious contexts for the city during the 200 years between 100 B.C. and 100 A.D. And then she briefly describes what happened to Ephesus after the time of Paul. 

Sandra Glahn

 

Glahn has published a number of Bible studies on the books of Jonah, Ruth, Judges, Esther, Song of Solomon, Malachi, Luke, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philippians; the letters to the seven churches in Revelation and the Sermon on the Mount; several books on women’s issues; and even novels. She had a column on Substack and her own blog. Her podcast on Youtube is called The Chick Report with Dr. Sandra Glahn. She also conducts student tours or workshops in Italy, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing.

 

The City of Ephesus isn’t an exhaustive study of the city and the times in which it flourished. But succeeds, and succeeds well, in its aim to provide a detailed overview. 

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Murders for June – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.

 

Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House: A Redemptive, Modern Novel – Daniel Sundahl at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The 120^th Anniversary of Vauxhall Bridge – A London Inheritance.

 

The Stamp Act and the American Revolution – Kyler Burd at Journal of the American Revolution.

"The Finale" by Calvin Miller

Calvin Miller’s trilogy The Singer, published in the 1970s, took the basic accounts of the books of the New Testament and turned them into epic myth. The Singer was based on the gospels. The Song was set in the world of the Book of Acts and the epistles. And The Finale is a mythologized account of the Book of Revelation, although it must have been something of a challenge to take a text that already existed in almost-mythic language and extend it.

What Miller did in The Finale was to simplify the story of Revelation to its most basic narrative. The old world of Terra is dying, and a new Terra is being born. Before that can happen, there will be a final battle between the forces of the Singer and the forces of the World-Hater. The story includes horrific battles and destruction, but the Singer overcomes evil and darkness, and New Terra is born.

Miller (1936-2012) was a pastor at Westside Church in Omaha, Nebraska for 25 years and then joined the faculty of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for seven years and later the Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He was the author of some 40 books on popular theology, writing, and other subjects, but was best known for The Singer Trilogy. 

The trilogy was extremely popular, remaining in print for some two decades and then republished in the first decade of this century. But the cultural context for its first publication was very different from contemporary times. The Jesus movement was at full tide, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were enjoying a huge burst of interest by young Baby Boomers (there was even an animated movie based on The Lord of the Rings), and the first Star Wars movies were released shortly after. 

Politics and the world economy were in broad upheaval as well. OPEC had implemented the first oil embargo in 1973, inflation and interest rates were in double digits for most of the decade, the Watergate scandal had brought a President down, and the decade ended with American hostages being held more than a year by Iranian Islamic radicals. That was the environment Miller’s mythic trilogy was born into and likely somewhat propelled by.

Calvin Miller

It’s also worth noting that the trilogy had both a direct and indirect influence on Christian literature. While most writers of Christian fantasy today will point to Tolkien or the King Arthur stories as primary inspirations, Miller’s epic stories (told in a kind of poetic form) have been an influence as well. I was surprised at how much Miller’s epic reminded me of the stories of C.S. Lakin and similar authors.

The Singer Trilogy is both a period story, very much the child of the decade in which it was born, and a more contemporary story as well. Using the mythic or epic narrative format allowed Miller to escape being forgotten. And it is still a good story, and an interesting story, even if you don’t know the New Testament.

Related:

“The Singer” by Calvin Miller.

“The Song” by Calvin Miller.

"The Song" by Calvin Miller

The first volume of Calvin Miller’s mid-1970s The Singer Trilogy was a retelling of the Gospel story in mythic or epic form. The second volume, The Song, focuses on the period covered by the New Testament books of Acts and the epistles, and especially the persecutions in Rome. 

The Song tells the story of four characters – Sarkon, whom we met in The Singer when he was called World-Hater; Madman, the character from The Singer who was liberated from the demons that possessed him; and a new character, Everyman, a young man much enamored with science and who rejects any notion of a Creator; and Anthem, an original follower of the Singer. The story begins in the Great Walled City, the place where the Singer was killed and rose again. Soon a persecution against the Singer’s followers breaks out.

Calvin Miller

Everyman and Anthem sail to Urbis, capital of Terra, “the shining temple-city of all the mountain gods.” One of the passengers is Praxis, known as the Builder, who is designing a great temple for Urbis and soon will be commissioned to sculpt a statue of its greatest god – one that bears the likeness of Sarkon.

The Song reads almost like a fantasy story, and one wonders how much Miller may have influenced whole generations of Christian fantasy writers. And while it may be tempting to identify the fictional characters with New Testament counterparts, the author did not write an exact transposing of the events and people of the New Testament.

Miller (1936-2012) was a pastor at Westside Church in Omaha, Nebraska for 25 years and then joined the faculty of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for seven years and later the Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He was the author of some 40 books on popular theology, writing, and other subjects, but was best known for The Singer Trilogy.

The Song is an entertaining and thought-provoking volume in its own right, apart from its predecessor or its successor. Miller had an essential grasp of human nature, and his characters seem almost stunningly contemporary.

Next week: “The Finale” by Calvin Miller.

Related:

“The Singer” by Calvin Miller.

“The Singer” by Calvin Miller

Context is important.

In the mid-1970s, national politics had taken a decidedly dark turn with Watergate. The economy was something of a basket case, with an inflation rate of just over 11 percent in 1974 and more than nine percent in 1975, partially driven by the spike in world oil prices following the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74. 

The Jesus Movement was surging, beginning to approach its high-water mark. Nostalgia was big. Fantasy was big; the Baby Boom had begun to discover J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. George Lucas had begun to write and film what would become Star Wars in 1977. Into all of this cultural and religious ferment came a book, The Singer, a mythical and almost poetic retelling of the life and death of Jesus, written by a relatively unknown pastor in Omaha. 

Along with the companion The Song and The Finale, Calvin Miller’s trilogy could be found in both general and Christian bookstores into the 1990s. A 25^thanniversary edition was published in 2001, and there have been additional editions since then. 

Calvin Miller

The main character in The Singer is the Singer, sometimes called the Troubadour. He’s called to sing the song that hasn’t been heard before, and experiences some of the well-known events of the New Testament, except told in mythic form. Events include the healing of the demoniac, the healing of a cripple, and the meeting with Mary Magdalene. The allusions and the scenes would have been broadly familiar in the 1970s, but perhaps less so today. 

At the center of the story is the conflict between the Singer and the character known as “World-Hater,” who offers various temptations and appears disguised as the high priest who condemns the Singer to death. The singer is hung on a wall, and after his death and collapse of the wall and the machine supporting it, his body isn’t found.

Miller was a pastor at Westside Church in Omaha, Nebraska for 25 years and then joined the faculty of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for seven years and later the Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He was the author of some 40 books on popular theology, writing, and other subjects, but was best known for The Singer Trilogy. 

The Singer is a beautiful story, told beautifully and written well. It’s more like reading a song than it is reading poetry, but that doesn’t detract from the story.

Next week: The Song, the second volume of The Singer Trilogy by Calvin Miller.

Saturday Good Reads: “How the Bible Came to Be”

You’re a major Christian publisher. You publish a major work about the Bible, like The Illustrated Bible Handbook. The immediate potential audience is going to be rather small – academics, theologians, and pastors. The material within the book, though, has a much wider potential audience.

But how are you going to convince people, people like me, to buy an 1152-page book filled with academic essays, even if it’s illustrated?

Maybe you don’t. Maybe you do what Baker Books did, and select eight rather representative essays, and assemble them as an “e-book short.”

And that’s how How the Bible Came to Be came to be. It’s an e-book short version of The Baker Illustrated Bible Handbook.

Both the much longer handbook and the e-book short are edited by J. Daniel Hays and J. Scott Duvall. Duvall has an essay included in the e-book, “Bible Translations and the English Bible,” which provides a great overview of where the English versions of the Bible came from.

Other essays include how the Old Testament canon developed, the Septuagint, how the Bible has been translated into the languages of the world, the New Testament canon, what we mean by “inspiration” as in the “inspired word of God,” and how the New Testament text was written, copied, and transmitted.

It is encouraging to know that the Bible has more documentary texts that any other book or literary work of antiquity. It’s also both interesting and helpful to know why one text is given more weight than another, how many of the texts were preserved, and what the Dead Sea Scrolls (discovered in 1947) can tell is us about the Bible.

It’s not likely that I would have picked up and started reading an 1152-page book. But this e-book short called How the Bible Came to Be makes that 1152-page volume accessible, and tells a fascinating story on its own.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“A Week in the Life of Corinth”

It’s an unusual idea for a Christian academic book – use the form of the novella to tell a story. That’s what Ben Witherington, American New Testament Scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary, did with A Week in the Life of Cornith. He wrote a novella, and made life in Corinth at the time of St. Paul come alive.

Corinth is one of the “cities of St. Paul,” and one where the apostle lived for an extended period. In Witherington’s story, St. Paul is a character, but not the major character. That title belongs to Nicanor, a freedman, who is establishing his various business activities, making alliances, developing contacts and networks. He’s a former tutor in the family of Erastos, a wealthy landowner who has come to follow the new religion called Christianity. (Erastus – with a u – and Nicanor are two names belonging to two of the original seven deacons appointed by the early church in Jerusalem; they served with the more well known Stephen.)

Wrapped all around the story are sidebars about aspects of life in Corinth and the Roman Empire. They include factual information of gladiators and gladiatorial schools, slavery, Corinth’s destruction and rebirth as a Roman colony, Paul’s physical appearance, how patronage functioned in Roman society, the role of money and bartering, the education of children, the Roman baths, food establishments, and many other subjects. Also included are photographs, city maps and diagrams of Roman homes, villas and other structures.

All of this factual information supplements how Witherington integrates historical understanding into a fictional narrative. And it works, and works well.

While not the main character, St. Paul is a character, living with a couple from Rome (the Prisca or Priscilla and Aquila of the Bible) and working as a tentmaker to support himself. He is facing a trial before the proconsul Gallio (a real person and a brother of Seneca the Younger, the Roman philosopher and statesman). And he will also play a critical role in the lives of both Erastos and Nicanor.

What A Week in the Life of Corinth does is to make Roman history and early Christian history approachable and understandable. It also gives history the sense of immediacy, that the reader is right there with the characters, both fictional and real, whether it’s the smell of the streets in the Corinth slums or the gluttony of a rich men’s banquet.

It’s life as St. Paul and the early Christians experienced it.