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Five Stones and a Sling: Memoirs of a Biblical Scholar PDF

155 Pages·2009·1.82 MB·English
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FIVE STONES AND A SLING MEMOIRS OF A BIBLICAL SCHOLAR MICHAEL GOULDER F S S ive toneS and a ling To Clare, my companion through the life of which this is the narrative, my support in good times and bad, who took down the text at my dictation, and materially improved it with her comments. F S S ive toneS and a ling MeMoirS oF a BiBlical Scholar Michael Goulder SheFField Phoenix PreSS 2009 Copyright © 2009 Sheffield Phoenix Press Published by Sheffield Phoenix Press Department of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield Sheffield S3 7QB www.sheffieldphoenix.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the publishers’ permission in writing. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Typeset by ISB Typesetting Printed on acid-free paper by Lightning Source UK Ltd, Milton Keynes ISBN 978-1-906055-84-4 Contents Chapter 1 eduCation 1 Chapter 2 Jardine Matheson’s 7 Chapter 3 st John’s Cathedral 10 Chapter 4 oxford 16 Chapter 5 salford 20 Chapter 6 st luke and Genesis 26 Chapter 7 st Christopher’s, WithinGton 30 Chapter 8 the lord’s prayer 36 Chapter 9 honG konG 43 Chapter 10 all saints, kinGs heath 53 Chapter 11 the university of BirMinGhaM 56 Chapter 12 the speaker’s leCturership 60 vi Five Stones and a Sling Chapter 13 the synoptiC proBleM 69 Chapter 14 The MyTh of God IncarnaTe 77 Chapter 15 the BlaCk and White Christian partnership 82 Chapter 16 the path to reCoGnition 90 Chapter 17 the old testaMent 104 Chapter 18 the psalMs 109 Chapter 19 visitinG leCtureships 118 Chapter 20 the BirMinGhaM ConferenCe 127 Chapter 21 the end of the road 129 Chapter 22 ConClusion 132 Bibliography 140 Index of Names 143 Chapter 1 eduCation My father, Douglas Goulder (to rhyme with shoulder or boulder), was a broker on Lloyd’s; that is, he arranged insurance for ships and their cargoes both British and European at competitive rates with Lloyd’s underwriters in the City of London. A large man—he was 6 ft 4 and six­ teen stone—he was friendly and active, a popular and respected figure in all aspects of his life; when he was killed in the War my mother received something like 230 letters of condolence, from people in many walks of life and half a dozen countries in Europe, all testifying to his kindness and friendship. He had married my mother Daphne, a kind and intelligent woman, in 1925, and I was born in May 1927 in South Kensington, a suitably middle­class area of London. My parents were not churchgoers, so apart from my baptism I had little introduction to religion in early days; I was escorted, unwillingly and irregularly, to Sunday afternoon service in St Jude’s, Courtfield Gardens, by the Stapletons, a pious family with a pretty daughter, Mary, who lived across the square from us. But it was at Wagner’s, a pre­prep school, the best, it was believed, in London, that I joined the Church of England from the heart. There Mr Lefroy, scarlet with emotion, told us the terrible tale of the Marian burnings, and of Latimer’s brave words, ‘Be of good cheer, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle as I trust shall never be put out’. No, I thought, and while I live, that candle shall not go out. Wagner’s told my father that I was clever, and this suggested to him a great series of hurdles which I should leap in life—public school, Cambridge, and ‘the diplomatic’. With this progress in view, he made plain to me his high expectations. In the many letters he later wrote to me, he never ceased exhorting me to shine in all departments of life. His advice was the same that Peleus gave to his son Achilles, ‘Always to come first and to excel others’ (aien aristeuein kai hypeirochon emmenai allon). I should come top in both languages and maths, and be in the teams for cricket and football, and learn to ride, and to box. Where my gifts were lacking he felt he could supplement them by arranging coaching for me. Although 2 Five Stones and a Sling these expectations sometimes felt oppressive, I have no doubt that his constant support and encouragement set me on the right path in life and inspired me to hard work and to success. At the age of eight I left Wagner’s and was sent to Highfield, a boarding school eighty miles away in Hampshire. Canon Mills, the Headmaster­ owner, known to the boys as ‘Bug’, had built the school up since the beginning of the century, and established it as a respected ‘feeder’ to the public schools; he had retained the services of an excellent staff of assistant masters. Perhaps he was a little too fond of the slipper and the hairbrush, but he was by no means the sadistic tyrant that we liked to paint him. In his own view he was a kind old man, never happier than when reading Nicholas Nickleby or All Quiet on the Western Front to a roomful of boys in his study; and I remember such readings with pleasure. He always did his best for me, and quickly sensed that I might gain an Eton scholarship, an idea totally acceptable to my father. I was, however, not happy at the school, and some blame for this must rest with Bug himself. Wagner’s had told him that I was clever, and had mastered the elements of Latin and French, so I was entered into the fifth form from the top of the school, in which the boys were mostly aged eleven. Week by week each form was stood up in line and its marks read out to the school; and week by week I went up to the top of the class. Bug’s solution to this was to give me a double remove in my second term; so I was in the third form from the top of the school, in a class of mostly rather slow boys aged thirteen. It was not until my final year that my coevals caught up with me in the top form. This meant that I had to contend with loneliness, because there were never boys in my class with whom I could become friends; and also with a certain resentment, for naturally my classmates did not take kindly to being outshone by a boy three years younger than them. Bug had built a fine chapel in the middle of the school, and he was serious about our religion, preparing us for Confirmation. But his religion was on the dry side: he gave each of us a copy of The Holy Communion by W. Walsham How. The service was printed on the left­hand page, and on the right some edify ing comments—’You are coming to God. God is coming to you. This is not a thought lightly to be dismissed.’ As a biddable lad, I did not dismiss it lightly, but I found the weekly practice of meeting these words somewhat daunting. I did not greatly value Bug at the time; but I remember him now for two things in the Chapel. One was his practice of reading Ecclesiastes 12 on the last morning of each term, ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth…’ The other was the moving tune which he composed to the hymn ‘Souls of men, why will ye scatter?’ 1 Education 3 Bug prepared me well for the Eton Scholarship, and I sat the exam in May 1940, while the Army was being evacuated from Dunkirk. When the results came out I had won the Second Scholarship, and in the September began five delightful years at a school which might well justify its claim to be the best in the country. There were many good teachers, foremost among whom for me was Richard Martineau, whose kindliness and intense love of the Greek and Latin classics made his teaching a blessing to all his pupils. But above all I made friends for the first time, some of them friends for life; I was a mild social success, and even rose to the high point of being elected to ‘Pop’, the Eton Society, to whom much of the school discipline was deputed. The only shadow on my Eton years was my succumbing to polio in August 1941; this involved three months away from school, in the Wingfield Hospital at Oxford; and a difficult January term, when I came back to school half­time, and was not kindly treated by some of my fellow­Scholars. Eton education was based on two foundations, which stood in some tension. One of these was Christianity. The School had been founded, exactly five hundred years before I was admitted, as the College of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Each morning at 9.25 the school assembled in College Chapel; there, between the soaring Perpendicular pillars raised in the Wars of the Roses, to repeat, in creed, hymn and psalm the articles of Christian belief. Every evening at 9.30 the scholars would assemble in Lower School for evening prayers, on Sundays said and sung in Latin. Between these two times the main staple was the Greek and Latin classics. The authors who had the greatest impact on us were Plato and Homer. Plato thought that one should be wary of accepted wisdom, and sceptical of anything proclaimed with confidence and authority. Richard Martineau was an enthusiastic disciple of Plato and of his teacher Socrates; we were constantly urged to think for ourselves and to challenge all dogmas, which in fact included Christian dogmas. Above all, the search for truth had primacy. Socrates represented himself as like a midwife, delivering the truth which was latent in even simple people; one had only to ask questions, and to follow wherever the answers led. Homer thought that life was a tragedy. On the whole the gods were against us, and were too strong for us. We could not win in the battle of life, but we could live nobly. Although the Gospel also urges us to live nobly, it has a happy ending in the Resurrection, which is lacking in the Iliad. Eton prepared me well for the Scholarship examination to Cambridge, and I won a Major Scholarship to Trinity, the most prestigious of the Cambridge colleges. But I owed the award in part to my native wit. I had to translate an English poem into Greek verses in the metre used by

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Michael Goulder is a scholar who has always taken an original approach to the Bible and biblical criticism. He has developed five major theories, which challenged received opinion among the learned; and the book tells the story of how these 'stones' fared when confronting the biblical establishment.
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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.