I’ve discussed here on this blogsite my suggestion that the Lord’s Prayer is structured as a chiasm, including an argument that the center of the Prayer (promising that we will forgive others) is especially important, as is characteristic of chiasms. So I wanted to note that I recently discovered that it is commonly noted that the Lord’s Prayer itself is at the center of the Sermon on the Mount. If you count up the verses, it’s not literally in the center, but it’s pretty close. And it certainly is plausible that Jesus would have wanted his followers to give special attention to His instructions on how to pray.
I also wanted to note a book review in the Wall Street Journal‘s most recent weekend edition. The review is by Barton Swaim, whose writing I like, of the book The Bible: A Global History by Bruce Gordon. The book looks interesting, but I haven’t read it so I won’t elaborate; instead I just wanted to flag three items in the review. First and least important, apparently “Prot” is slang for “Protestant”; you learn something knew every day (Swaim refers to himself tongue-in-cheek as “a hardened Prot myself”). Second, Swaim notes that “the sense in [the reviewed book’s] narrative that [the Bible] is alive, as if somehow it has agency and finds ways to make itself known and felt, is inescapable.” I sort of chuckled when I read that: Gee, ya think — almost like it had some special power behind it like, oh, a Holy Spirit or something. And, third, I liked the review’s conclusion:
The consequent thirst for biblical knowledge [after thousands of Koreans in Pyongyang were converted by the preaching of a Protestant minister in 1907] led to a new translation, the Korean Bible of 1911. More than 600,000 copies were produced, Mr. Gordon reports. I have to believe some of those copies, more than a century later, still float around, illicitly, in the present-day police state called North Korea and that the believers in that beleaguered country have read the promise of Psalm 37:
The wicked plots against the righteous and gnashes his teeth at him,
But the Lord laughs at the wicked, for he sees that his day is coming.