I am now reading the New Testament in Ancient Greek. Which means I have to advance slowly chewing each and every word. Slow reading is like a zooming camera’s snapshot or a magnified action on a huge screen: you feel and live to the full all the details you normally do not pay attention to while rushing at a speed of 100 miles per hour through the text.
What the whole thing starts with is blood. (Nice thing, yeah? A book about love and humanism and God’s mercy.) Have you ever thought of that beyond simply referring to Herod’s massacre as to one of biblical episodes? God presents himself as an all-knowing author behind the screen who can at a certain moment help the characters or even interfere and derail the action. He knew how to save the Child’s life, but with the other kids aged two years or less he was like a playwright rubbing his hands: blood, more blood, and yes, some more blood here and here. And a little more there, yes.
OK, God, you made all this fuss about Christ’s birth, but how were those little ones guilty anyway? From the dramatic point of view there is no reply: the gun hanging on the wall did not shoot (Herod died, Maria returned from Egypt to settle in Nazareth). Only hundreds of innocently killed. But do not worry. This was only a preambule. We will teach you how to love your neighbour.
And never mind the blood spilt since the very first pages.
There is more to come in the centuries afterwards.
8 August 2015. — Dzerzhinsk (Russia)