People, like novels, have themes.
Our Stories
Our flight into Zanzibar settled on the runway after midnight. I looked out the window. It was dark and soft like the inside of a smudge pot and there was little to see except the flashes of the ground crew. A tug swung around. Its lamps illuminated palm fronds just beyond the pavement. Dense vegetation completed the backdrop.
Gordon lifted the oversized compass to his face. The transparent plastic flexed in his hands, making his nose appear to wiggle. His voice was less animated. His words came out deliberately.
“Turn the bezel until the arrow is in the box.” He turned the disk on his plastic demonstration model. His nose wiggled again.
Last night I finished F. A. Worsley’s 1931 publication of Endurance: An Epic of Polar Adventure (Norton, 2000). It was terrific! The author, Frank Worsley, was a New Zealand sea captain who saw action in WW1, did merchant work around Iceland, but most famously, skippered the Endurance. The Endurance was the ill-fated ship used by Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1916. It is also a fitting theme for this book.
We are busy here at the Bible Land Explorers’ headquarters chewing the magoi. So far we’ve noted how Jesus was born in a Cold War (see here) and how the magoi were savvy politicians with a reputation for king-making and king-breaking (see here). As Christmas morning approaches, however, we lean toward something more festive: wisemen wafers!
Enter the idea of the eulogia.
“When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him” (Matt 2:3).
The response of Herod and Jerusalem (and potentially Rome itself) may be best appreciated in a wider geopolitical context. This is all the more significant given the reputation of the magoi as royal puppeteers in texts outside the Bible.
