Outside View

‘Which reading do you want for this particular Sunday?’ asked our church administrator. ‘There’s a choice so I need to know so I can prepare the large-print copies’. I opted for the lection from the Book of Wisdom. ‘Do you know why there’s a choice?’ I asked, and explained that, because Wisdom is in the Apocrypha and some evangelical churches don’t recognise the Apocrypha as part of the Bible because those books were in the Greek Septuagint but not in the older Hebrew manuscripts, so they have to have an alternative. ‘I see’, said our secretary. Then, after a moment’s reflection, she stated ‘It’s all just bloody madness, isn’t it?’ Well, there are complex questions to be asked about the way in which the Scriptures were written and the process of discerning their selection – but, to put it very basically indeed, yes, it’s all bloody madness. Every church should have a non-churchgoing member of staff, I think.