The Importance of What Your Children See You Doing

     First Friday of Easter

First, let me note that there were three entries, but no one got the P.S. quiz question 100% right. Three people got the play, The Importance of Being Earnest, but no one got the author, Oscar Wilde. I'm giving each of the three half a point. So the quest for the candy bar now has the following score: Stuart--1, Caroline--1/2, Chris--1/2, and Marianne--1/2. 5 points wins the candy bar. 

The first influence in my faith journey was my mother. Besides, along with my father, having me baptized and taking me to church, my mother had a peculiar habit. She never talked about it until I asked. Every afternoon she would sit down and read the Bible for a while. When I asked, she showed me one of those cards that has daily Bible readings that take you seriatim through the whole Bible in one year. She read the Bible cover to cover once a year. The total number of times she read the entire Bible over the course of her 95 year lifetime was 86. I still don't know anyone who has read the entire Bible more times than my mother. Like her, and in imitation of her I picked it up and started reading every day when I was 9 (or maybe it was 10 or 11). I got as far as Leviticus, but bogged down and quit. 

Beginning in 1994, and in something of an imitation of her, I began reading the New Testament in Greek, a page a day (though not every day). I had read it cover to cover in Greek in the summer of 1972 in preparation for one of my Ph.D. prelims (preliminary examinations that allow you to move on past your course work and begin your dissertation). I had five prelims. This one was oral, was at the professors house, and the professor was the scariest on my committee. He was W.D. Davies, a Welshman whose doctorate was from Cambridge, where he had also taught before coming to Duke. He was the author of many books, one of which, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (1948) was a game changer in the study of Paul. I was reasonably well prepared. I knew virtually all of the 5,594 different Greek words that appeared in the New Testament, including the vast majority of the hapax legomena words, that is, words that appear only one time in the entire NT. I was still terrified when I went before Professor Davies. I passed but not without some frightening moments. Davies threw me a few curve balls. Several times he asked me to name the grammatical construction of a particular phrase or word. After I answered, he then asked, "Mr. Wilson, that's an unusual construction in this sentence, what would you expect the construction to be in that place?" Other times he asked, "Yes, and Mr. Wilson, what would the Hebrew of that phrase be." When I missed one of these questions, Professor Davies would then go into a detailed explanation of my error, which lengthened the exam (Professor Davies never had any sense of time) considerably. Finally a little over two and half hours later I emerged utterly exhausted, but feeling like I was reasonably competent in Hellenistic Greek.

Back to 1994, I began reading a page of Greek NT first thing each day (though I missed as many days as I made). It's about 800 pages. I'm not sure how many times I have read it cover to cover now, but I think I'm on my sixth. At a later point, in 2005, I started reading the Old Testament in Hebrew seriatim (I had read several books of the OT in Hebrew before but never the whole thing). I read only 5 verses a day. I'm not nearly as good at Hebrew as I am at Greek. The OT is three times as long as the NT. I'm not nearly finished with my first time through the Hebrew OT. Reading Hebrew and Greek is now a part of my daily devotional practice.

All this is say mothers are huge influences on our lives. Perhaps you already knew that. I feel certain that I never would have ended up being a minister and a New Testament and Greek professor, had it not been for my seeing my mother read the Bible every day. 

Faithfully,

Christian