it looked like this

We may want to nail down a specific historic period in a restoration of a building, or recreate a musical performance with original instruments, or recreate a landscape that used to exist a certain way.

These can be worthy projects, giving us a better handle in understanding life or art in earlier times, but the very act of recreation begins to set up problems based on incomplete knowledge, overwhelming and contradictory facts, misunderstandings, approximations and best guesses.

While such attempts may be insightful and helpful and rewarding, they still do not give us the real experience of the past.

We should recognize such attempts as a conversation between us and the past.

Those of us who are Christians have a similar tension, and a similar conversation between the past and the present. AMKA has a couple of posts recently that reflect on this tension. Writing with Roth, Praying with Catherine" talks specifically about the conversation between ourselves and the saints of the past.

His scholarly essay This is not a Bible is included in a newly published book, New Paradigms for Bible Study: The Bible in the Third Milennium, edited by by Robert M. Fowler, Edith Blumhofer, and Fernando F. Segovia. AKMA points out that our understanding of language and communication, and of what we call the Bible, is more complicated than we realize.