A Product Listing on Amazon

Years ago, for some period of time, I was obsessed with a problem Amazon was having: they weren't accurately listing the languages in which many of the books they sold were written. Books written in Latin with English prefaces were listed as English; books written in Greek with Latin prefaces were listed as Latin; books written in Latin with facing-page English translations might be listed as Latin or English. The thought of accurately describing a book's language with more than one word, such as "Latin primary text with English facing-page translation, English introduction, footnotes and commentary" seemed to be right out of the question. Whatever computer program Amazon used to fill in the"Language" box in the "Product details" section, below "Publisher" and above the ISBN's and dimensions and weight -- the very idea that a book might be in more than one language, did not seem to compute. The details given for dimensions and weight for all sorts of items sold on Amazon, not just books, continue to be equally divorced from reality, to the point where the information given on the amazon is so unreliable as to be useless.

I actually tried to get a job at Amazon correcting these language descriptions of books. The attempt did not go well. Eventually I was able to just let it go and get on with my life.

Last year I got ahold of Jean-Pierre Mahe's edition of the Coptic fragments of the Perfect Discourse from the Nag Hammadi library and the Armenian Hermetic Definitions, published in the city of Quebec in 1982.

 

So, that's an ancient primary text in Coptic, with, on the facing page, a French translation and passages from the Latin Asclepius almost as lengthy as the Coptic text, showing the relationship between the Coptic and Latin texts; and an ancient primary text in Armenian with facing-page translation in French; with a lengthy introduction and commentary in French, not to mention a bibliography as impressively polyglot as you might imagine. 

How would I fill in that line: "Language," in the product description, if I were Emperor of all Amazon? I think maybe something like: "primary texts in Coptic and Armenian, with ancient Latin for comparison with the Coptic, and facing-page translations and introduction and commentary in French."

That doesn't describe every single thing in this book, but I think it comes close enough to give a potential reader a fairly accurate idea of what would be facing them, if they wanted to read this book.

Amazon describes the language of the book as "English."

Now, I couldn't get away with calling this description 100% inaccurate, because of a few items in English in the aforementioned impressively polyglot bibliography, and a few brief citations from those several English items. Still, it is about as far as an exhaustive modern critical edition -- two critical editions, actually -- can be from being English. The publisher's name, the name of the series in which this volume appears -- Bibliotheque copte de Nag Hammadi -- the copyright notice, all are in French.

Who, Pray Tell Me, Gentle Readers, Has Not Heard Of The Recently-Discovered Gospels And Other Early Christian Writings?

Startlingly, Hal Taussig claims that "the public knows little about" the "more than 75 otherwise unknown documents from the early Christ movements of the first and second centuries [which] have been discovered in the sands of Egypt, the markets of Cairo, or in unprocessed sections of European and Near Eastern libraries in the past 150 years," and "churches almost never read them."

What? Who are this public who've never heard of the Gospel of Thomas or the Nag Hammadi Library or the Gospel of Mary Magdalene or any other of these finds of the past century and a half? In what illiterate, non-TV-gettin backwaters do they live? These texts make headlines, they make the covers of magazines like TIME, they have been edited and translated and put into bestselling books by people like John Dominic Crossan and Elaine Pagels, plenty of adult Sunday-school classes in liberal churches read and discuss them all the time. Half of the nonsense on the "History Channel" was inspired by them. You can't browse much at all through Huffington Post Religion without stumbling across a story about one or more of these "startling" discoveries. Yet Taussig claims that "hundreds and then thousands" of people have been gobsmacked "as [he has] taught these documents over the past 20 years in seminaries, colleges, the church where [he pastors], and many groups around the country," and asked him things like: "Why don't I know about these works? Why aren't they in my Bible?"

No foolin, Hal? Thousands? Hal says: "I began to think that the larger public really needed to have a chance to read the most valuable of these new discoveries alongside the powerful works of the traditional New Testament."

Well, what a heroic soldier of enlightenment Hal Taussig is! Or maybe, just maybe, he's trying to hype his new edition of the Bible by making it seem much more new to people (The word "New" is in its title twice) than it really is. I wonder how many people will buy A New New Testament, take it home, open it up and say "Hey wait a dang minute! The odes of Solomon?! The Gospel of Truth?! None a this dang stuff is new to me! I bought this new Bible for 32 dollars cause a these 12 additional pages?!" I wonder whether Hal is losing any sleep at at all wondering the same things.

Thousands, Hal? Really? Oh well. What do I know.