Library Book Club

Did the greatest poet of ancient Rome prophesy the birth of Christ? Professor of English Dr. Michael Elam will lead a discussion about the nearly identical language in Virgil’s fourth Eclogue (c. 42 BC) and the Nativity prophesies in the Book of Isaiah. Was Virgil a Messianic prophet, as Augustine believed? Was he familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures through Greek translation? Or as T. S. Eliot argued, do Virgil’s works simply foreshadow a new moral vision that the early Church would in time spread to all corners of the known world?

In Genesis 9 and Odyssey 6, Noah and Odysseus endure the humiliation of nakedness, from which they are rescued by the prudence of Shem and Japheth in Genesis and the feistiness of the princess Nausikaa in the Odyssey. What can the actions and narrative style of these stories tell us about the cultures of ancient Israel and Greece? Join the Library Book Club and Professor of Hebrew and Biblical theology Dr. Jordan Jones for a discussion of these episodes from two of the foundational books of Western Civilization. We will conclude our meeting with a look at Homer's image of the marriage bed of Odysseus and Penelope as a symbolic tree of life and compare it with the Biblical Tree of Life.

The existence of evil and suffering by the good is one of the eternal questions of life. In the Hebrew Bible and literature of the ancient Greeks, nowhere is this problem projected in greater starkness then the Book of Job and the Oedipus Rex. For the final Book Club discussion of this year, Professor of English Dr. Jeremy Larson will lead a discussion of these two great works. To better understand the similarities and differences in these stories, we will also look at an essay by Catholic philosopher René Girard.