Jerome
I’ve also been having another look at Latin and Greek recently. And, at risk of seeming horribly religious, I’ve ben reading some of the letters of St. Jerome.
This is hilarious in an exactly opposite way to the dream of the rood. It sounds uncannily like current evangelism. Or rather, it sounds exactly like the kind of stereotypical CICCU evangelising that makes people run screaming. Nothing has changed, it seems, over the past 1600 years, and perhaps the Jerome Method works.
I was going to paste in some of the gems I came across, but I can’t find the appropriate letters on the internet, and certainly not in English. One day I’ll go back to the classics library and copy down a few of the best bits.
Incidentally, I’d not realised that Jerome and Heironymus are same name. Not quite as good as Catamite and Ganymede, but getting close.
“Maybe the Jerome method works”
Well, something certainly seems to work for Christianity (God’s on their side, I guess) - all those terrible posters you see outside churches, where they quote a bit of the Bible about Jesus being the Son of God, or whatever. I don’t understand why they think these bald assertions will persuade anyone; and yet, presumably, they do.
Comment by Tim — August 21, 2005 @ 9:30 pm
Oh, hello you!
The bit of Jerome was more about psychological manipulation - trying to get the one Christian in a family to convert her relatives for their own good.
I am completely intrigued by how religions prove their legitimacy (that’s sort-of what my dissertation was about). For tantric buddhism, the method seems to involve being as counter-intuitive and controversial as possible while saying nasty things about other buddhists. Compared to that, bald assertion is positively logical.
Comment by Dan — August 21, 2005 @ 9:46 pm