Things Unutterable: Now Available Again…
Today is my birthday and I am in a “thinking back” mood. Let’s just say I can now sing the lovely Beatles song, “When I’m Sixty-Four.” So looking back…
I published my first book back in 1986: Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise in its Graeco-Roman, Judean, and Early Christian Contexts (University Press of America). It was in the Brown University Studies in Judaism series, and was recommended through the good agency of Jacob Neusner. The book is essentially my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago, written under the esteemed and legendary Jonathan Z. Smith with the equally illustrious Robert M. Grant as a reader and co-director. I graduated from the Humanities in the Department of New Testament and Early Christian Literature–look it up, it was quite a place in those days, outside the Divinity School, but thriving with its own purposes and emphases, headed by Prof. Grant.
I was incredibly proud of that book, dedicated it to my late father, Elgie Lincoln Tabor, and I would still stand with most of the positions I take in that book, even after nearly 30 years (Ph.D. 1981 so I wrote it in 1980). The Journal of Religion, in reviewing books on Paul during the decade of the 1980s, put my book in the top ten. My new book on Paul with Simon & Schuster (publication date yet to be determined) will make some huge advances beyond what I knew and understood in 1986, but it absolutely builds on the former.
The book has been long out of print and regularly sells on Amazon for $200-700–which seems pretty ridiculous. Over the years I have had hundreds of requests for copies and I only own two or three myself. I recently authorized Genesis 2000, one of my publishers, to issue an unbound edition, autographed, with color cover (8.5 x 11) for $25.00. It is not a photocopy of the book (hey that’s illegal, right!) but an actual printout of the page poofs from the original disk–which now belongs to me. If you are interested you can order through Amazon.
