book reading meme

OK, so there's this concept called a "meme," which means it's sort of like a game that people do on their blogs, and they tag people and those people can choose to play the game, too. So this particular meme is about books. I don't think I'd do most other memes but I'm just nerdy enough for this one (much like my friend Michael, who tagged me!).

The rules of the meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
2. Find page 123
3. Find the first 5 sentences
4. Post the next 3 sentences
5. Tag 5 people

My closest book happened to be "Holy Writings, Sacred Text: The Canon in Early Christianity," by John Barton. I realized half an hour ago that I was supposed to post two questions to our class discussion board on this book before midnight tonight (well, yesterday at this point), and while I was still up I figured I'd check a few blogs...so here I am not sleeping and playing this meme. =) So the three sentences after the first 5 sentences on p. 123 are:

"Now it may be that the Christians who devised the system of nomina sacra were engaged in the task of 'reinvent[ing] the sacred institutions of Judaism'--providing a Christian equivalent for the Name in Judaism. It would be characteristic that the equivalent is a kind of inversion, so that sanctity is marked by contracting a word, where for Jews it is registered by the care with which the whole word is copied. Whatever the explanation, the existence of the nomina sacra indicates that for Christians as for Jews there were features of the text as a physical object that were used to express its sacredness, and which were not connected with its semantic content in the sense of its 'message.'"

You got that? I don't even really know what it means yet, because we haven't quite gotten to that section yet this term. Maybe I'll let you know what it means when I find out!

So I tag:
Melissa
Robin
Martin
Leah
Anita