Apostle: travels among the tombs of the Twelve
TOM BISSELL

I discovered on page 281 of Tom Bissell’s Apostle that I’m a bird dog. You may remember the Everly Brothers’ deployment of the term: “Johnny is a joker that’s a-tryin’ to steal my baby (he’s a bird dog)”. Bissell’s bird dog is less a baby-stealer than a sniffer-out of hidden prey, for he declares that the Trinity “has no scriptural basis beyond that which has been detected by desperate exegetical bird dogs”. The implication is that there was no bird to detect.

The throwaway bird-dog remark comes between pursuits of the Apostles in an interlude devoted to exploring the identity of Jesus Christ. “For the everyday Greek speaker of the first half of the first century CE, christos  was the word used for ‘ointment’,” he explains. That doesn’t sound quite right. In fact the related word that means “ointment” is chrisma, though there’s another word  muron  for common kinds of ointment. Another surprising statement is that the author of the Gospel according to John “never depicts Jesus praying”. Perhaps Bissell turned over two pages at once and missed out Chapter 17.