Peculiar Treasures (1979)
A Biblical Who's Who
Book Description
In Peculiar Treasures: a biblical who’s who, Frederick Buechner profiles over one hundred Biblical figures – the holiest, the most profane, and everyone in between.
From Jesus to Judas, David to Delilah, and Peter to Pilate, Buechner casts a wry and penetrating eye over the lives of these well-known individuals, drawing out the humanity, sanctity, fragility, complexity, and divinity that has remained hidden to generations of lay readers.
These unique insights, he writes in his memoir, Now and Then (1983), were inspired by the difficulties of his task as school minister at the Phillips Exeter Academy, where, surrounded by disinterest, the young author embarked upon ‘restoring’ to the great Biblical figures ‘some of their original life and depth and power’, and ‘tried to scrape off some of the veneer with which centuries of reverence had encrusted them until I reached something at least approaching, I hoped, what had once been their flesh-and-blood humanity.’
What struck me more than anything else as I reacquainted myself with this remarkable rag-bag of people was both their extraordinary aliveness and their power to make me feel somehow more alive myself for having known them. Even across all the centuries, they still have the power to bring tears to the eyes and send shivers up the spine. And more besides. Saints and scoundrels, nabobs and nobodies, they galvanize all the pages they appear on, and if this book serves to send people back to those pages themselves, so much the better.
Reviews
"A fresh perception of the biblical stories with razor-edged humor in such a manner as to bring them alive to modern readers."
— Theology Today
"The entries from Peculiar Treasures that got the most play...were no doubt those treating Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac. Musicians like Michael Card and Daniel Amos wrote songs based on the humor and contemporary themes Buechner finds."
— W. Dale Brown, The Book of Buechner
