At Oxford they talk not of studying a particular subject but of “reading” political science or economics or physics. I read Classics, or “Greats” as it was called, and so was not actually exposed to an English seminary. However, every college had its Anglican chapel and a learned chaplain. Oriel, one of the smallest and oldest of the colleges, was no exception. The circumstances of my meeting our chaplain, Dr. Roy Porter, for the first time were somewhat unusual. I had just arrived to take up residence the day before. My room was on the second floor, off staircase number one, in the main quadrangle. Immediately below me was the large, though similarly bare, suite of the Captain of Boats—head of the Oriel College Rowing Club. On this particular evening there was a club party in his rooms to celebrate the beginning of a new term. The din of the revellers was worsened when, as they drained each glass of beer, they tossed the glass through an open window to crash on the concrete pavement around the quadrangle of grass below. Coming from a conservative background, and being Canadian, I was surprised at both the obvious drunkenness and the wanton waste.
Then I heard a crash of tangled metal. I looked downstairs and saw a student with his dinner jacket askew, bow tie hanging by a thread, climbing the stairs carrying a bicycle over his shoulders. I watched open-mouthed as he staggered past me up to the third floor, paused for a moment before an open window, and then threw the bicycle out and down to the quad below. “What on earth are you doing?” I asked, and he said with an inebriated grin: “My tutor told me that after the party he wanted to see the whole quad filled with bicycles!”
I decided to lodge a formal complaint and went in search of the Captain of Boats. Looking into the crowded room, my eyes focused on a small black-suited figure with a clerical collar: the college chaplain, a man renowned for his knowledge of the ancient Biblical languages and one of the most noted of the translators of the New English Bible. Porter was being held firmly in the grip of two very large oarsmen while a third wound bathroom tissue around him in wreaths from head to foot. A fourth student then mounted a chair holding a pitcher of beer and, reciting some kind of Latin mumbo-jumbo, poured the beer over the chaplain’s head in a mockery of baptism. The helpless cleric spotted me and cried out for rescue. Call it discretion or cowardice, but there were twenty “enthusiastic” young men in the room who were looking for trouble. I decided that anyone clever enough to decipher Hebrew ought to have known better than to be there in the first place, so I retreated and left him to their mercies. The next day I saw him enjoying himself at the head table with the other dons, so it seemed his little encounter had caused him no permanent damage.
With these antics and many more, I suffered a certain loss of innocence during those first few days in the city of mist and “dreaming spires.”
My footsteps reverberated through the deserted quad and the clock tower began to tremble as its inner workings prepared to sound the hour. Peter Brunt, my tutor in Greek and Roman history, had sent a terse note earlier in the day saying he was down with a cold, wouldn’t be able to meet with me for the usual full hour, but would I come along at eight p.m. for a brief chat about my studies? I adjusted my ridiculously short commoner’s gown as I reached the door of his apartment. As yet we hadn’t been introduced, although his rooms were on the front quad not far from my own. As I knocked, the eight strokes of the bell had begun their doleful litany.
The chiming ended before I could make out the distant, exceptionally nasal voice saying: “Come in, come in—the bloody door is open!” I entered timidly into what proved to be his study-cum-sitting-room. The air was rank with stale cigarette smoke. Books, papers and files were stacked on all sides. Apart from two tired, deep easy chairs in front of the standard electric fireplace, the only piece of furniture visible was a large oak table. There was so much clutter around and upon it, however, that it was very well disguised. The best thing about the room, as I subsequently discovered, was its splendid view of the college’s main quadrangle, with the entrance or clock tower on the west and the ancient hall or refectory on the east.
The door in one corner of the study was open and Professor Brunt, my don or tutor, could be seen propped up in bed, surrounded by more stacks of books. He was sneezing loudly, and apparently very moistly, into a dubious-looking handkerchief. His eyes and nose were red and his hair was tousled. When the immediate paroxysms were over, he waved me in with an impatient gesture of his free hand, holding the hanky ready with the other. Since there was no place to sit—the only chair was already carrying its own literary burden—I stood respectfully at the foot of the narrow, astonishingly short bed and tried my best not to stare.
To be honest, I was both scared and intrigued at the same time. I knew this germ-laden, wheezing gentleman was one of the greatest living authorities on the classical period of Greece and Rome. He was later to become the Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, from 1970 to 1982. Brunt, the son of a Methodist minister, was born in 1918 and was eighty-eight when he died. He had scored a rare double first in his own time as an undergraduate and was then, at about thirty-six, still a comparatively young man. I figured he had already forgotten more that I might ever know. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was destined to spend at least an hour a week on my own with Brunt for three eight-week terms every year for the next three, a total of over seventy-two hours one-on-one. It was a schooling in the history of the period before and surrounding the birth of Christianity that few people have been privileged to receive. Above all, it taught me in depth about this crucial question: What constitutes genuine historical evidence, or in other words, what do we truly mean by “historical” and “historicity”? That question was to play an important role in the later controversy over The Pagan Christ.
“You’re Harpur, are you?” he coughed. I assured him I was. “You’re my eleventh student. The others will come in pairs for tutorials, but you’ll have to come by yourself.”
At the time, this had no significance for me. What I didn’t know was that when there were two students, one would read his weekly essay aloud; the other would be assumed to have written one if he made a useful contribution to the discussion. Thus, you could get away with just making notes on your research every other week. Being alone for each session, however, meant I had no option but to write an essay for Brunt every time. He explained that these essays should be about two thousand words long, which would be roughly twenty minutes of reading aloud. With a snuffle close to a snort, he said: “And I don’t want you just to regurgitate what you’ve read in the books I assign for each topic. I’ve read them; I know what’s in them already. What we want to know is what you think about what they think—backed by plenty of evidence.”
He was, as I later learned, a very gentle person, but he sniffled and dabbed his streaming eyes and fixed me with what I thought was an angry grimace, then shot out: “You do read Greek, don’t you?” When I nodded that I did, he fished around among the books on the chair and, coming up with a worn copy of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, stabbed a stubby finger down on a page and ordered: “Start translating from there.”
I was barely under way when he asked the same question about Latin, and hauled out a copy of Tacitus’s Annals. I exchanged Thucy-dides for it with a sense of relief. I could handle Tacitus’s Latin more easily than Thucydides’ elegant yet knotty Greek any day of the week.
He seemed to be quickly