In his splendid book on the Fourth Gospel , John Ashton has some truly wonderful turns of phrases. It is one of the most erudite and humane books in biblical studies I have ever read. One of the hidden gems can be found in his discussion of John 1.51 ("Amen, amen I say to you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man"): "One of the difficulties of interpreting the saying satisfactorily is that the imagination, for once, is of no avail. Confronted with the bizarre spectacle of the angels clambering up and down on the strange new figure of the Son of Man, it seizes and stalls. This is a common experience of twentieth-century Westerners: as they look at myth, they feel compelled, somehow, to demythologize. But why should a demythologized myth be any more use than dehydrated water? The medium is the message--it does not contain it or hold it imprisoned like a genie in a bottle, waiting to be released. Somehow, then