Memetic LEGO Mindstorms and Christian Origins

I have been tagged with a meme by Doug Chaplin, and so I need to do the following:

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

I’ve decided to follow his lead and not include the Bible on this desk. Some potential difficulty is created by the fact that the next nearest book will be on a bookshelf situated perpendicular to me so that pretty much every book on it is roughly equidistant from my current position. I decided that, rather than choose the one that seems most interesting, the fairest method is the one that is on the edge of the top shelf. It is a small bookshelf with books from the public library. The closest is in fact Classic LEGO Mindstorms Project and Software Tools, and page 123 does not have 8 sentences. So I decided to forego posting pictures of LEGO (which I think Doug would agree do not constitute sentences), so I go back for the book my eye originally settled on first on the same shelf: Christian Origins: A People’s History of Christianity Vol.1, edited by Richard Horsley. The three sentences I have to post are the following:

Their initial hearing of Paul’s preaching of “the word of the cross” was attended by a “demonstration of Spirit and power” (1 Cor. 1:18-25; 2:4), and manifestations of the Spirit in the form of spiritual wisdom, prophecy, speaking in tongues, and other spiritual phenomena continued to be an important aspect of how many Corinthian believers expressed their identity in Christ.

MEMBERSHIP AND IDENTITY
Who were the people that joined the new assembly in Corinth? Reacting against an earlier view that the early Christians were largely from among the poor, scholars interested in the social world of Paul formed a “new consensus”: Based on a literal understanding of 1 Cor. 1:26-30 (“not many of you were rich,…wise,…of noble birth”), they argued that therefore “some” were indeed rich and nobly born.

I hereby tag Dr. Jim West (not his grandmother, lest my post be misunderstood), Julie Bogart, Bob Patterson, hyper-textual ontology, and Qalmlea. I hope their nearest book has neither long convoluted sentences nor pictures of LEGOs. I also hope that reproduction because one has been tagged with a meme constitutes “fair use”.