thoughts on the limits of historical description

I begin with an obvious point: Humans exhibit significant limitations regarding the ability to describe and/or reconstruct the past. I have two such limitations primarily in mind, though perhaps there are others. First, processes of human perception already filter through the sensory data assaulting our senses and limit what we notice about the world around us. As we move through the ever-moving stream of the present, we don't even notice some things (how windy it is on an average day, how many people walked past my office door in any given hour, etc.). We remember even less (I almost certainly noticed things that happened on 11 September, 2000, but I can't recall any of them).

Second, our language is limited in its capacity to describe and communicate the things we do notice and remember about the real world, and what utility our language does have already directs interpretation of the events we're attempting to describe. For example, if I tell you about "what happened" to me at the bank, you expect a certain type of story (perhaps I slipped on the wet floor, or I found a $10 bill on the counter). If, however, I tell you about "the incident" in which I was involved at the bank, you expect another type of story (such as I couldn't get in because the police had barricaded an armed robber inside).

Such easily documented considerations have typically urged historians to exercise caution in what we think we know about the past. And rightfully so. But we have run the risk of being immobilized in our attempts to know anything meaningful and authentic about the past with any degree confidence. So I enjoyed Gerd Theissen's comments in this regard, from his 1996 essay, "Historical Scepticism and the Criteria of Jesus Research: or, My Attempt to Leap Across Lessing’s Yawning Gulf” (SJT 49: 147–76):

So human inability to give a genuine account of truth implies the equal inability totally to refashion everything according to certain interests and intentions. As we are axiomatically convinced of human imperfection before we have studied a single source, so—provided our source material is sufficiently complex—we are protected a priori from the suspicion that everything described in these sources is fictitious. (Theissen 1996:155)

Theissen's comments echo things written by folks such as Michael Schudson, Barry Schwartz, and Gary Alan Fine, all of whose works are finding their voice among biblical scholars. This is a helpful development in biblical historical criticism.

sayings or narratives?

I'm currently reading William Arnal's essay, "Major Episodes in the Biography of Jesus: An Assessment of the Historicity of the Narrative Tradition" (Toronto Journal of Theology 13/2 [1997]: 201–26). Arnal is a member of the [in]famed Jesus Seminar, and anyone familiar with their work will find Arnal's work squarely within that tradition. (I don't intend this polemically, even though I disagree vociferously with the Seminar; and, to be fair, Arnal takes a number of Seminar Fellows to task at a number of points, including John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and even Robert Funk.)

Arnal questions the historicity of three key events in the life of the historical Jesus: his baptism by John, his tantrum in the Temple, and his Passion ("suffering"). These events are "key" not simply because they are normally understood as watershed moments in the life of the historical Jesus; they are "key" because they are almost (almost!) universally accepted as historical. But Arnal's argument isn't just that these three events were fabricated by Jesus' followers after his death (though he does argue this). Arnal goes further to offer "a general point about the narrative tradition in the Synoptics":

I believe that a reasonable case can be made that the stories developed out of motifs in the sayings tradition. Sanders very much to the contrary, the narrative tradition can be understood as a result of a narrativization of themes already present in the sayings tradition, as interest in Jesus as a teacher modulated into a desire to make Jesus himself a champion and paradigm of the community ethos generated by those sayings. (Arnal 1997:215; emphasis in the original)

Anyone familiar with the history of the historical study of Jesus knows that the distinction between the sayings and narrative traditions has played a storied role in the historical Jesus scholarship. The so-called "third quest" has largely privileged the narrative tradition (see Arnal's reference to E. P. Sanders, above), though I get the impression that some third-questers try to remove the distinction rather than invert it.

Here, however, is my problem with Arnal's argument (and with any Jesus historian who privileges the sayings tradition and actively derides the narrative tradition). Arnal offers his "reasonable case" that the narratives he examines arose from motifs in the sayings tradition, but nowhere does he justify the bifurcation between sayings and narratives in the first place. What historical basis does he have for presuming that Jesus' earliest followers preserved/passed on his teachings but were uninterested in narratives about him? Additionally, what historical basis does he have for assuming that, once Jesus' followers did develop an interest in stories about Jesus, they didn't have any and so had to turn to what they knew from the sayings tradition in order to fabricate some?

I know of two usual answers. First, Jesus' sayings are demonstrably more similar across the three synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) than are the accounts of Jesus' actions. Some historians (not necessarily Arnal and/or the Jesus Seminar) have used this empirical observation to justify the bifurcation between sayings and narratives. Second, and more importantly, a number of scholars, mostly associated with the Jesus Seminar (and here I would include Arnal) privilege the sayings source, known as "Q" (= material that appears in Matthew and Luke that does not appear in Mark), in their reconstructions of Christian origins. Since Q largely comprises sayings and not narratives, the assumption is that Jesus' earliest followers (or at least a subset of Jesus' earliest followers) cherised his teachings and had little or no use for stories about him.

Even leaving aside the hypothetical nature of the so-called Q-document, this second point rests on some dubious assumptions. First, it assumes that the Q-document, assuming it did actually exist, corresponds to the theology of a specific, identifiable group of Jesus' earliest followers. Second, it neglects that Q as currently reconstructed does indeed contain a number of narrative features. Third, again assuming that a Q-document actually existed, it assumes that reconstructions of that document from the material in Matthew and Luke give a reasonably accurate portrait of the Q-document. Joe Weaks's PhD dissertation, "Mark without Mark: Problematizing the Reliability of a Reconstructed Text of Q," should convince us to put such confidence behind us.

In sum, the choice between sayings and narrative traditions in historical Jesus research is a lark. Neither is epiphenomenal of the other; both were of utmost importance to Jesus' earliest followers. Jesus was remembered as an authoritative teacher (so Mark, passim) whose halakha put Torah into proper perspective (see, e.g., Mark 7.1–23; Matt. 5.17–20; Rom. 3.21–31, among many others). But he was also and simultaneously remembered as a powerful prophet/healer/exorcist, whose words calmed the seas, cast out demons, and silenced his enemies (e.g., Mark 1, 4, and 5). Any reconstruction that privileges the sayings over the narratives or the narratives over the sayings has already started off on the wrong foot.

on the hermeneutics of authenticity

In a 2009 article in The Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, I argued that one of the [many] problems facing the criteriological approach to identifying authentic sayings of the historical Jesus in the Gospels involves the hermeneutical decisions that precede such identifications. In other (hopefully simpler) words, when NT scholars judge a particular logion an authentic saying of Jesus (or, more typically, when they reject a saying as inauthentic), they do so on the basis of a particular interpretation of the saying in question. The argument looks something like this:

• A particular verse claims that Jesus said x.
• X means interpretation-of-x.
• Jesus could not have ever said and/or meant interpretation-of-x.
• Therefore, x is inauthentic.

The argument to the contrary proceeds along similar lines:

• A particular verse claims that Jesus said y.
• Y means interpretation-of-y.
• No one other than Jesus could have ever said and/or meant interpretation-of-y.
• Therefore, y is authentic.

The following two quotes from my article are especially appropriate here:

Some criteria, however, have an exegetical function that has gone unremarked in a number of studies. That is, a given logion’s meaning shifts under the weight of our assessment that it differs from extant Jewish and Christian traditions. As an example, James Crossley has challenged a common interpretation of Mt. 8.22‖Lk. 9.60 (‘Leave the dead to bury their own dead’) in which Jesus ‘was prepared to override biblical law and common piety concerning the burial of dead parents’. This passage’s ‘dissimilarity’ from previous and subsequent teachings, on discipleship or otherwise, has earned a favourable assessment among a broad cross-section of critics. Crossley, however, doubts that this passage portrays Jesus as being ‘prepared to say that following him superseded the Torah’ and ‘therefore prepared to challenge the adequacy of the “Mosaic dispensation”’. Whether or not we find Crossley’s reinterpretation of Mt. 8.22‖Lk. 9.60 persuasive, we should note that his criticism pertains to the interpretation of this logion as dissimilar from its religio-cultural milieu and not its authenticity. In this case, the criterion of dissimilarity seems to have motivated an interpretation of this logion that the text itself does not require. (164–65)

And a little later on:

As always, we deal here with probabilities rather than certainties, and therefore a more provisional use of the criteria is warranted rather than the flat declaration ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’. When we pose the question of ‘dissimilarity’, for example, we ought to ask what it means for the interpretation of, say, Lk. 4.25-27 if we posit its origin in Luke’s redaction/creation of Jesus tradition to frame the programme of Luke–Acts, on the one hand, or in the proclamation of Jesus, on the other. The assessment of ‘inauthentic’ too often presupposes a particular interpretation of the tradition being assessed. The question of ‘dissimilarity’ from later Christian theology requires us to note that the traditions to which Jesus refers in Lk. 4.25-27 are involved in political polemic against Israel, but this polemic, as Luke presents it, originates from and remains within Israel. On what basis can we presume, a priori, that Jesus as a Jew could not have levelled theological, social, or political criticism against his own ethnos? That Luke’s programme was overtly concerned with the extension of God’s blessing to the gentiles is, therefore, less relevant to the question of Lk. 4.25-27’s authenticity than to this text’s significance in its current context. (166)

As so often within NT scholarship, this point is not new. D. G. A. Calvert, in an article published in 1972, makes exactly the same observation with respect to the criterion that states, "A saying is authentic if it contains elements that could not be from the Church":

The weakness that [Dennis] Nineham reveals in this pillar argument is that whether we regard a saying as impossible of invention by the Church depends entirely on the interpretation we give to the saying. ("An Examination of the Criteria for Distinguishing the Authentic Words of Jesus," NTS 18 [1972], 216)

Calvert's article was published five years before I was born, and yet historians of Jesus as diverse as E. P. Sanders and the Jesus Seminar continue to ignore the hermeneutical assumptions underlying their employment of the criteria to authenticate sayings purportedly spoken by Jesus. We should be able to do better than this.

a classic of NT scholarship

I just finished reading a classic piece of New Testament scholarship, Morna Hooker's essay, "On Using the Wrong Tool" (Theology 75 [1972]: 570–81). I'm currently working on two essays, one espousing an end of form-critical influence over contemporary NT media and memory studies and one on the "demise of [the criteria of] authenticity." Hooker's essay contributes to both pieces nicely and has a number of acerbic turns of phrase (I intend this as a compliment). For example:

First, and most obviously, [form criticism] is a literary tool. It tells us about the form of the material; it examines the shape of a piece of tradition and classifies it. This be interesting to those who like doing that sort of thing, but I do not think it is particularly illuminating to be told that a miracle story is a miracle story . . . At this stage, form-criticism is being used simply as a literary tool, to sort the material into piles according to its shape—and my reaction is a somewhat bored but polite "How interesting". (571)

That's beautiful. Hooker then goes on to discuss (and concede) form criticism's utility for probing the function of this or that unit of Jesus tradition in the early communities of his followers. As I read this section, I kept objecting that Dibelius and Bultmann weren't really after the tradition's form or even it's function; they sought the tradition's origin. This, in my estimation, is the egregious over-reach of form-critical analysis.

So I was delighted to read,

Form-criticism, then, tells us something about the shape of the material, and it attempts on the basis of that shape to tell us something about the way in which the material was being used—about its function within the community. It is at this stage, it seems to me, that the form-critic gets carried away. For he next tries to deduce, from the material which he has before him, what the earlier forms might have been; it is at this stage that he begins to use form-criticism as a historical tool. . . . The trap into which the form-critic so often falls is that he equates the Sitz im Leben with the origin of the material; the Sitz im Leben is not simply the "setting" of the material but, according to Fuller, its "creative milieu". (572, 573; all italics in the original; citing R. H. Fuller, The New Testament in Current Study [1963], 40)

I simply cannot understand how anyone as creative or insightful as Dibelius or Bultmann or any number of their impressive and inquisitive protégés ever actually thought that the dissolution of the written Gospels into individual pericopae and the form-critical analysis of the remaining textual shards ever did put them in touch with the first moment of this or that story from and/or about Jesus. To return to Hooker, she accepts Fuller's point (re: Sitze im Leben as "creative milieu[x]"), "so long as by 'creative' is meant 'that which licked the material into its present shape" (573). Isn't that a lovely image?! But no, we're not talking about "licking into shape" this or that saying of Jesus; too often we think we're looking into the birth of the Jesus tradition. For this task, form criticism is patently "the wrong tool."

Most of the remainder of the essay concerns the criteria of dissimilarity and coherence. Her insights on the assumptions undergirding the criteria and how critics have employed them to verify or disqualify a saying as actually something Jesus may have said are stunning. Simply put, she sees clearly the full range (or at least a broader range than is normally seen) of issues involved with adjudicating authentic tradition on the basis of reputed dissimilarity from Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity, etc.

Unfortunately, Hooker was not able to envision an alternative historical-critical research program, and so she asks, "And what tools should he use in this task? He must, alas, use the tools we have been discussing, for there are no others, and there are unlikely to be any better ones discovered" (580–81). I'm reminded of Dale Allison's book, Jesus of Nazareth (Fortress Press, 1998), in which he came to the very same conclusion:

This state of affairs does not, however, mean that we should lay them aside. For in truth we have nothing better in the scholarly toolshed; at least I have not turned up anything better. Apparently we must reconcile ourselves tot he unhappy fact that our methods are defective and may often mislead us. Probably, as will be explained later, our best recourse is to figure out how to improve and use our existing indices, unwieldy as they are, under the guidance of an interpretive model established independently of those indices. (1998:6–7)

Of course, over ten years later Allison threw down the criteria and pursued a different historiography of Jesus (see my posts here and here). I will be interested to see how Hooker responds to this new state of affairs when she writes the forward to the upcoming volume, Jesus, History, and the Demise of Authenticity, of which both Allison and I are contributors.

One last quote from Hooker, simply because I think it gets at precisely the problem that hampered critical history of Jesus programs, particularly (though not solely) in the second half of the twentieth century:

The fact that I have questioned the value of form-criticism and certain other critical methods as tools in getting back to the Jesus of History does not mean that I am trying to offer comfort to those who have all along maintained a traditional "conservative" approach. I venture to suggest that I am being more radical than those who are commonly labelled "radical". For it seems to me that conservative and radical alike have both succumbed to the temptation to seek for certainty—and to believe that it can be achieved. The "radical", though he may eschew the old form of certainty, is seeking another. He looks for some kind of scientific verification—a litmus paper test which can be applied to the sayings of Jesus, which turns either pink or blue, according to whether they are or are not authentic, so that he may sort his material into neat piles.

A Pile of Poohs

New Testament scholarship has certainly produced myriad "piles" in the nearly four decades since Hooker's essay was first published. These, however, have generally lacked the neatness their creators have claimed on their behalf.

a new [or non-]criterion of authenticity

This will be much shorter than my previous post. In Constructing Jesus, Dale Allison defends what he calls "recurrent attestation," that is, when "a topic or motif or type of story reappears again and again throughout the tradition" (20). Allison finds that such recurrently attested themes or motifs are either genuine and authentic impressions of the historical (= "real") Jesus, or the Gospels have fundamentally misconstrued Jesus to such an extent that we cannot employ them to know anything historical about Jesus. Again, such recurrently attested themes or motifs convey genuinely historical information about Jesus even apart from the question of the authenticity of any particular saying or narrative or pericope in the Gospels. So even apart from the question of the authenticity of any particular exorcism story in the Gospels or any particular statement about exorcism from Jesus, the historical Jesus must have been widely regarded as a powerful exorcist if the Gospels are of any historical value whatsoever.

At any rate, I highlight this new [or non-]criterion of authenticity because it appears to me that this is the central approach to Jesus research undergirding Allison's book. Indeed, he says as much:

Recurrent attestation yields much more than [Tom] Holmén imagines, for not all the regularly attested themes and motifs are nonspecific and cursory. I offer this book as the proof. Nevertheless, I agree with Holmén to the extent that recurrent attestation is not sufficient unto itself. It supplies as I hope to show, much more than a minimalist foundation. It is not, however, everything. As I stated earlier, although we may well begin by asking, "What are our general impressions?" we need not end there. (20; my emphasis)

If the number of pages is any indication (nearly 600), Constructing Jesus amply demonstrates at the very least that recurrent attestation is a first word in a very long conversation.

the new historiography of Jesus: step 1—memory

Yesterday I moved past Dale Allison's preface and began reading the first chapter, "The General and Particular: Memories of Jesus" (1–30), of Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Baker Academic, 2010). As the title suggests, Allison begins his historical discussion of Jesus by providing an excellently researched and documented discussion of memory and, especially, all its vagaries.

I'll have much to say about this shortly, but I want to start by noting that historical Jesus scholarship seems to be moving beyond the so-called "Third Quest" and entering a new phase of its own history. In the Third Quest, the first step of scholarship was to apprehend something of Jesus' "Jewishness"; in this new phase, the first step is to explore the processes of memory and the recovery/reconstruction of the past. Whereas earlier Jesus scholarship neglected memory completely (because the Gospels weren't thought to be memory but were primarily expositions on the interests and conflicts of the early church projected back onto the figure of Jesus), the new historiography of Jesus recognizes that memory refers to so much more than simply "recall of the past." Memory is the retrieval and reconstruction of the past from which we perceive we have come within the circumstances and concerns of the present with which we must contend. Memory is about both the past and the present. And this is precisely what we have in the Gospels.

No, this isn't a "Fourth Quest" (how quaint that would be!). If anything, it's a post-Quest. How ironic, then, that the language of "questing" comes from Albert Schweitzer, that early-twentieth century champion of the failed apocalyptic prophet, and that Allison, an important heir of Schweitzer's legacy, is an important voice in historical Jesus scholarship after the Quests! Other voices would include Anthony Le Donne, Jens Schröter, Chris Keith, Samuel Byrskog, Richard Bauckham, and others. (And, of course, I would include myself here.) While some of us (e.g., Bauckham) turn to memory out of a conviction that the Gospels are or include eyewitness testimony about the life of Jesus, most if not all of us recognize that discussions of memory provide us with an apropos critical perspective from which to approach the Gospels even if the Evangelists themselves never saw or heard the prophet from Nazareth. We all remember a past much deeper and broader than simply our own limited fields of experience.

So Allison begins his discussion of memory by painting the canvas black. He appropriately sets the stage in the first sentence: "The frailty of human memory should distress all who quest for the so-called historical Jesus" (1). He immediately sets out a series of nine of memory's "sins," consequences of the "leaks and dissociat[ions]" of the human capacity to recall the past (2–8). Not surprisingly, Allison (who cites a broad range of memory studies) often references the work of Elizabeth F. Loftus, who perhaps more than any other researcher and experimenter has demonstrated how capable of being "messed with" is human memory. The conclusion vis-à-vis memory is stark:

Given what we now know about human recollection, given that "the past is produced in the present and is thus malleable," one researcher, Elizabeth Loftus, has opined, half seriously, that our lawcourts should administer this oath to witnesses on the stand: "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, or whatever it is you think you remember?" (8; citing Olick and Robbins, "Social Memory Studies," 128, and Loftus, "Memory Faults and Fixes," 127, respectively)

I am unable and unwilling to oppose anything Allison says about memory (at least up to this point); in all this he is exactly right. And yet I do object that the malleability and demonstrably fluid nature of our recall of the past are not weaknesses that the historian must overcome but rather resources that enable the past to persist across the ever-shifting present and make historiography possible in the first place. Or, to pick up a metaphor I dropped above, my canvas isn't as black as is Allison's. For example, in another sentence with which I generally agree, he writes, "As our recollections because increasingly tattered and faded, they are disposed to retain, if anything, only the substance or 'gist' of an event" (11; my emphasis). True. And yet I balk at the narrative underlying this sentence, viz. that memory, like a photograph left out in the wind and sun, tatters and fades at the onslaught of time. Certainly memories can fade. Just as certainly memories can change and even be retrojected. But memories can also persist, become more vivid and stark, take on clearer significances, teach more important lessons, and so on. In fact, memory does not either become clearer or more obscure; often memory's clarity or obscurity depends just as much on what or why we are trying to recall some thing.

Let me illustrate. If I'm trying to remember the squint of my wife's eyes as she smiled on our first date, or the color of her sweater on the night I proposed, the vagaries of the last ten years will certainly have tattered and faded my memory of the events. (To be honest, I'm only guessing that she was, in fact, wearing a sweater, since I proposed in early January and I certainly do remember that it was a very cold day.) If, however, I'm recalling the woman herself who once laughed at my jokes or accepted my proposal, my knowledge and memory of her is clearer now as we approach our tenth anniversary than it was even the day after the events in question. I know more about my wife now than I did then, and my understanding of her in 2011 is better than it was in 2001. So in 2011 I'm positioned to remember 2001 in ways that I wouldn't have been able to in 2001. In some ways my memory today is indeed tattered and faded. But in other ways it's clearer and crisper.

Despite the differences, I think Allison has exactly the right end of the stick (if the stick = how to engage historical Jesus research). As a beginning point, Allison offers the following conclusion about how to appropriate the data provided by the Gospels, a conclusion which differs categorically and fundamentally from work such as that proposed by the Jesus Seminar:

Given that memory is "fuzzy," that we remember the outlines of an event or the general import of a conversation better than the details, that we extract patterns and meaning from informational input, it would be peculiar to imagine that, although their general impressions of Jesus were hopelessly skewed, Christian tradents somehow managed to recall with some accuracy, let us say, two or three of his similitudes or parables and a handful of one-liners. . . . If general impressions are typically more trustworthy than details, then it makes little sense to reconstruct Jesus by starting with a few of the latter—perhaps some incidents and sayings that survive the gauntlet of our authenticating criteria—while setting aside the general impressions that our primary sources instill in us. The larger the generalization and the more data upon which it is based, the greater our confidence. The more specific the detail and the fewer the supporting data, the greater our uncertainty. (13, 14)

So Allison begins by looking not for isolated facts from which the historical Jesus will slowly but surely emerge, like a newer-model Terminator, out of the morass of the Gospels. Instead, he's looking for general impressions (16). Now, anyone familiar with Allison's work will expect him to find that most general of impressions at work in the Gospels: that Jesus was a prophet of the apocalypse. We'll see. But for now Allison's insights rightfully and helpfully set the program for historical Jesus scholarship of the second decade of the twenty-first century. The new historiography of Jesus begins with the Gospels as memorial artifacts, as plausible and coherent presentations of Jesus of Nazareth in the context of the challenges and concerns of his followers in the mid- to late-first century CE. Much critical work remains. But that work expressly is not filtering the Gospels through a battery of criteria and then trying to fit together the remaining textual shards into a critical reconstruction.

Constructing Jesus

I just started Dale C. Allison, Jr.'s most recent (and, apparently, final) contribution to historical Jesus scholarship, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Baker Academic, 2010). I have the privilege of writing a review essay for an upcoming issue of The Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus; the standard format of these kinds of things is that two or three people will offer reviews of a significant recent publication, and the author will respond to each of the reviewers. I've never done anything like this before, so I'm looking forward to this. (Allison and I are also co-participants in an upcoming conference on "the demise of the criteria of authenticity," to be held on Lincoln Christian University's campus in 2012 and for which a volume will be published by T&T Clark International.)

At any rate, I really have only just started reading this book; to date I've only read the preface. But already I like what I'm reading, especially as I compare it to Allison's previous work on Jesus (especially his volume, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet [Fortress Press, 1998]):

This volume as a whole is testimony to my conviction that the means that most scholars have employed and continue to employ for constructing the historical Jesus are too flimsy to endure [yes!!], or at least too flimsy for me to countenance any longer. I learned the discipline during the era when everyone was taught to employ the so-called criteria of authenticity. We were to find Jesus by, first, isolating individual units and then, second, running them through a gauntlet consisting of multiple attestation, dissimilarity, embarrassment, and so on. After many years of playing by the rules, however, I have gradually come to abandon them. I have decided that knowing the old directives has been of much less help than promised. I am trying something else. This book is the result. (x; my emphasis)

This is, perhaps, the best beginning to a book on Jesus I've read in a very long time. And that would include my own book on Jesus.

I'll comment further as I work through this weighty book (pp. xxix + 588).

400

No, it's not a sequel to the film, 300. It's the number of posts with which I've cluttered Al Gore's Internet. (Actually, this is no. 401; the four-hundredth had the unfortunate title, "contrasts (or, not ridiculicity)." I don't even know what that means . . .)

contrasts (or, not ridiculicity)

In contrast to that other article I was reading, Samuel Byrskog's 2003 review of Rudolf Bultmann's classic, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition [1921; ET: History of the Synoptic Tradition (1963)] strikes me as both fair and appropriate. I have my own disagreements with Byrskog's approach to memory and oral tradition, but his evaluation of Bultmann's work and its legacy seems pretty cogent to me. So I appreciate the force with which Byrskog gives the following blunt assessment:

The fundamental problem with Bultmann's method is not its inherent skepticism toward the historicity of the tradition. Occasionally he grants a good deal of continuity to the tradition; and skepticism is indeed part of all critical investigations. Rather, what is essentially problematic is precisely that his method does not work as a tool of historical inquiry. (Byrskog, "review of The History of the Synoptic Tradition" [JBL 122/3 (2003)], 554; emphasis added)

Byrskog goes on to demonstrate the unworkability of Bultmann's method; this is not simply dismissive invective. And so the blunt assessment is not only warranted but also welcome.

ridiculicity

I'm reading a fairly ridiculous article by Helmut Koester. His short piece, "Written Gospels or Oral Tradition?" (JBL 113/2 [1994]: 293–97) responds to Edouard Massaux's argument that the written Gospel of Matthew bore significant influence on other Christian texts of the first two centuries CE. Koester, of course, argues that apparent Matthean tradition in 1 Clement, Ignatius' letters, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and others actually stem from oral tradition. And it seems to me that Koester says a number of silly things. For example:

When pieces of tradition are quoted and used in early Christian authors, their function in the life of the community is usually maintained. Indeed, it may not even be necessary to refer to them as traditions related to Jesus. This is most clearly the case in Paul's allusions to sayings of Jesus in Romans 12–14, in 1 Peter, and in the Epistle of James. As far as writings such as 1 Clement, Barnabas, and the letters of Ignatius are concerned, use of sayings of Jesus and allusions to them would seem to be natural continuations of this practice, whether or not Jesus is explicitly mentioned as an authority. Sayings of Jesus were known because they had been established as parts of a Christian catechism; the passion narrative was known because it was embedded into the Christian liturgy. (Koester 1994:297; emphasis added)

The entire perspective informing this paragraph seems absurd to me. Notice how Koester privileges a tradition's "function in the life of the community" over its significance as a "tradition[] related to Jesus." When, for example, a Christian text says something like, "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse" (Rom. 12.14), that text is clearly performing certain functions among the Christian community. However, when another text narrates Jesus saying something to this effect (e.g., Matt. 5.43–48), the latter text is less authentic because its communal function has been muted. (That is, in Romans 12 Paul is overtly trying to persuade the Roman Christians to think and behave a certain way; in Matthew, the Evangelist may be endorsing certain patterns of thought and behavior, but his endorsement is covert, masked by the overt aim of narrating the life and teaching of Jesus.) I can't help but wonder where Koester thinks Jesus' followers procured the traditions that were at work in their communities if not from the teachings of the historical Jesus. I'm not even claiming that such traditions had to actually stem from the historical Jesus; only that the tradition's significance as a "tradition[] related to Jesus" must be more salient than any purported "function in the life of the community."

But even more to the point, I don't understand how Koester can claim that Jesus' teachings "were known because they had been established as parts of a Christian catechism," or that "the passion narrative was known because it was embedded into the Christian liturgy." Koester is clearly a fan of putting carts before horses. Where does Koester think Christian catechisms and liturgy came from if not from the sayings and passion of Jesus, among other things? Instead, the teachings of Jesus and the passion narrative were known because they were foundational to the beliefs and practices of Jesus' followers. As a result, their catechisms and liturgy reflected his teachings and passion. While the catechisms and liturgy might have been vehicles of the traditions of Jesus' teachings and passion, they were not the motivation or reason for knowing these traditions. Otherwise, Koester needs to explain what motivated the church's catechisms and liturgy.

Ridiculous.

on heavenly citizenship

When I was writing my Master's thesis on 1 Peter, one of the things that most impressed me about that letter was the language of "aliens and foreigners" at key points in the text (1.1, 17; 2.11). Paul exhibits a similar idea in a text that Tim Gombis cites in his discussion of the "cruciformity" (or "cross-shaped-ness") of Paul's ethical instructions (see Gombis's Paul: A Guide for the Perplexed [T&T Clark International, 2010], 73):

But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation so that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself. (Phil. 3.20–21)

While I don't have a problem with Paul's point here, I really don't like the way we in the church often read this idea of "citizenship in heaven." We often think a Christian worldview denigrates or diminishes the value of this world—and the pains it inflicts—by way of realizing our citizenship is in heaven. Are you struggling in this world? Don't worry; our citizenship is in heaven. Wondering why good people suffer? It doesn't matter; our citizenship is in heaven. You're hungry or thirsty or naked or forsaken? Silver and gold I do not have, but our citizenship is in heaven.

I think neither God nor Jesus nor Paul would have accepted such an idea. Tim Gombis, however, has helpfully framed Paul's point in Philippians 3 and the idea that we live as subjects of God's kingdom. Gombis writes, "Just as the humiliation of Jesus led to exaltation and glorification, so believers' humiliation for the sake of Christ will result in exaltation and glory" (73–74). This is the actual point at play here: Jesus was exalted to God's right hand and enthroned in the heavens because he sought out and served the poor, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised from Temple or Council or Legion. Seeking and serving the poor, however, led to the cross; it did not lead to recognition as a prophet or even as a philanthropist. And Christ en route to Calvary calls his own to take up their crosses and follow him. But beware. If you take up your cross, you will find yourself nailed to it one day.

Why would anyone take up their cross? Why would anyone lay down their life to help others find theirs? What makes this transaction attractive? Enter our heavenly citizenship. Status as citizens of heaven, of God's kingdom, enables me to serve this world and not just endure it. Heavenly citizenship doesn't denigrate this world; it elevates this world as the object of God's care and concern and call us to enter into and live out of the same care and concern.

This world matters gravely to God, and we the Church must recognize its importance. In those moments when we do recognize this world's value as the work of God's hands, we come alongside the hurting, the hungry, the homeless, the weak. We enter into their pain and disenfranchisement. And we apply to their wounds the balm of God's Spirit. And the kingdom of God, of which we are citizens advances against the ruler of this age.

identifying Paul (again)

I'm currently reading through Tim Gombis's introductory volume, Paul: A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark International, 2010). Of course, as I mentioned in a previous post, I read Rodrigo Morales's published doctoral dissertation, The Spirit and the Restoration of Israel: New Exodus and New Creation Motifs in Galatians (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), last week. So all things Paul have been on my mind these last few days.

Gombis's discussion of Paul is introductory and pitched at beginning ("perplexed") students, so of course there is lots of room to nitpick and complain about lack of nuance or precision. But the goal of the book isn't to provide nuance or precision; it's to speak in broad strokes and get people into the discussion. Details can come later.

So I hope it's clear that I'm not nitpicking here (or at least I don't think I am). And I should also disclose that I know Gombis personally, and I've found him to be one of the nicer, more congenial younger biblical scholars. I think he and I think a lot alike. But as Gombis briefly introduces Paul's letter to the Galatian communities, he attributes the problem Paul confronts to a "very conservative Jewish Christian faction . . . seeking to make certain that the Christian communities that sprang up in Asia Minor were thoroughly Jewish" (25). A little later, Gombis explains that Paul bristles against the claim that gentile converts "must adopt a Jewish way of life." I'm not sure what to make of Gombis's use of the term Jewish; even (or perhaps especially!) in an introductory volume such as this I think a little more nuance is necessary.

The problem comes down to this: If Paul sets out to correct the claims of the "agitators" (see Gal. 5.10) that gentiles "must adopt a Jewish way of life" (25), what should we think Paul set up as an alternative to that Jewish lifestyle? Should the converts remain gentiles? If so, we need to explain the continued negative references to gentiles in Paul's letters (e.g., Eph. 2.11–12; Gombis accepts Pauline authorship of all thirteen letters attributed to Paul). Should the converts become Christians? If so, we need to explain how Paul never uses the word Christian in any of his letters.

Since neither of these terms—gentile or Christian—will work for Paul, the question remains: What should we think Paul set up as an alternative to the Jewish lifestyle the "agitators" were advocating to Paul's gentile converts in Galatia? I think the only answer that will work, historically or theologically, is, Paul proposes a differently Jewish lifestyle to the universal Torah-obedience advocated by his opponents. If I learned anything from Morales (which I wouldn't expect Gombis to cite even if they weren't both published in 2010), Paul understands his vocation as "apostle to the nations/gentiles" in terms of bringing the blessing of Abraham to bear upon the nations of the Roman Empire, and this precisely because God has poured out his Spirit upon his people Israel and brought an end to their experiences of the covenantal curses (exile and, especially, death).

In other words, and to sum up Morales's point and wrap up this post, the problem Paul has with Torah in Galatians isn't that it's Jewish. The problem is that Israel has failed to keep the terms of the covenant and has brought upon itself the covenantal curses—exile and death (see Deut. 27–30)—rather than the covenantal blessings. But God has not abandoned his people or his promises to them; instead, Israel's messiah, Jesus, overcame the covenantal curses brought on by Israel's failure to observe Torah. (Notice the problem isn't Torah itself but the people's failure to keep Torah.) Now the gentile Galatian believers have a choice to make. Do they take on a Jewish lifestyle defined by Torah? Or do they take on a Jewish lifestyle defined by the blessing of Abraham, now unleashed on God's people in the aftermath of God's Spirit poured out on Israel and a new heart given them? This latter might be what we mean when we refer to a "Christian lifestyle," but we need to recognize (and teach others to recognize) that in all likelihood, for Paul, this was simply a better way to be Jewish.

a Pauline transformation of Jewish eschatology?

I have been reading the published version of Rodrigo Morales's PhD dissertation (Duke, 2007), The Spirit and the Restoration of Israel: New Exodus and New Creation Motifs in Galatians (WUNT 2/282; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), which I'm reviewing for IBR. This is an excellent little book (only two hundred pages) that is very clearly and logically structured, cogently and carefully argued, and concisely written. As a brief introduction, Morales proceeds in three basic steps:

• First, he briefly establishes the Status Quaestionis of the role of the Spirit of God in Paul and, especially, his letter to the Galatians. At a pivotal point in the letter Paul asks, "Was it by works of the Law that you received the Spirit? Or was it by hearing of faith?" While the answer is clear (Paul simply could not be proposing that the Galatians received the Spirit via Torah-observance!), the significance of the Spirit for Pauline thought and rhetoric is not. Morales argues that the connection between the outpouring of God's Spirit and the restoration of Israel provides the key to understanding Paul's argument in Galatians.
• Second, he surveys the intersection of God's gift of his Spirit and the promise of Israel's restoration among the prophetic Hebrew biblical writings (specifically, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Joel) in Chapter 2 and among Second Temple Jewish texts in Chapter 3. His aim is not to identify how Paul reads either biblical or extracanonical texts but rather to assess how Paul takes up and employs themes and concepts current among (roughly) contemporaneous expressions of Jewish thought. Key among these themes are, among others, new creation and new exodus imagery, the heart and its need for renewal, and the sonship of God's people.
• Third, Morales turns to Galatians 3–4 (Chapter 4) and Galatians 5–6 (Chapter 5) to bring the material from previous chapters to bear on the exegetical discussion. I am currently at the beginning of Chapter 4, so I cannot say very much at all about Morales's hermeneutic or exegetical work. But his handling of the texts in Chapters 2–3 has been responsible and cautious, and so I don't anticipate problems here.

Except . . .

Morales makes a comment almost in passing (it's even in a footnote) regarding the shift in late-Second Temple Judaism from metaphorical understandings of "resurrection" (and of "death," too) toward literal interpretations. He says, "The key transformation that Paul brought about was the idea that one figure would be raised in the middle of history, and that others would somehow participate both anticipatorily and ultimately in that eschatological life" (79, n. 5; my emphasis). I have some problems with the phrase "middle of history," because I'm not sure that helpfully frames Paul's rhetoric. Would Paul affirm the present as "the middle of history"? Or would he see in Christ's resurrection the dawning of the new age and the fading of the old? But given the complexities of the dynamics of what are commonly referred to in Christian theology as the "now-and-not-yet" (complexities which Morales recognizes), we likely won't solve that problem here.

But I have bigger problems with the idea that this was, somehow, a "key transformation" for which Paul was responsible. I'm not at all opposed to the idea that individuals affect, sometimes dramatically, how and what their cultures think. And clearly Paul is one of those individuals. But after reading Jerry Sumney's essay, "'Christ died for us': Interpretation of Jesus' Death as a Central Element of the Identity of the Earliest Church," pp. 147–72 in Reading Paul in Context: Explorations in Identify Formation (FS William Campbell; Edited by K. Ehrensperger and J. B. Tucker; LNTS 428; London: T&T Clark International, 2010), I'm a bit more suspicious of the image of Paul-the-theological-revolutionary than I previously was.

Certainly Paul takes this idea—viz., that the future resurrection was inaugurated and even is proleptically exprienced in Christ's resurrection—and advances it considerably. But here's the question Sumney has taught me to ask: Is it really likely that the pre-Pauline church had not already developed some idea of the inaugurating/proleptic/"middle of history" resurrection of Jesus? How would the earliest Christians, whom Paul the Pharisee (who almost certainly accepted the notion of bodily resurrection in the age to come even before his experience on the Damascus road) saw fit to persecute, have connected their eschatological ideas of resurrection with the experiences of Jesus as raised "according to the Scriptures" (see 1 Cor. 15.3–5)? Is it not more likely that this was one of the ideas Paul found incomprehensible, and so he sought to stamp them out from Israel? Can't we understand the failure of the disciples to understand Jesus' so-called "Passion predictions" in Mark's Gospel (almost certainly later than Paul's letters) as suggesting that this very point caused problems for Jesus' followers prior to their experiences of Easter?

Of course, I'm only raising questions; I have very little to offer by way of answers. In many areas Paul was almost certainly theologically avant-garde. But in some areas—perhaps in many areas—Paul inherited ideas from those around him, whether Jewish, Greek, or even early (or proto-)Christian influences. In the balance of things, do we really want to think that Jesus' earliest followers had to wait for Paul to come around before they began wrestling with the connection between pre-Christ[ian] eschatological ideas about resurrection and the Easter Event? I find this very unlikely.

Still, to end on a positive note, Morales's book is very easy to read. Even if you find it difficult, the thesis he's pursuing (and the evidence he considers) is well worth the effort it takes to access his argument.

making sense of Paul

As I continue reading Kathy Ehrensperger and J. Brian Tucker's edited volume, Reading Paul in Context: Explorations in Identity Formation (LNTS 428; London: T&T Clark International, 2010), I find myself scratching my head sometimes. I've raved about Ekkhard Stegemann's essay (here and here), and I enjoyed Robert Jewett's analysis of the relationship between the gospel and the revelation of God's wrath in Romans (even if, in the end, I was unconvinced by his universalist interpretation). Neil Elliott's political reading of Romans was significantly less convincing than Stegemann's, perhaps because he trades in the same distinction between theology and politics that he criticizes in others. Mark Nanos's interpretation of Rom. 11.25–26 is suggestive if still, in my opinion, unsatisfying.

But Ian Rock's essay, "Another Reason for Romans—A Pastoral Response to Augustan Imperial Theology: Paul's Use of the Song of Moses in Romans 9–11 and 14–15" (74–89), strikes me as odd. I'll raise two issues here. First, I simply have no idea what Rock means when he refers to "the substantial evidence that the addresses of this letter are not Christians but rather the saints in Rome (Rom. 1.7)" (74; my emphases). Does anyone have any idea what distinction Rock might have in mind here? Is this the complaint that the term Christian is anachronistic for the mid-first century CE? Or does Rock have two distinct (and distinguishable) groups in mind here?

Second, Rock locates Paul primarily within the sphere of Roman imperial political rhetoric (rather than within Israelite/Hebrew biblical tradition), a move reminiscent of Elliott's essay, mentioned above. In fact, Rock asks,

Could Paul's references to the kingship of David, the universal covenant with Abraham, the cosmic character of the Law of Moses, the historicity of the people and Israel as the true people of God, his articulation of the messiahship of Jesus the Son of God and Lord, have all stemmed from a subcultural reading the Aenid? (78; my emphasis)

In general, we biblical scholars don't usually ask questions that can be satisfactorily answered, "yes" or "no." But this one is easy: No. The emphatically Jewish topoi Rock names certainly and without doubt did not "stem from" Paul's reading of the Aenid or any other Roman literature. Are we really to imagine Paul developing the ideas we find in his letters about "the kingship of David, . . ." in response to the imperial claims coming out of Rome? What, then, did Paul think before he encountered these claims (or rather, before he needed to formulate responses to them)?

It may well be that Rock didn't mean to ask whether Paul's Jewish ideas "stemmed from" his encounter with Roman propaganda. Perhaps he's merely after how Paul employed Jewish theological resources to answer things that were being advocated about Caesar, for example in the Aenid. But this isn't what he said. And NT scholarship needs to carefully explore the way NT texts employ Jewish theologoumena to counter Roman political and theological ideology without obscuring the fact that, among the NT authors, Jewish ideas and concepts precede Roman ideas. Our authors were Jews navigating Jewish identity in Roman contexts, not Romans engaging Jewish ideas.

Ekkhard Stegemann on Romans 13.1–7

In a post last week I mentioned Ekkhard Stegemann's essay, "Coexistence and Transformation: Reading the Politics of Identity in Romans in an Imperial Context," which opens the volume, Reading Paul in Context: Explorations in Identity Formation. Essays in Honour of William S. Campbell (LNTS 428; London: T&T Clark International, 2010). I cannot recommend highly enough this essay, which, in my view, treads the narrow path between ignoring the political, Roman imperial context that defined every moment of early Christianity in its opening centuries, on the one hand, and focusing on that context so thoroughly that early Christianity becomes, in effect, an anti-Roman response to imperial dynamics, on the other. In some discussions the reader could be forgiven for thinking that Caesar, not Christ, provided the driving impetus for the theologizing processes we see at work in the NT texts; Jesus becomes, almost, merely the vehicle for opposing Rome.

Not so with Stegemann's analysis. I have already said enough to introduce Stegemann's primary thesis (see the post I mentioned above). In his own words, he builds upon William Campbell's work "to show that for Paul the insistence on obedience to the (Roman) rulers and the obedience of faith in Jesus Christ as Son of God in power and Lord, which implies the expectation of the coming of God's kingdom, coexist as well—and that without contradiction" (22). But my introduction does not do justice to Stegemann's masterful portrayal of this coexistence, for example, in the essay's closing paragraph:

Virgil's prophecy for Augustus, which he put in the mouth of Anchises, the father of Aeneas, promised Augustus Caesar, the descendant of the divine (divi genus), that he will extend his empire beyond the stars, and bring a golden age to the Latin land. He will eventually ascend with all th Julian offspring to the exalted firmament (omnis Iuli progenies magnum caeli ventura sub axem; Aen. 6.790–92). For Paul it is Jesus Christ and his followers who will ascend to their Father, God, and his kingdom in heaven, Jesus Christ as the firstborn of the resurrection of the dead and his brothers and sisters after him. But up to now they still coexist with this aeon and its frailties. (23)

I'm not so certain Paul trades on the idea of "ascent" as much as Christian reading of Paul has supposed it has (largely on the basis, I think, of 1 Thess. 4.13–18). And Stegemann, as you can see, includes that idea here. Even so, this is an excellent essay, nearly poetic. And it points the way, I think, for responsible explorations of and appreciations for the political dynamics underlying every word the early Christians said and wrote.

on Mark's ending

David Parker addresses "The endings of Mark's Gospel" in the eighth chapter (124–47) of his short but important treatise, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). In this chapter, Parker does more than present and analyze the manuscript evidence for the various endings of Mark; he also assesses the effect of these various endings upon the whole story of Mark.

I certainly don't want to deny that the decision of how (or when) to end one's reading of Mark matters. I think the earliest recoverable ending of Mark is 16.8, and it matters for how we read 1.1–16.8 that the final words of the gospel—ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ ["for they were afraid"]—leave the account of Jesus' life after the crucifixion unnarrated (but not unstated!).

Nevertheless, I think Parker over-reaches in his discussion of the endings' importances. Parker writes,

Both the Intermediate and the Long Ending, with their emphasis on proclamation, provide the Gospel with its own validation. By writing, Mark is obedient to this command, for he enshrines the command within his book. The Short Ending provides no such security for the book. Indeed, quite the reverse, for the women's silence means that, within the story, we have no means of knowing that any of it happened. (146; original emphasis)

Ending with the women's silence and fear is certainly strange. But isn't Parker's limitation—"within the story"—rather artificial? Doesn't the very fact of Mark's gospel (by which I mean Mark 1.1–16.8) indicate that the silence is broken, that the women have found their voice despite their fear, and that their testimony has been taken over and become Mark's? If, "within the story," the women never pass on the angelic announcement, then there is no "within the story" to speak of.

But instead, by ending the story at 16.8, with the women fearful and silent, the Markan narrator leaves open a space for the audience to consider their response to the narrative. Will they speak through their fear, as the women surely must have, or will the gospel's proclamation come to an end after its reading? Mark 16.8 encourages—even requires!—not only the women but also us to begin to tell Jesus' story anew. This, in fact, is the transgression of the so-called Longer Endings: Mark 16.8 doesn't call for 16.9 but rather for a return to 1.1, ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ["The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ"]. After 16.8 the audience becomes the narrator, the silence is overcome by the beginning of the gospel, and we the audience-become-narrator become the messenger of God who prepares the way for Jesus (1.2–3).

a point finely (and finally) made

I've begun reading Kathy Ehrensperger and J. Brian Tucker's edited volume, Reading Paul in Context: Explorations in Identity Formation (LNTS 428; London: T&T Clark International, 2010), which presents a collection of essays in honour of William S. Campbell. The first essay is Ekkehard Stegemann's, "Coexistence and Transformation: Reading the Politics of Identity in Romans in an Imperial Context" (3–23), in which Stegemann nuances the politically sensitive readings of Romans that have been cropping up recently.

But this is the point that is (or should be) both patently obvious and thoroughly heeded. Stegemann notes:

Reading Romans in a Roman imperial context does not exclude the recognition that Paul's words and message belong at the same time and to an even greater extent to a Jewish cultural concept, more precisely to an 'apocalyptic' or 'theocentric' or 'messianic' Jewish language. Admittedly C. Bryan stresses this very difference in his critique of the counter-imperial reading of Paul, 'Christians were using some of the same words about Jesus as pagans used about Caesar, but they were hardly using them in the same context, or meaning anything like the same thing by them.' But Jewish culture and especially its 'apocalyptic' or 'messianic' version in some sense represents imperial rhetoric too. (6, citing C. Bryan, Render to Caesar: Jesus, the Early Church, and the Roman Superpower [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 91)

I'm not sure how "precise" the language of apocalyptic, theocentric, or messianic Judaism really is. But Stegemann rightly resists reading Paul in either Jewish or pagan contexts and understands him as operating as a Jew in a pagan context. To say things a bit differently, I don't think Paul used words like euangelion ("gospel"), kyrios ("lord"), pistis ("faith[fulness]"), etc. simply because these were the catchwords of Roman imperial rhetoric; these are terms that are clearly operative in his biblical/Jewish context. But neither was he unaware of the imperial employment of these terms. And I don't understand why we should think we need to choose between Jewish and Roman readings of Paul. At least since Martin Hengel's landmark study, Judaism and Hellenism (1974), we have known that these aren't two discrete cultural universes. Stegemann's study helps us see more clearly Paul, the Jewish philosopher/evangelist, as he was formed by and engaged with the Roman imperial context in which he lived his entire life and ultimately met his end.

"collective" and/or "social" memory

I'm reading Samuel Byrskog's article, "A New Quest for the Sitz im Leben: Social Memory, the Jesus Tradition and the Gospel of Matthew" (New Testament Studies 52 [2006]: 319–36). Byrskog has recently fired off a series of essays looking to reframe the form-critical concept of Sitz im Leben within the contemporary theoretical framework sustaining NT scholarship. Of course, as I've mentioned previously, I'm not as interested in salvaging NT criticism's form-critical heritage. But inasmuch as Sitz im Leben has degenerated into a fairly generic term that means not much more than "context," it remains flexible enough to serve contemporary needs while maintaining an apparent continuity with the research of previous generations.

At any rate, Byrskog is rightfully drawing attention to the surprising terminological disarray in the secondary literature regarding the communal dimension of memory. "There is a confusing variety of terminology. The literature uses 'family memory', local memory', 'popular memory', 'public memory', 'relational memory', 'cultural memory', etc. These expressions sometimes carry different connotations, but are also often employed synonymously" (321–22). Byrskog's right; the loose use of language here is unfortunate and, I think, masks a worrying imprecision with respect to what we're after when we use these terms.

So I'm sympathetic with what Byrskog's trying to do when he defines more precisely what he means by "social" and "collective" memory. But I'm not sure he's successful. He clarifies:

With James Fentress and Chris Wickham, I will use "social memory" as a label distinct from "collective memory". While the latter is social in that it includes those recollections of a group that are shared by all of its members, being something else than the sum total of all the individual recollections, the former is social in that it deals with the social aspects of the mental act of remembering. Social memory is thus interested in the memory of individuals in social contexts which are larger than the individual and yet related to the individual. (322)

Byrskog describes beautifully the most important insight of social memory theorists: that every act of memory is social. But I'm not sure what his use of "collective memory"actually refers to. Byrskog equates collective memory with "recollections of a group," but I'm not sure what a group's recollection actually is, how it's manifested, for whom it's manifested, or whatever. Funnily enough, Byrskog himself has balked at this very idea of "collective memory": "Groups and cultures might have what we call ‘memory’, which affects the members of those contexts, but groups and cultures do not remember and recall; individuals do” (2000:255; original emphasis). Granted that in this current context (Byrskog's NTS article) he still focuses on the individual rememberer (notice the reference to "all of its [viz., a group's] members"). But I don't understand at what point a sufficient number of individuals within a group exhibit a particular recollection, and I don't understand what makes the memories of individuals "collective" other than, apparently, the mere fact that multiple individuals share them in common.

In a rough draft of another paper, I've questioned Byrskog's concept of "collective memory" this way:

Byrskog affirms that “groups and cultures do nurture a memory of their past” and that “memory is to some extent a social construct” (2000:255), though he does not explain what processes, social or psychological, are involved in this nurturing. This problem plagues Byrskog’s work at multiple points; another example, taken at random: “[O]ral historians of today often attempt to control the uniqueness of each eyewitness account with a sense of its representativeness and a careful method of strategic sampling. In order to do this, one needs to single out persons who are representative of a larger group, and compare their versions with each other. Groups are important, but one needs to focus on the individuals within each group, because the collective version [of the past] might be entirely different from the version of the individual” (2000:69; original emphasis). But what, precisely, is “the collective version” that an oral historian could compare and contrast with an account given by any given individual? And which individual, for that matter, is able to give an account of the past that isn’t already reflective of the history, interests, and culture of the groups to which s/he belongs?

I should clarify that I wrote these comments solely in reference to his very important monograph, Story as History, History as Story (Mohr Siebeck, 2000). However, the same problems are operative in his 2006 article. I'm very, very sympathetic to the interest in the social dynamics of even the most individual of processes (here, memory). And I do think that "remembering together" affects the way individuals express and employ memory. But I just can't convince myself that "collective memory" refers to "group memory" or even the aggregate of individuals' memories. Individuals and groups aren't separate (or separable) entities; my memories all by themselves are already social creations. The act of remembering with other people doesn't transform my memories into social facts; still less does it produce social facts in the melding of multiple individuals' memories. Remembering together augments and extends the social-ness of my/our memories; it does not cause that social-ness.

getting ready for SECSOR 2011

The SECSOR 2011 meeting is this weekend (4–6 March) at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, KY. The pictures look gorgeous, and I'm excited to get on the road. I'll be presenting my paper, "Speaking of Jesus: 'Oral Tradition' beyond the Form Critics," in the SBL New Testament section on Saturday evening. I've been working on this paper for over a month, and I think it's pretty good. But I would think that, wouldn't I?

In the spirit of open and public academic discussion and debate, I've uploaded my paper to both Scribd and Google Docs. I'll embed the Scribd version below. If, for some reason, you prefer Google Docs, you can use the link I've included. Both documents are completely public.

The highlighted numbers in the paper refer to the accompanying PowerPoint presentation. I've tried to upload the .pptx file to Scribd and Google Docs, but it didn't display properly in either place. If you're interested in seeing the PowerPoint, leave a comment here and I'll happily e-mail it to you.

UPDATE: I've finished the handout that I will distribute to anyone determined to listen to my paper. Like the paper itself, you can find the handout on Google Docs, or you can see the embedded Scribd version, below.

Speaking of Jesus: "Oral Tradition" beyond the Form Critics
Speaking of Jesus: "Oral Tradition" beyond the Form Critics (handout)

thinking poorly about Mark's audience

As part of my senior-level undergraduate course on Mark's gospel I've assigned James Edwards's commentary in Eerdman's Pillar New Testament Commentary series (The Gospel according to Mark [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002]). Edwards argues that Mark was written for gentile Christians in or near Rome. While I don't have a problem with this position (though neither do I subscribe to it), I do have a problem with Edwards's favorite argument in its favor.

Whenever Mark translates an Aramaic phrase or a Jewish custom (e.g., Mark 5.41–42; 7.2–5), Edwards makes a comment regarding Mark's gentile Roman audience. And whenever he does so, I make a point to explain to my students how unnecessary such comments are. But now Edwards has crossed the line from claiming more than the data demands (a common and, in my view, acceptable practice) to making claims that simply aren't true. Let me explain.

In his comments on Mark 7.34 ["Jesus looked up into heaven and sighed, and he said to him, 'Ephphatha' (which means, 'Be opened')."], Edwards drops a footnote in which he claims, "The need to translate an Aramaic saying into Greek again indicates that Mark is writing for non-Jews" (2002:225, n. 28). But this simply isn't true! At the very least, such a view assumes that every Jew in Mark's world understood Aramaic.

Instead, we need to recognize at least two basic facts, both of which require explanation. First, Mark includes Jesus command in an Aramaic form. Second, Mark translates the Aramaic command into Greek. Edwards focuses on this second datum and infers, therefore, that Mark must be writing for non-Jews. But, as I've already said, this goes too far. The most we can say with confidence is that Mark is writing for people who know Greek but do not know Aramaic.

The really interesting question, I think, is: Why did Mark include the command in Aramaic in the first place? Answers will be speculative, of course. But I can think of two: First, there was a power associated with Jesus' actual spoken words, and so Mark included those words even though he wrote for a Greek-speaking audience. We have remains of hundreds of magical papyri, mostly from Egypt, that attest the perceived power of foreign words (somewhat like the pseudo-Latin of Harry Potter). But second—and here's where Edwards goes astray—the presence of both the Aramaic command and its Greek translation may suggest that Mark is writing for a multi-ethnic (and multi-lingual?) audience. If so, then Mark may preserve the Aramaic/Judaic form of much of his tradition because many among his audience were well positioned to appreciate its preservation, but he explains the Aramaisms/Judaisms because others (many?) among his audience would not have understood them.

At any rate, if you're convinced, along with Edwards, that Mark writes for gentile Christians in/near Rome, then you need to provide some explanation why Mark includes words like, Ephphatha, or Talitha koum, or Elōi, Elōi lema sabachthani. Certainly the gospel story is intelligible without them, so why does Mark bother to include them at all?