biblical studies and comparative thinking

Werner Kelber's essay, "The Work of Birger Gerhardsson in Perspective," concludes the book, Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (Werner Kelber and Samuel Byrskog, eds.; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009; 173–206). I'm not the biggest fan of Kelber's work, though I have to admit that I am a beneficiary of his groundbreaking work. My first introduction to Kelber was through his seminal monograph, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1983), which in my initial opinion posited too-strong a disruption between oral and written communicative media. Since then Kelber himself has acknowledged this shortcoming, though he still (again, in my opinion) slides too-easily into an oral vs. reading dichotomy.

Those criticisms aside, I find myself enjoying the current essay very much, perhaps more than I've enjoyed any other thing Kelber has written. With that, I'd like to quote Kelber's analysis of biblical scholarship and why objections to cross-cultural and/or transhistorical analytical models are red-herrings.

As an academic discipline, biblical scholarship is laden with centuries of received manners and mannerisms. Not infrequently it has operated in a state of culturally conditioned and/or institutionally enforced isolation. More to the point, many of its historical methods and assumptions about the functioning of biblical texts originated in perennial working relations with print versions—typographic constructs of modernity. Plainly, New Testament (and biblical) studies stand in need of a rethinking of the communications environment in which the early Jesus tradition participated. (181)

Kelber is exactly right. The danger—for Kelber as well as for any of us who search for sociological and anthropological models to help illumine ancient texts—is thinking that we have avoided misapprehending the biblical texts while everyone else sees them through culturally inappropriate lenses. Kelber may too easily critique other scholars for assuming an inapplicable communications model, but his work also constantly reminds that our own ways of perceiving, processing, transmitting, and working with words differ in nearly every respect from Jesus, Paul, and every other figure from antiquity. Cross-cultural models help us become better aware, at the very least, of our own ways of verbalization and so to question how ancient communicative techniques and technologies may have functioned in ways different from our own.

reflections on biblical-style philology

Count me among those who were shocked (no pun intended) by the Chargers' loss to the NY Jets Sunday. I have been saying for a couple weeks that I thought San Diego was the best team in the NFL (though the Vikings looked pretty darn good, didn't they?!), and I expected them to bring the Vince Lombardi Trophy to southern California next month. If I was a gambling man, I'd put money on Indianapolis and Minnesota in the Super Bowl, with the Colts winning. But then again, if I was a gambling man I'd already be broke.

But in Monday's news coverage of the Jets' victory, I saw a headline flash up on the tv screen that read, "The Jets ground the Chargers," an obviously intentional if not very creative pun. But I have to admit, it took me a few minutes to get the pun's intent. First, I thought it would have been a more appropriate headline if the Chargers had won, so that "The Chargers ground the Jets." After all, Jets are grounded; they don't do the grounding. So when I tried to imagine a more appropriate pun, I asked which verb is more appropriate when the Chargers is the object. That's when I realized that I had misread the verb, ground. The headline, almost certainly, didn't use ground in the sense of "keep planes (or jets) out of the sky" but rather in the sense of "provide a path for electrical current to be dissipated into the Earth."

Given the different semantic domains in which the English verb ground occurs, the word's meaning in this context varies significantly depending on whether we infer the crucial context from the presence of "The Jets" in the immediate context or from the presence of "the Chargers." And nevermind that ground, in a football context, also means "to throw onto the field" (as in, "Sanchez grounded the ball with three seconds left on the clock."). Given the very many different things ground CAN mean (and we've only considered its meanings as a verb!), it's all the more amazing how quickly and effortlessly we intuit what it ought to mean in a particular context. As native English speakers, we identify the interpretive options available and discriminate between them with surprising ease; if not for my initial misinterpretation of the headline I would not have even realized the dynamics at play when I make sense of that simple headline. But that doesn't make those dynamics any less sophisticated.

We can only wonder how ridiculous so much of what qualifies as peer-reviewed, publishable biblical scholarship would strike the average first-century person as inane and absurd. I'm not maligning everyone else's scholarship and excusing my own; the problem I'm trying to raise is in some ways part of the essence of our discipline. But it should go some way toward tempering the rancor that sometimes accompanies biblical scholarship to realize that many of us have earned our PhDs trying to understand and explain phenomena that made sense intuitively to children and the uneducated masses.

on defining biblical scholarship

In the process of putting the finishing touches on an article, I returned to Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), a book I first encountered early in 2002 as I groped after the theoretical basis of my Master's thesis at Cincinnati Christian University. And I came across this:

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right. But that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse questions, is what being an ethnographer is like.

There are a number of ways to escape this—turning culture into folklore and collecting it, turning it into traits and counting it, turning it into institutions and classifying it, turning it into structures and toying with it. But they are escapes. The fact is that to commit oneself to a semiotic concept of culture and an interpretive approach to the study of it is to commit oneself to a view of ethnographic assertion as, to borrow W. B. Gallie's by now famous phrase, "essentially contestable." Anthropology, or at least interpretive anthropology, is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other. (Geertz 1973: 29)

I am currently engaged in proposing a semiotic approach to gospels scholarship, a proposition that began in Structuring Early Christian Memory but that I'm realizing more and more I need to push and expand before moving on to my other interests (particularly the "parting of the ways," my analysis of which will depend thoroughly on this semiotic approach).

The most common criticism I have received, from multiple quarters, is of my rather uncontrolled, open-ended, fluid understanding of ancient tradition and how that tradition was expressed in and related to written texts. So, naturally, I like Geertz's idea, in which biblical scholarship's "progress is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate." More precise, controlled, "scientific" biblical scholarship isn't "better" if its precision and control—its science—are distortions that provide an "escape" from the historical processes and communities and texts at the heart of our analyses.