Category Archives: Historical Criticism

Supersession again

Another thought that has been disrupting some of my earlier conclusions:

If we take seriously the idea of the history of ancient Israel involving an ongoing series of ideological constructions of the identity of ‘Israel’ – an ongoing series of abductions, to use the terminology I was using a few months back – what does it do to our assessment of that (series of) abduction(s) involved in early Christianity?

More construction

A quick clarification of the end of the last post.

I suggested that ‘identification of the meanings of the Bible’ might itself be a case of different communities with different ‘interests’ picking out different ‘objects’. I did not mean, however, that every differing interpretative claim – I claim that ‘Son of God’ should be read against such-and-such a Hebrew background, you claim that it should be read against a Hellenistic background – was simply to be traced to differing community interests. Debate about differing interpretations would then always be disguised (ideological) debate about our differing communities (conflicting) interests – the Bible no more than a proxy battleground for our real animosities.

Rather, I was thinking the rather vaguer (though no more original) thought that there is no one obvious thing that ‘interpretation’ means. Different communities with different interests play different kinds of games that I, abstracting in my study late at night, might decide to call ‘interpretation of the Bible’ – but those games might be as different as the games played by different investigators in my little story. The ‘Hebrew’ versus ‘Hellenistic’ debate about ‘Son of God’ is a debate within one of those games – and it is no easy matter to say how it relates to the games played with similar texts by those embroiled in fourth century Christological debates.

I’m forcibly struck by the banality of this observation (and the realisation that the only reason for the previous post was that I liked my silly little story :-)) except for the niggling suspicion that it is a lesson I have not yet learnt. On the one hand, I find it frighteningly easy to proceed as if ‘interpretation’ were one thing – and there were only more and less successful attempts at it. On the other hand, I still manage to proceed as if hermeneutics – i.e., the discussion of what sort of thing interpretation is and how it works – is a nice abstract discipline, rather than one that must feed on historical and social-anthropological attention to the widely differing constructions of materials, nature, origin and end of interpretive activities in differing communities. (Oh, and I should of course never have adopted this deeply misleading ‘community’ terminology in the first place – as if you could define and count the somehow discrete groups involved in interpretative activities.)

Oh dear. I’m having one of those ‘turning to ashes’ evenings: ideas that seemed to have something in them before I tried writing them down seem dull and clumsy when I’ve actually typed them. I’m hovering between the delete key and the publish button…

Hermeneutical Flurry

(1) An academic proposing a meaning for some element in the text (e.g., saying ‘Part of what lies behind Mark’s use of ‘Son of God’ is a reference to Old Testament images of God as Father of Israel’s King) is proposing a programme of further work: an attempt to see what further evidence (from this text and from other texts) can be drawn in to the picture. Successful suggestions will be those that allow a wide range of connections to be made (e.g., drawing in a wide range of OT texts about Kingship; drawing in other examples from the Ancient Near East; allowing connections to anthropological discussions about relationships between the language of cult, kingship, and household…). Successful suggestions will also allow refinements and revisions of the original proposal to be made – they will become the bases of conferences, articles, books…

(2) In principle, an academic might well champion multiple meanings (e.g., championing both the OT background of ‘Son of God’, and connections with Hellenistic usages); in practice it is probably inevitable – and may even be necessary, given the sheer labour involved – that individual academics will latch on to particular meanings and run with them. In which case, a well-rounded interpretation of the text will only be found in the argument between multiple academics (not in the success of any one individual or group). The proper form in which the results of academic historical criticism can be presented will be a dialogue.

(3) To an even greater extent, Christian individuals and groups are likely to pursue particular lines of interpretation – grasping hold of some roughly coherent way of taking the texts (and therefore prioritising some of the available meanings of individual elements), in ways which connect to the development of that individual or group’s life. (It might be, for instance, that Christian interpretations of Gospel language about Jesus as ‘Son of God’ get interpreted in the light of OT passages in such a way as to authorise and enable Christian mining of those OT passages – providing a route by which they can become part of the community’s self-identification in relation to the Israel of the OT, and part of its repertoire of ways of thinking about its relationship to contemporary Judaism.)

(4) Even more clearly than in the case of academic investigation, the proposal of particular meanings is a proposal of particular forms of life, particular ways forward. This is not now simply a matter of division of labour, nor simply of the psychology which leads individuals and groups to hold fast to ‘their’ meaning. It is, rather, because at any given time an individual or group can only to live the text by living some determinate subset of possible meanings. Living involves the making of decisions. ‘On the other hand…’ provides no way forward.

(5) In principle, therefore, recognition of the limitation, the arbitrariness, of such decisions, can’t lead to the proposal of a single form of life which interpeted the text ‘properly’ – i.e., interpreted it without such arbitratiness. Rather, the ‘proper’ form in which Christian interpretation of the text can be seen in the round will be in the dialogue between individuals and groups who have decided differently. The proper form of Christian interpretation of the Bible will take the form of ecumenism.

(6) Some of my language here is wrong, though. Individuals and groups end up pursuing particular meanings not (normally) because they select them deliberately, and with acknowledged arbitrariness, from a range of possibilities all seen as equally available – but because they find themselves chosen by those meanings – captivated by them, given them. Other meanings might still be regarded as possible in the abstract – but not as truly live options.

(7) I know that the straightforward ‘academic’ versus ‘believing community’ distinction is questionable, but let’s stick with it for now. For the academic, the interests within which particular meanings can come to the fore can be very broad: interest in the reconstruction of 1st Century Palestinian society; interest in 1st Century Judaism; interest in the development of Christian piety in the first four centuries, and so on. For the believing community, the interests within which particular meanings can come to the fore will be rather different. Formally, attention to a particular meaning is only going to flourish if it makes some contribution to the life of the community – though the ways in which that can happen are more diverse than we might imagine. Substantively – and here I am perhaps speaking more prescriptively than descriptively – the Gospel texts will be interesting primarily as witness to the identity and significance of Jesus of Nazareth.

(8) If we simply concentrated on the formal side – the ‘livability’ of the text – the dialogue of interpretations found in the Christian community might have quite tenuous and ambivalent connections to the conversations of the kind of historical criticism that focuses on the origins and ‘original meanings’ of these texts (though would perhaps retain stronger connections to the kind of historical criticism that looks at the reception history of the text). If, however, we concentrate on the texts as witness to Jesus, the connections to origins are going to remain unavoidably important.

(9) This means, I think, that the ‘conversation of interpretations’ in the Christian community is bound to take a different shape from, say, the Talmudic conversation of interpretations in the Jewish community. Questions of origin, as far as I can see, quite appropriately matter less in the latter case. Law is not the same as witness.

All this is, I know, intolerably abstract. It’s simply attempted as a summary of some thoughts buzzing round in my head at the moment.

Inventing New Testaments

I’ve just read through David Parker’s inaugural lecture as Professor of New Testament Textual Criticism and Palaeography in Birmingham. Very interesting stuff:

It would seem obvious … that what I am trying to do is to demonstrate that  there is not and never has been a New Testament, and that copyists and users have been inventing New Testaments at a frightening rate.  I hope that I have sketched ways in which I might make this demonstration.  But I am not going to do so.  Instead, I would like to explore the reasons for the emergence of New Testaments and for their variety, avoiding the usual theological and textual explanations.  Instead I shall present evidence that the most significant contributions to developments in the understanding and character of New Testaments have been technological innovations in production methods and in physical form.  After all, “inventing” is associated most strongly in the modern mind not with artistic creativity but with scientific or technological discovery.  I leave open the question whether we invent particular technologies because we need them at that particular point.  My argument is that it has been developments in the format of books that have been most significant in shaping the ways in which those books have been used.

Beginning in the middle 5

Mark 1:1:

ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ υἱοῦ θεοῦ

Genesis 1:1 (LXX):

ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν

I’d like to be able to make an argument something like this: Mark begins his Gospel with an ἀρχὴ in conscious echo of the beginning of the LXX: a new beginning for new Scriptures… Saying something like this would enable me to ratchet up the tension between this and the καθὼς γέγραπται of the next verse.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I can make so straightforward a move. I’d need, I think, to find more links between Mark 1 and the LXX of Genesis 1 in order to outweigh the difference between ἐν ἀρχῇ and ἀρχὴ. I’d also need, perhaps, to have done some thinking about what it would have meant in the middle of the first century for Mark to be consciously emulating his ‘scriptures’. And, perhaps most problematically, I would need to argue against those who claim that Mark 1:1 is a scribal addition, making up for the loss of an original beginning. Such arguments are not impossible, of course, but I don’t at the moment see my way to making them stick.

So what can I say? Well, think of the following scenario. A politician says something accidentally apt – not because of a Freudian slip, but simply because the context in which we are able to interpret his or her words gives them a meaning the politician never intended, but which happens to be funny or thought-provoking. So, for example, earlier this year George W. Bush was speaking about the Asian tsunami, and (quite rightly) rejecting the views of those who saw it as a direct intervention of God. He stumbled as he constructed his sentence, however, and ended up saying “In no way, shape, or form should a human being play God.” Now imagine a political commentator who picks up this phrase and runs with it, suggesting that Bush had unwittingly stated the principle by which his own conduct (over Iraq, say) should be judged. The commentator would be playing with the phrase, using it as a hook on which to hang some reflections and criticisms. The comments would not stand or fall by whether they were a fair interpretation of this particular statement of Bush in its original context, but by whether they turned out to be insightful and fair comments about his political activity as a whole – a much, much more complex matter.

By analogy, I think I can say that there is, whether Mark recognized it or not, a resemblance between the beginning his Gospel has ended up with, and the beginning of Genesis. And I think I can say that it is an appropriate resemblance, a telling resemblance – even if unintentionally so. And, further (and unlike the political example just given) I think I can say that such a noting of resemblance might be more than just a hook for things we’ve thought already, but might be a stimulus to new thought – something that will send us on an interesting journey of exploration. And, lastly, I think I can say all this despite the fact that it’s quite likely to be an accidental resemblance, but still intend it as a serious way of engaging with this text. I can, that is, say that although I’m playing with this particular fragment of the text, the exploration to which this playfulness leads will stand or fall by whether or not it proves to be an insightful and fair way of thinking about the text as a whole – although judging that will be a very complex matter.

To put this in traditional terms: my playing with the resemblance between the two beginnings has to do with a ‘spiritual sense’; but that doesn’t undercut the primacy of the ‘literal sense’, which alone can ‘prove’ (i.e., test) doctrine….