QOTD: M. M. Mitchell

I've been reading Margaret Mitchell's Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and wanted to quote something from the near end of her book. I've really enjoyed reading this book, especially powerful and engaging despite just past ~100 pages. Something should be said about the many modern monographs that easily eclipse 300 pages... Anyway, in her final chapter, she has a section titled "Backwards and Forwards: Final Movements" where she writes the following (emphases original):

The adversarial nature of the agonistic paradigm also continues to pervade the discipline of academic biblical scholarship, in which the text, in whole and part, serves as a witness of a thesis on offer, and the readings of others are demonstrated to be deficient when the evidence is cross-examined. And yet the legal paradigm (long before de Saussure or Derrida!) was overt about the fact that texts do not just "mean things" but their meanings rely upon effort, of argument and evidence, to be adjudicated in some public court of appeal. Origen's telling phrase, "For without witnesses our interpretations and exegeses are incredible," is still as true in modern academic biblical scholarship as in his day (that is what footnotes, for one thing, are all about).

On one hand this is absolutely right; all ideas need testing in the court of human opinion, and scholars and students carry out their civic duty as public readers by submitting their interpretations to judgment. On the other, the dualistic framework can lead to the kinds of overstatements about different readings that the rhetorical handbooks recommend the young orator learn in order to press resolutely his own belief … I would like to suggest that what we learn from the ancient agonistic paradigm is that it is a commonplace to present the options as mutually exclusive, as either/or -- one reads a text either literally or figuratively, with no gray area in the middle (after all, juries are pressed by both sides to tender a verdict in their favour). But that binary, rhetorically constructed in favor of one's own reading and against that of another, is hardly an accurate analytical tool for appraising most reading, which is somewhere between the letter of the text and its intent or deeper sense as discovered later, as discerned by some but not others. Indeed, the "literal" sense itself is a construct, a rhetorical claim for textual, for biblical fidelity. But despite the commonplace, no texts stand "without interpretation," for even an appeal "to the letter" is an argument that depends upon focusing the eye of the reader on one or another chosen detail of the many letters which make up a text (no one reads each letter with the same level of emphasis or attention, akribeia, all at once).