My article is out (VC)

I'm happy to announce that my article titled, "Τὸ πνεῦμα in 1 Corinthians 5:5: A Reconsideration of Patristic Exegesis" is now out with Vigiliae Christianae in volume 72, issue 2.

Here's the abstract:
This article questions the assumption that there was a standard patristic interpretation regarding the identity of “spirit” in 1 Corinthians 5:5 (ἵνα τὸ πνεῦμα σωθῇ ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τοῦ κυρίου). Recent scholarship on 1 Corinthians 5 either fails to provide a fair representation of the available data or ignores the patristic exegesis altogether. The present essay addresses this deficiency in current scholarship by presenting the varieties of ways that early Christians read and interpreted “spirit” in 1 Cor 5:5.

This was a couple years' worth of work in the making (from editing, submission, acceptance, etc.), a work that was derived out of my current dissertation. I hope scholars find it to be a good article.

Check it out here (you'll need to be part of an institution or a paid subscriber to access the article).

To Be Paul or Not To Be Paul

So I can't seem to get around the circular reasoning used to determine if a text is Paul or Deutero-Pauline. The argument goes something like this (albeit in simplified terms):

Step 1: Identify places (words, passages, etc.) x in text y that does not sound like Paul

Step 2: Since Paul wouldn't not sound like Paul, x gives you a good measure whether y was in fact  written by Paul

Now, what seems missing is Step 1a, which is: Let us decide already what falls under the purview of "Paul," so that we have a collection of terms, thoughts, systems, theology(s), etc., that tells us what constitutes genuine Pauline thought. But if we have already decided that only a certain set of evidence falls under the "Paul" category, isn't this a form of loading the dice?

To take the stylistic issue for example, if one already decided Letters 1-7 are genuine but 8-13 are disputed, and then from 1-7 gather the evidence for some commonality in style (="Pauline"), of course as a self-fulfilling prophecy it is no surprise to find that Letters 8-13 do not sound "Pauline."

To broaden the scope a bit further, there is the question of "consistency" in Pauline thought, which as often is the case, scholars are divided to no end. Some argue inconsistency, some argue consistency, some argue some middle ground, etc. etc. etc. If in fact Paul has written letters spanning 5-10 years from the first to the last, is it so out of the question to think that he could change his mind (or develop) on a particular position? Must his theology remain static from beginning to end?

I suppose all of this is provoked by my reading through Ehrman's historical intro to the NT, and again the method of argumentation sounds strange to me. For example, in his discussion of Ephesians, he notes that it has roughly 100 complete sentences and 9 of them are over 50 words in length. He tells us that Gal/Phil are roughly the same length and we can note some astonishing differences. Phil has 102 sentences and "only one of them is over fifty words" (408); Gal has 181 sentences and only 1 over 50 words (He then notes similar statistics in Rom 1-4; 1 Cor 1-4; etc.) Then in terms of hapax, he notes that Ephesians uses 116 words not found in any of the undisputed letters while in comparison, Philippians at slightly shorter length has the highest number of unique words (among the undisputed) "but the total there is only 76" (408).

What if Gal/Phil had 30 other sentences that had over 40 words in length (NB: I did not count them, so this is just hypothetical), would that be okay? Or, what if they had 5 sentences over 50 words in length? Is that good enough? Or would they have to have at least 7 (and why)? What kind of specific criteria does one use to say "Okay, this one made the cut" when you are using these numbers? 15%? 25%? Or to look at the hapax question, what if Philippians had 86 unique words, does that then allow us to bring Ephesians into the fold or not? Why is 116 (or 76) used as a disqualifying #? Without any discussion of what constitutes statistical significance (Ehrman does not indicate if he has looked into the p-value of these #'s; or can something like that even be established here?), these numbers mean nothing besides one's "feeling" that something is amiss.

Now, I am not arguing here for a 7 letter corpus, 10 letter corpus, or even a 13 letter corpus, but I am concerned primarily with the methods of argumentation used to establish the categories in the first place (I would say this also applies for the opposite end of the spectrum, to assume a priori that all 13 letters are "genuine" Paul without clear argumentation to that end.) Finally, a scholar may argue that it is the cumulative case that allows for these conclusions, but again, I am not so sure that works; if I put together 5 questionable probabilities, does the conglomeration of them increase the overall probability of my original thesis?

JSPL 2.2

The Fall 2012 issue of the Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters is out (though the website is not yet updated to reflect this latest issue), and I'm proud to say that my first peer-reviewed article has been published in this issue! It has been a long process of revising, editing, and waiting to get my first publication out there, and I hope that this is just the first of many more adventures in the world of academia. The article is a revised edition of a paper I wrote for a Galatians seminar I took with Susan Eastman. She was very encouraging about submitting the paper for publication, and given that I was unfamiliar with the whole process, her guidance was without doubt one of the reasons why I have been able to get this article published. The main textbook assigned for her course was J. Louis Martyn's Anchor Bible commentary on Galatians so it was a real treat to have him join us for our final session of our graduate seminar to talk about his thoughts on Paul. Having taken a course with both Susan Eastman and Douglas Campbell, I found myself quite amiable to the "apocalyptic reading" of Paul, and consequently, this journal article demonstrates their influence on my own reading of Paul.

The title of the article is "'It Has Been Brought to Completion': Leviticus 19:18 as Christological Witness in Galatians 5:14," JSPL 2.2 (2012): 115-132. In this article, I argue that the citation of Lev 19:18 in Gal 5:14 is not a one-to-one type correspondence in which the Galatians were supposed to obey the love-command found in Lev 19:18, but instead the quotation functions to resonate with the larger context of Lev 18-26 broadly, as a witness to the love demonstrated in the person of Jesus Christ.

I haven't been able to check whether my library has the hardcopy out yet, but if you get a chance to read it, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the article.

Conference Audio

If you are interested in Pauline theology, you'll probably know that one of the professors here at Duke, Douglas Campbell, has recently written a large tome on his own particular reading of Paul and the topic of "justification" (though he likes to use the term "deliverance" more than "justification"). From what I can tell, it's made quite a splash onto Pauline scholarship, and at the end of last year, Prof. Campbell attended a conference in London (at King's College), one that was entirely devoted to engaging The Deliverance of God. I'm glad to see that the conference audio files are now available online! Check out the lineup:

I'll be done with school in about two weeks, so looks like I'll have to dig into these audio files then. Go check it out here.

Justification and Politics?

I'm currently reading through Douglas Campbell's Deliverance of God as mentioned in my previous post. So far it's been pretty good but one consistent critique that I've encountered in virtually every review I read of this book is its length. One particular scholar, Beverly Roberts Gaventa, summarizes this critique as such in Christian Century:

"This is a book that deserves to be read, but virtually every conversation I have heard about the volume has touched on its formidable length (some of which is in small print). Campbell insists that his project requires such length if he is to bring down the citadel of Justification theory. I fear that the length is self-defeating, as it means that only the most determined specialist will work through to the end, and Campbell will have lost the readers he most wants to persuade."

On some levels, I think I can agree, I'm currently on page 305 and he's still clearing the ground, so to speak, so that he can eventually lay down his own interpretive framework, namely, an apocalyptic reading of Paul. Be that as it may, it's been very instructive so far and in this subsection titled 'Justification and Liberal Political Individualism,' Campbell looks into John Locke's political theory to see how the Justification paradigm fits with Locke's own program, furthering its own agenda while circumventing the need to have a tight connection to the Pauline texts themselves to establish the paradigm as viable. In one subpoint, Campbell lays out a pretty strong critique:

"In addition to its enjoyment of four significant affinities with liberal politics — individual contracts, the notion of consent, the privatization of religion, and the characterization of all human relationships in terms of a discourse of currency — Justification is unable to protest very vigorously against liberal politics ... Special revelation associated with either the Scriptures or the Christian dispensation is limited to the private sphere and constrained by the individual's need for faith alone. And tradition and institutional control are repudiated as not genuinely religious. Moreover, Justification finds it notoriously difficult to generate any significant ethical observance from its converts (indeed, it arguable cannot generate this). The theory is hostile to any religious activity beyond faith, labeling it derisively as "works." The ecclesia constituted by the theory remains similarly weak; it is fundamentally individualist, confessional, and voluntarist, rooted in consent. It can ask very little from its converts. And these limitations raise a frightening prospect."


I'm still on this chapter, so we'll see where this all leads. Meanwhile, it seems that the axe that Campbell is grinding is getting bigger and bigger...

Tome

Pronunciation: \ˈtōm\

-noun
1. a book, esp. a very heavy, large, or learned book.
2. a volume forming a part of a larger work.

From time to time, I've seen various books referred to as "tomes," but I don't think any of them comes close to this one:

Amazing! The book comes in at 1248 pages (at least that's what Amazon says, though the page numbering actually ends at 1218 [probably earlier unmarked pages = 30 pp.]), with four parts that are broken down into 21 chapters. I'm really excited to start on this "tome," as I was given permission by Dr. Campbell to enroll in his PhD seminar on Pauline theology for the Spring semester. I've done work on Corinthians, Galatians, and 1 Thessalonians, but not much on Romans, so this should be an exciting but also challenging class to help me think after Paul's thoughts.

I hope I can walk away from this with some measure of confidence that I have grasped a little bit more of Paul's theology. From what I heard, Campbell has an interesting take on it which should make our classes very interesting. He mentioned in the introduction to the book that this work is over ten years in the making, so it's no surprise that it is so hefty. I was already intimidated by books that come in at pages number counts such as 535, 718, 740, 741, and 876, but this one is at 1248! Hope I can get through this in a timely manner...

Know that phrase!

I've been really enjoying Dr. Eastman's Greek Exegesis of Galatians class, and if you've looked through this text in Greek, there are a few phrases that biblical scholars have been wrestling with for... oh, I don't know, decades? I might be wrong, but it seems like the debate will never end. Anyway, here's two phrases that you might be familiar with:

(1) ἔργων νόμου
(2) πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ

The first phrase, most often translated as "works of the Law" occurs seven times (if I'm counting correctly) in the NT: Rom. 2:15, 3:20, 3:28; Gal. 2:16, 3:2, 3:5, and 3:10. The problem lies in what Paul actually meant by "works of the Law." Is it some type of legalistic adherence to Jewish law, customs, traditions, etc. as the Reformers have understood Paul? Or is it the food laws, circumcision, etc., that are the "markers" or "badges" of the ones in the covenant? In addition, this phrase is very odd and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls with 4QMMT (one of the texts from the find), we now have another understanding of the phrase "works of the Law" or מעשי התורה.

The second phrase, most often translated as "faith in Jesus Christ" is actually not as neatly translatable as it seems in the popular English versions. It occurs in this construction five times in the NT: Rom. 3:22, Gal 2:16, 3:22, 3:26, and Phil. 3:9. It is in what's called the genitive construction and in this particular case, most often understood as objective genitive (i.e., faith in Jesus Christ, where Jesus Christ is the object of the faith) or subjective genitive (i.e., faith[fulness] of Jesus Christ, where Jesus Christ is the subject of the faith). Plenty of ink has been spilled on this topic and while the traditional view of seeing it in objective genitive relationship prevailed for a long time, recently the subjective genitive has been gaining support.

Why am I bringing this up? Well I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this whole debate and wanted to know what you all thought about these phrases. We haven't hit either of these phrases yet in my seminar class, but I'm looking forward to the lively debate.