QOTD: Leonard Cassuto Pt. 2

Continuing on from my QOTD from last week, here is another quote from the same chapter from Leonard Cassuto ("Professionalization"), but focusing on student debt--which given the current public discourse should be very relevant:

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Jeffrey J. Williams of Carnegie Mellon University persuasively compares student indebtedness to indentured servitude. For a new Ph.D. who is lucky enough to land an intellectually rewarding job in  his or her field (whether in or out of academia), the burden of paying off student loans on a relatively modest salary means a life of poverty from which the gentility wears off like a cheap coat of paint. Economist Paul Krugman warned in 2005 that the United States is threatening to become a "debt peonage" society, in which borrowers work endlessly for creditors to service debts they can never retire.

We can't talk honestly about professionalization--or the larger meaning of being professional--without bringing debt into the conversation. Debt affects what kind of professional a student is or can be. Graduate students don't explore many of the assumptions that underlie their own professionalization, but they are unsurprisingly well aware of the onus of their loan debts. In this case, it's the professors who lack self-awareness. When professors and administrators countenance practices that maintain (or even increase) time to degree, we make ourselves complicit with a system that hurts our students' lives.
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But we can also view the time-to-degree question--and with it the idea of professionalism--through the prism of graduate student debt. When I complained in a newspaper column about how academic job searches tend to privilege candidates who stay in graduate school longer, some commenters disparaged my concern. "Who wouldn't hire a [more experienced candidate]?" asked one, while another declared, "Potential is just that" and called it a "risk" to hire a less experienced Ph.D.

But if more time in school equals more debt, then a preference for more experienced Ph.D.'s essentially adds to graduate student indebtedness. If we ask for graduate students to acquire a hyper professionalism in order to get a professor's job, we're essentially asking them to buy that training out of their future earnings--which, given the shakiness of the job market, are uncertain at best. Put simply, we're asking them to spend money that they haven't got and that they can't be sure they will ever get, to acquire a specialized skill set (how to succeed in academia) that they may or may not be able to put to direct use. And we ask those who want to try for a professor's job to do this at the expense of shaping their preparation for other kinds of work.

Viewed thus, a preference for more experienced job candidates is not simply instrumental. It's also pernicious, and redolent of malign neglect of one of our most pressing, but least visible, concerns as teachers of graduate students. We can debate the intellectual pros and cons of graduate student professionalization (hyper specialization, the utility of graduate student publication, etc.) until the next millennium; but let's not forget that money is at stake, and it belongs to the poorest members of academic society.

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From the outside looking in, there is something very disturbing about this: by creating an entire class of professors who can never retire due to debt, we are only exacerbating the situation that is the dismal job market. Because modern medicine has extended the quality of life for all (which is a good thing), people can literally work for longer number of years. And this all the more so for jobs that are less physically intensive such as the professorship. All things being equal, even without the debt, I can imagine many professors wanting to work for many decades, well past the usual age of retirement that is common (or required) in other jobs. Therefore, professors can work a longer number of years (because health and desire) but they will and must (because of debt). That means even less jobs for those finishing graduate school, which means bigger debt for such graduates, which leads them to lengthen their years of work if they make it to the other side, and on and on goes this downward spiral.

QOTD: Leonard Cassuto

Another recommended reading for anyone interested in higher education is Leonard Cassuto's The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2015). I've had the pleasure of meeting Lenny on several occasions as he served as a consultant/guest for events we hosted at Emory University. He has provided sage advice and has been gracious enough to listen to my own story in academia (mind you, our fields of expertise are completely different and I have never met him before these events). Anyone who has talked to Lenny about higher education will know immediately how much he cares about "the university" as an institution while simultaneously caring deeply about the graduate students' success and the need to reform the way doctoral programs are set up currently. To provide just a quick background: Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English at Fordham University and is a frequent contributor to The Chronicle of Higher Education (see here). I highly highly recommend this book. It is thoroughly researched and includes ~50 pages of endnotes for all of you who want to pursue these questions further.

In the sixth chapter of his book, "Professionalization," I came across the following (likely resonating with many friends and colleagues out there):

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Hiring committees now routinely choose among applicants who have accomplished much more than their interviewers had at comparable stages of our own careers. At the same time, though, we've been calling for reducing the time that graduate students take to complete their degrees. How can we square that imperative with our hiring practices?

Just about everyone agrees that graduate students--and academic culture as a whole--would benefit if our Ph.D. students could graduate in fewer years than they do now. Deans call loudly and frequently for streamlined degree programs, and many, if not most, graduate directors have been asked to figure out ways to reduce the amount of time students spend in graduate school …

One important reason that graduate students take longer and longer to finish is because departments don't reward quick finishers with academic jobs. In fact, we do quite the opposite. In the search for the best candidate to fill an opening, hiring committees privilege the kinds of achievements that can be attained only when graduate students stay in school for more time, not less. We offer the highest prizes--full-time faculty positions--to the ones who stay longer.

Let's compare two hypothetical new Ph.D.'s. The specs can be adjusted by field, but the gist of the difference should be clear. Candidate A completed her Ph.D. at a rapid clip and has emerged from her program with a passel of recommendations attesting to the publishable quality of her dissertation and to her creativity, perspicacity, teaching ability, and enormous upside potential. Candidate B, who took three years longer, is also coming out bedecked with praise. She's done more varied and advanced teaching than Candidate A, and she has placed a couple of articles in leading journals in her field.

We would naturally expect Candidate B to have more to show for the extra years she spent in school, and we see as much in the form of her publications, enhanced teaching credentials, and (depending on what field you imagine her in) perhaps work on grants or even some administrative experience. That extra expectation is amply reasonable: if you take more time, you should do something useful with it.

What happens when hiring committees compare the two applicants? This is not a hypothetical question. Hiring committees find themselves presented with versions of this A-B comparison all the time. And if you look at the profiles of the assistant professors who get hired these days, you'll see that the nod almost always goes to those who look more like Candidate B

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In fact, many departments take it even further and hire assistant professors who have been out for two or three years or even longer. These midlevel assistant professors (who typically show up with an armful of publications and other achievements) for entry-level jobs are then encouraged to reset their tenure clocks backward. Although that adjustment is made post graduation, it essentially converts an experienced faculty member back into a recently minted Ph.D. and thus contributed to the same overall trend (You'd think that departments would instead bring such well-qualified new hires up for tenure early, but somehow that never happens.) To be sure, junior faculty members are themselves complicit in such retrograde moves. Most of those who sacrifice years of experience do so in order to rise up the academic food chain, move o a preferred geographical area, or both. But we can hardly blame them for choosing options that employers make available to them.

What does it mean for an institution to advertise an entry-level position and then pit new Ph.D.'s against applicants who have years more experience? To begin with, it amounts to a preference for concrete achievement over raw potential. It also creates inexorable selective pressure in that direction. After a couple of years on the market, Candidate A gradually metamorphoses into Candidate B.

Choosing experience over possibility can result from the lure of achievement--and the achievements of today's graduate students are indeed considerable. But it can also result from complacency: instead of relying on one's own judgment, one substitutes the judgment of journals and presses. An emphasis on attainment over potential further implies that an applicant needs to have experience in order to get experience: a classic Catch-22 that is bridged by the willingness of departments to employ their student apprentices far past the point of simply training them.

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A friend and I have a phrase for that Candidate B. We call them "fake assistant professors." This refers to the fact that such candidates are usually 3-5 years removed, with at least 2-3 years of employment elsewhere. To our minds, they are "fake" insofar as when they are compared with newly minted Ph.D.'s. They often have 3-5 publications in top journals, at least one monograph published (sometimes even more!) and are, for all intents and purposes, "associate" level, but the timing of their employment/tenure hasn't brought them to that point. It is somewhat disturbing that such candidates are applying for what is essentially supposed to be "entry-level," pitting themselves against other new graduates (mind you, as Lenny noted above, this is not completely their fault). How likely is it that a committee will consider the "potential" of a new Ph.D. over such overwhelming portfolios?

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).

Translation

This past year, in my work as one of the SIRE (Scholarly Inquiry and Research at Emory) Graduate Fellows, I had the wonderful opportunity to work with a team of other fellows in a variety of fields including Biology, English, Environmental Health, and Physics. One of the things we had to learn, as part of our professional development. is how to talk about research to an interdisciplinary group of researchers. This is certainly not easy, even less so when you start mixing humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences altogether. Still, I think this is supremely important in the current climate of academia, and there seems to be a real push (and not just in words) for interdisciplinary dialogue and getting out of our mini silos.

During the school year, then, we taught a group of undergraduate researchers on how to create an "elevator pitch," basically a ~3 minute presentation about their research that even the most novice of listener should be able to reasonably comprehend. This is important, as it shows the listener the value of the research being conducted as well as providing a helpful bridge between serious scholarly inquiry and the general public (= translation).

All this to say, I just finished a wonderful book by Professor Susan Eastman, who was one of my first teachers at Duke Div. She was an amazing teacher and a great person overall, who seemed to have that gift in straddling the academician/practitioner divide. Her book titled, Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul's Anthropology, is a great example of how she melds her interests in serious scholarly inquiry as well as in practical outcomes (the so what question) of that research:

This is a serious book. She wrestles closely with even contemporary discussions in neuroscience, personhood, etc., all in the service of her bigger questions in thinking about Pauline anthropology afresh. Her use of other disciplines, however, is not amateurish or faddish, she seriously took the time to digest and understand what contemporary scientists and thinkers are saying about these issues.

Anyway, in her concluding reflections, she wrote some words that really struck me as being a wonderful example of translation (or at the very least provoking translatable questions, as we will see with her probing questions at the end):

"... the complex overlapping of relational systems means that social institutions must live with imperfection rather than demanding closure and a resolution of differences that will inevitably benefit some and harm others. One aspect of Christian witness is thus to name the lack of closure and the continued ruptures and suffering in all humanity, including the body of Christ. To fail to do so betrays the bodily interconnectedness that underlies Paul's thought; when a community claims to have achieved perfect unity, one wonders who has been left out; when an individual claims to have achieved wholeness, one wonders at what expense that 'integration' has happened. Rather than pushing for some kind of personal or social perfection, perhaps speaking truthfully about the lack of wholeness most perfectly manifests Paul's realism about Christian existence this side of the eschaton … 
I suggest that a conversation between Paul and current work on the person affords new opportunities for resourcing Paul's thought in pastoral and clinical settings … the participatory logic of his gospel needs interpretation and articulation to address particular contexts of care in churches and other institutions today. Those contexts include situations in which the worth and identity of the person seems to be at risk, such as the understanding and care of those who suffer from dementia and those who care for them; the articulation of personhood and relationship among and with autistic persons; support for people suffering the aftereffects of trauma; and articulating real hope in the face of death. All of these situations often result in social isolation; all of them are unavoidably embodied; all of them require care in interpersonal networks. How might Paul's understanding of the body as a mode of connection and communication be deployed in such care? How might his depiction of sin as a hostile, enslaving agent be deployed diagnostically in some traumatic situations? Does his view of persons as relationally constituted overlap with debates in psychology and psychiatry about the relationship between biomedical care and talk therapy? Does the understanding of personhood as a criteria-free divine gift speak to debates about the human status of limit-cases, such as fetuses, those in comas, extreme dementia, and so forth?"

If you are currently engaged in research, how do you imagine "translating" it for others and what kinds of provocative questions could be raised on the basis of that research?

Book announcement: Miracles

I would like to make a quick announcement regarding the recent publication by my doctoral supervisor, Luke Timothy Johnson:

Titled, Miracles: God's Presence and Power in Creation. Throughout the early period of writing my dissertation (he's already moved on to another project while I'm just about putting the finishing touches on trying to publish my first book!), we talked about him writing various chapters of this book. I'm glad to see it is finally out.

The idea of "miracles" is not an easy topic to discuss, still less to analyze and write about. I haven't picked this up yet but I will in the near future. I suggest you go and do the same!

Race/Racism in Antiquity Pt. 1

I've been developing a course on race/religion in antiquity and am currently reading through a book titled, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2004) by Benjamin Isaac. He has a very interesting section in the introduction on how prejudices continue to be propagated even in modern literature (as supposedly innocuous as a travel guide!). I hope to blog through some interesting points I come across as I read through this book and continue to develop my syllabus.

He cites what he names as a "random example" taken from the Michelin Guide to Venice (1st ed. 1996) that says the following [with bold print and italics from original text]:

To stereotype the flavour of Venice would be detrimental to the magic of the place and offensive to her proud inhabitants. The Venetian is born with a positive outlook on life that is maintained by an imperturbable nature in which emotional involvement is tempered, in a very gentlemanly manner, by a certain indifference to anything that lies beyond the lagoon. This leads to him being noticeably predisposed to being tolerant, an innate quality acquired from a knowledge of different peoples distilled over the centuries. The blend of an almost Anglo-saxon [sic!] aplomb with boundless and all-embracing curiosity renders this personality even more fascinating.

It may be a random example, but Benjamin's comments are helpful: "This continues for half a page. It is a good example, because the authors are demonstrably unaware that they are spouting stereotypes—which they claim to reject. It is interesting that the rejection of stereotyping in the first sentence itself is justified by a stereotype: to stereotype Venetians would be offensive to those proud people, it is claimed, as if it is legitimate to stereotype the inhabitants of a town without magic, provided its inhabitants are not proud. Venetians are born with a positive outlook on life and tend to be tolerant because they dispose of a reservoir of knowledge accumulated over the centuries. This betrays confusion between acquired and inherited characters, comparable with what we encounter in many ancient texts."

Benjamin warns that even a "positive" stereotype is damaging in its propagation of prejudices.

New editors of NIGTC

Very happy to hear that Mark Goodacre has been named as one of the editors of the NIGTC series. With the passing of I. Howard Marshall and Donald Hagner scaling back his duties, Eerdmans named Mark and another, Todd Still, as the new editors of the series.

Congratulations!

HT: Eerdword

New commentary on Acts

Hello readers! I know it's been a long time since my last post, it has been a truly busy season trying to write the dissertation, finish up some teaching work, work as a TA for the college, send stuff off for review, etc. etc. I hope this post finds all of you in good spirits despite what is a tumultuous season in American politics.

I wanted to point out a fairly new commentary by one of my teachers, Professor Carl Holladay, Acts in the New Testament Library series. It was a long work in progress and I know he's very happy to see it finally out in print:

It's a beautiful hardback volume and it also contains a very good section (among other important things throughout!) concerning the text of Acts, which I'm sure many scholars will benefit from for years to come.

I think it will be out in the bookstands at SBL/AAR in San Antonio, so get yourself a copy there if you are able! Unfortunately, I will not be attending this year, but if you are going, I wish you all safe travels and an enjoyable time in SA.

BOOK NOTICE

I just saw that Professor Kavin Rowe from Duke University Divinity School has a new book which is set to come out very soon, titled One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions (Yale University Press, March 2016): 

I know he's taught NT and Greco-Roman philosophy at Duke Div on multiple occasions and I'm sure that was part of what he was working on here as well as his earlier book. The blurb from Yale is as follows:

In this groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary work of philosophy and biblical studies, New Testament scholar C. Kavin Rowe explores the promise and problems inherent in engaging rival philosophical claims to what is true. Juxtaposing the Roman Stoics Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius with the Christian saints Paul, Luke, and Justin Martyr, and incorporating the contemporary views of Jeffrey Stout, Alasdair McIntyre, Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Pierre Hadot, and others, the author suggests that in a world of religious pluralism there is negligible gain in sampling from separate belief systems. This thought-provoking volume reconceives the relationship between ancient philosophy and emergent Christianity as a rivalry between strong traditions of life and offers powerful arguments for the exclusive commitment to a community of belief and a particular form of philosophical life as the path to existential truth.

I also noticed that he is listed as a full professor now on Duke's website which is quite amazing (if it isn't an error) because he finished his PhD not that long ago at Duke. This probably speaks to his scholarship and other contributions to the school which from everything I've heard has always been very positive. It'll be interesting to see how this book is received once it's out; I wouldn't be surprised if there will be a future SBL session engaging with his book.

VIDEO: Paul and "gift"

If you were at AAR/SBL this year in Atlanta, and your interest is in NT, or even more narrowly, Pauline studies, you would have likely heard about John Barclay's just published book, Paul and the Gift. On top of that, maybe you had the chance to attend the session devoted to reviews of Barclay's book, with a very serious panel consisting of Joel Marcus, Margaret Mitchell, and Miroslav Volf. I had kind of a packed schedule, so I only caught the back end of Dr. Marcus's review (honestly, all I remember is him saying that Paul and the gift is a gift that keeps on giving and some comments about 4 Ezra) and stayed for most of Dr. Mitchell's review before I had to scoot out for a meeting and run back when Barclay was giving some final comments. Again, I had to leave early again, so needless to say, I didn't get to hear a lot of the interactions regarding Barclay's book.

Also, I had meant to finish reading Barclay's book before this session but my schedule got ahead of me, so it was helpful to hear from Marcus and Mitchell on some of the perceived shortcomings of Barclay's book–though as far as I could tell, it was very well received despite the critical comments about it. In my opinion thus far, the book is very well organized and clearly argued; it seems to me that Barclay's book dances along that fine line between the appropriation of method(s)/analytical tool(s) (in Barclay's case, the 6 "perfections" of gift/grace) and careful sifting through the primary sources. Honestly, it's rare to find a book of this length and quality that doesn't seem unnecessarily long or difficult to read given the technical fine points of book x. It's so clear and well organized to the degree that I think even a non-specialist could derive huge benefits from reading his book.

Anyway, if you are interested, I also saw that there is a short clip of Barclay explaining his project. Check it out:

Book Notice: Bultmann

I want to mention a recently published book titled, Rudolf Bultmann: A Companion to His Theology (Cascade) by David W. Congdon. On his most recent blog post (go here) he mentions a promo by which you can receive 40% through Nov. 15. 

Bultmann and his Theology of the New Testament still receives plenty of attention even in NT scholarship, seen for example in the recent publication of Beyond Bultmann. Last year in SD, SBL held a session devoted to this book (room was packed), and all the participants did a great job presenting their own interactions with Bultmann. My own supervisor also wrote an essay for the volume, though he was not in the SBL session. I'm still intrigued by his hermeneutical methods and his NTT, and I think Congdon's book will be a welcome addition to helping Bultmann dilettantes like myself wade through his vast oeuvre beyond just his Theology. Go buy a copy if you're interested!

Marcion

It looks like interest in Marcion is picking up as of late with the (soon to be) publication of scholarly works concerning this interesting figure in early Christianity. Harnack had attempted to recover Marcion's text more than a century ago, and as far as I know he still sets much of the agenda on the question of Marcion and his relationship to the NT. Check out these new books in chronological order with their respective descriptions:

Markus Vinzent, Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels (Peeters: 2014)

Are the Synoptic Gospels at odds with Early Christian art and archaeology? Art and archaeology cannot provide the material basis 'to secure the irrefutable inner continuity' of the Christian beginnings (Erich Dinkler); can the Synoptic Gospels step in? Their narratives, however, are as absent from the first hundred and fourty years of early Christianity as are their visual imageries. 'Many of the dates confidently assigned by modern experts to the New Testament documents', especially the Gospels, rest 'on presuppositions rather than facts' (J.A.T. Robinson, 1976). The present volume is the first systematic study of all available early evidence that we have about the first witness to our Gospel narratives, Marcion of Sinope. It evaluates our commonly known arguments for dating the Synoptic Gospels, elaborates on Marcion's crucial role in the Gospel making and argues for a re-dating of the Gospels to the years between 138 and 144 AD.

Dieter T. Roth, The Text of Marcion's Gospel (Brill: January 2015)

In The Text of Marcion’s Gospel Dieter T. Roth offers a new, critical reconstruction of Marcion’s Gospel including various levels of certainty for readings in this Gospel text. An extensive history of research, overview of both attested and unattested verses in the various sources, and methodological considerations related, in particular, to understanding the citation customs of the sources set the stage for a comprehensive analysis of all relevant data concerning Marcion’s Gospel. On the basis of this new reconstruction significant issues in the study of early Christianity, including the relationship between Marcion’s Gospel and Luke and the place of Marcion in the history of the canon and the formation of the fourfold Gospel, can be considered anew.

Judith M. Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century (forthcoming, Cambridge: April 2015)

A comprehensive and authoritative account of the 'heretic' Marcion, this volume traces the development of the concept and language of heresy in the setting of an exploration of second-century Christian intellectual debate. Judith M. Lieu analyses accounts of Marcion by the major early Christian polemicists who shaped the idea of heresy, including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Epiphanius of Salamis, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Ephraem Syrus. She examines Marcion's 'Gospel', 'Apostolikon', and 'Antitheses' in detail and compares his principles with those of contemporary Christian and non-Christian thinkers, covering a wide range of controversial issues: the nature of God, the relation of the divine to creation, the person of Jesus, the interpretation of Scripture, the nature of salvation, and the appropriate lifestyle of adherents. In this innovative study, Marcion emerges as a distinctive, creative figure who addressed widespread concerns within second-century Christian diversity.

They all look to be fascinating studies on Marcion and I'm sure many scholars will benefit from these works.

Book Review by LTJ

My teacher here at Emory University, Luke Timothy Johnson, has recently posted a short book review of Bart Ehrman's How Jesus Became God on the Commonweal Magazine website. Check it out here.

On this note, if you are interested in pursuing LTJ's comments further, check out his Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity.

Yet Another Book Notice

I guess November can be chalked up as a Duke month for my blog, as I have yet another post featuring a book by a Duke University professor. This book is a bit outside of my area of expertise, though still interesting. It is written by Grant Wacker, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Christian History at Duke Divinity School. If I'm not mistaken, he is a premier American religious historian, and I remember when I first got to Duke a few years ago, I talked with him for a while for a job as a research assistant that involved working on a book on Billy Graham. I should mention though that I did not get the job, but given my own area of interest that was completely incongruous with his project, he was still very gracious enough to meet with me and was great fun to talk to. Over four years later, his book seems to have come to completion with America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (according to Amazon, published Nov. 7, 2014). If you're at all interested in modern American religious history, this is a book you want to pick up.

Two Books

In keeping with the theme of Duke Div from my latest post, I want to bring to your attention two books that are out now, both written by my former teachers at Duke.

The first book is written by Richard Hays and if his earlier book Echoes reimagined the way we understood Paul's reading of the OT, then his new book, Reading Backwards may be akin to rethinking about how the four canonical Gospels have appropriated the HB. When I took my OT in NT seminar with him a few years back, he shared with us some portions of that book, and it seems that it has finally come to fruition this November. 

The second book is written by Douglas Campbell, titled Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography and like Hays' book, it's going to be important in how one conceives of Pauline chronology and the relationship between the epistles/Acts, the idea of a 'Pauline corpus,' etc. 

Both Hays and Campbell have a fair share of critics and a large number of supporters, though whatever side you may be on regarding their hermeneutical strategy(s), historical work, etc. etc., you will want to at least take seriously their arguments in these two books. I assume SBL will probably have a sale on them (and if I'm not mistaken there will be a session devoted to Hays' book), so go check them out.

(In)stability of Oral Tradition

I'm currently reading for my comprehensive exams that will take place in the Fall, and that means wading through a ton of books having to do with topics ranging from historical Jesus research, to Pauline theology, to the Synoptic Problem, critical introductions, NTT, history of interpretation, etc. etc. etc. Right now I'm working through a couple different books and one of them is Bart Ehrman's The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (5th ed.) and in chapter 5, he discusses the issue of the Jesus tradition (particularly oral) and writes the following (p. 70):

"No one knows for certain when Jesus died, but scholars agree that it was sometime around 30 C.E. In addition, most historians think that Mark was the first of our Gospels to be written, sometime between the mid-60s to early 70s. Matthew and Luke were probably produced some ten or fifteen years later, perhaps around 80 or 85. John was written perhaps ten years after that, in 90 or 95. These are necessarily rough estimates, but almost all scholars agree within a few years. Perhaps the most striking thing about these dates for the historian is the long interval between Jesus' death and the earliest accounts of his life. Our first written narratives of Jesus (i.e., the Gospels) appear to date from thirty-five to sixty-five years after the fact. This may not seem like a long time, but think about it in modern terms. For the shortest interval (the gap between Jesus and Mark), this would be like having the first written record of Richard Nixon's presidency appear today."

Now, most of this is fairly bland and nothing surprising from a critical standpoint, but what got me scratching my head are the last two sentences of this quotation. Why should I think about this in modern terms? Is the modern sociocultural milieu even remotely close to that of first century Palestine? Was Richard Nixon ever venerated as a miracle worker, exemplary moral figure, much less a divine being (and does that make a difference in how the memory of a person is transmitted?) I take his point that it is not as if some news reporter followed Jesus around and wrote everything down the minute he said them, but to use "modern terms" to highlight the apparent gap between the event and the written narrative seems rather unconvincing. I can't say I have read a whole lot on 'orality' in antiquity, but if my memory serves me right, plenty of scholars have already shown that our current paradigm in which events, memory, knowledge, etc. are passed down and how that occurred in the past are certainly not the same. I don't know if Ehrman is right or wrong entirely on this point, though he could nuance his argument without appealing to 'modern' sensitivities. Yes 5 years in modern terms is certainly a lot; these days not many can even recall with great clarity about events/people from 15 years ago (much less 50 years), but what I am wondering is if that was exactly the same in antiquity.

QOTD: Samuel Sandmel

"It can be set down as something destined to endure eternally that the usual Christian commentators will disparage Judaism and its supposed legalism, and Jewish scholars will reply, usually fruitlessly. I have addressed myself to this topic in three or four essays, and do not intend to pursue this any more beyond this one time, preferring to conclude that with those Christians who persist in deluding themselves about Jewish legalism, no academic communication is possible. The issue is not to bring these interpreters to love Judaism, but only to bring them to a responsible, elementary comprehension of it."

- Samuel Sandmel, The First Christian Century in Judaism and Christianity: Certainties and Uncertainties, 98n10

QOTD: Molly Worthen

As my final semester of coursework is winding down (finally!) this week, I had some more time to resume other random readings that interested me. I've been slowly reading through books on Roosevelt/Taft, the news, economics, and American religious history. The last book on this list is a book by an Americanist at UNC (Worthen) who recently published that book with the title Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. I'm not that far into the book, but I'll just leave you with a quick quote from her introduction:

"The evolution of the evangelical community—and whether, and why, it might be called anti-intellectual—is best traced through the lives of elites: the preachers, teachers, writers, and institution-builders in the business of creation disseminating ideas. When critics describe evangelicalism as anti-intellectual, usually they are not blaming ordinary laypeople. A casual glance at the latest Amazon.com best-seller list, chock full of celebrity memoirs and puppy novels, or the amateur talent shows and dating competitions that top the television ratings, demonstrates that when it comes to intellectual shallowness evangelicals have no advantage on the rest of America."

Douglas Campbell (new book + video)

One of my former teachers at Duke Divinity School, Douglas Campbell, is coming out with a new book titled Framing Paul: An Epistolary Account (see here). He's been teaching a course on the life of Paul at Duke for a few years now I think and I remember him describing to us about working on a book about the chronology of Paul's letters, and this seems to be the working out of that project. His Deliverance of God certainly made some waves in Pauline scholarship and I have no doubt that this book will also do the same on discussions about Paul and his letters. He is certainly a provocative thinker and you can love him or hate him but I don't think you can ignore his work. The book should be out late this year, but for now, check out this video:

Yes!

I found out that I recently won the following books from a giveaway (with the lofty title, "The Amazing T&T Clark Book Giveaway of 2014") by the folks over at The Jesus Blog (+ T&T Clark):

(1) Maurice Casey, Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? (March 2014)

(2) Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne editors, Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (August 2012)

(3) Helen Bond, The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed (May 2012)

This is an area of NT studies that continues to spark interest for me, so I'm very happy to add them to my library collection. Thanks to Chris, Anthony, and T&T Clark for this generous giveaway. If you haven't checked out The Jesus Blog yet, go take a look now here.