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?

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).

New journal issues

The newest issues are out for the two following journals:

The newest volume of JSNT (March 2014) looks to be a very interesting volume, as it is an issue devoted entire to two recently published books on the Gospel of Thomas, one by my teacher at Duke University, Mark Goodacre (Thomas and the Gospels: The Case for Thomas's Familiarity with the Synoptics) and the other by Simon Gathercole of Cambridge (The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas: Original Language and Influences). Here is the TOC:

John S. Kloppenborg, "A New Synoptic Problem: Mark Goodacre and Simon Gathercole on Thomas"

Nicola Denzey Lewis, "A New Gnosticism: Why Simon Gathercole and Mark Goodacre on the Gospel of Thomas Change the Field"

Stephen J. Patterson, "Twice More--Thomas and the Synoptics: A Reply to Simon Gathercole, The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas, and Mark Goodacre, Thomas and the Gospels"

These articles are followed by response papers from both Simon Gathercole and Mark Goodacre. I read through both books this past year, so I'm very much looking forward to reading the responses. In my opinion, Mark is one of the best out there on the Synoptics and as always, his book is very well researched and clearly written, so if you're mildly interested in this subject, go check out his book (quite affordable at that). Gathercole's book was informative as well, though it might set you back some $ if you want to own a copy for yourself.

The newest volume of NTS (April 2014) includes a wide variety of articles, likely to contain something for everyone. Here is the TOC:

Christopher M. Tuckett, "What is 'New Testament Study'? The New Testament and Early Christianity"

Paul Trebilco, "Creativity at the Boundary: Features of the Linguistic and Conceptual Construction of Outsiders in the Pauline Corpus"

Brice C. Jones, "A Coptic Fragment of the Gospel of John with Hermeneiai (P.CtYBR inv. 4641)

Brendan Byrne, SJ, "Jerusalems Above and Below: A Critique of J. L. Martyn's Interpretation of the Hagar-Sarah Allegory in Gal 4.21-5.1"

Dorothea H. Bertschmann, "The Good, the Bad and the State - Rom 13.1-7 and the Dynamics of Love"

James B. Prothro, "Who is 'of Christ'? A Grammatical and Theological Reconsideration of 1 Cor 1.12"

David I. Starling, "'We do Not Want You to Be Unaware ...': Disclosure, Concealment and Suffering in 2 Cor 1-7"

Sheree Lear, "Revelation 19.16's Inscribed Thigh: An Allusion to Gen 49.10b"

Go check them out.

NA28 + LXX

Check this out:

I just saw that this nice volume from the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft is putting together both the Septuagint and the NT together into one massive text.

According to Eisenbrauns, this book runs at over 3,100 pages!

It will include an apparatus criticus among other things, so seems like a great resource for those of you who want access to both the LXX and NT in one book. Though at 3,100+ pages, I wonder what kind of dimensions it will have. I tried to search to find what its thickness would be but could only find its length and width dimensions and no depth.

I already own their standard Septuaginta and the recently published NA28, so I probably won't buy this, but I thought some of you might be interested. Forthcoming Fall of this year.

Did Jesus Exist?

Over at Unbelievable?, this week's program features one of my teachers from Duke University, Mark Goodacre and a Columbia trained historian, Richard Carrier. The topic is "Did Jesus Exist?" Carrier espouses the "mythicist" view that claims that the historical Jesus never existed and Goodacre the opposite. Seems like an interesting debate and this radio program is usually well-moderated (by the host Justin Brierley), so go check it out.

Road to a NT PhD

I had always wanted to write a blog post about my own experience in applying to PhD programs, and now that another season of applications is rolling by, I thought this would be a good time to write this post.

When I first set out with the goal of getting into a PhD program, there was a blog post that was very helpful (see Nijay Gupta's post here). This was all the more important, as I did not personally know anyone pursuing the same goal: none of my friends nor acquaintances were in doctoral programs. One good friend eventually matriculated as a PhD student, but his experience of getting into a doctoral program in the sciences was very different than my own, and another friend eventually entered into a PhD program for the same field as mine, but he went over to the UK, which again is different than my experience of the US system. I've ran into other blog posts dealing with this issue of doing PhD work (see here, here, here, here, and here) and more recently, one blogger has described his own experience of applying to PhD programs in patristics and/or early Christianity. So, I thought I would talk about my own thoughts on this process (for discussions on US vs. UK systems, a helpful starting point is a blog post from one of my teachers at Duke, Mark Goodacre).

(1) GREs: One of the necessary evils of this whole process. An advice that I repeatedly heard from students and faculty was to make sure that my GRE scores were high. Given the very limited spots per school, the admissions committee would need something off-the-bat to whittle down the candidate-pool. See, for example, this very useful summary from Duke University regarding PhD applications to their Graduate Program in Religion. In the last 10 years, the acceptance rate has been anywhere from as low as 4% to a still fairly low 17%. In my opinion, the GRE scores won't make you (i.e. secure you immediate admission to the program) but it will certainly break you. I suppose this might not be as important for some programs out there, but I'm using as my point of reference, schools in the realm of Duke, Emory, Yale, et al. that will probably take your GRE scores seriously. Also, I know for a fact that certain schools nominate some of their best admittees (i.e., high GRE/GPA) for a competitive university-wide scholarship or fellowship that will be added on top of the general stipend for their PhD students.

(2) Money: Unfortunately, none of this is cost-free so be aware of the following things that cost money: GRE prep books, GRE tests, sending GRE scores (per school), transcripts (some schools are free; Duke, for instance), and PhD application fees. I know students who applied to over 15 schools and by my estimation, that should have cost at the minimum close to $2000(!). That leads me to...

(3) Schools: I did not want to spend that much money nor did I even have thousands of dollars to spend on just applying to schools even if I wanted, so I went the route of applying to six schools. Some might think that casting a wider net increases one's chances of getting into a PhD program, but I'm ambivalent to that strategy: these schools have a specific philosophy, culture, and interest(s) within their faculty/students and if you are not a very good fit, no amount of money or applications will increase the chances of getting in. Furthermore, I know there are various "rankings" out there on who has the best religion program, and while that might be irrelevant to some, I often found a correlation between "rank" and the availability of funding. In other words, most, if not all of the "first-tier" programs (I take this term from N. Gupta's blog post) have tons of funding while other schools on the fringe or lower had less (far less in some cases). For example, I'm pretty sure Yale has one of the highest base stipend payments at around $26-27k per year while I know of other students pursuing PhD work at Fuller in Pasadena who are paying their way through the program. Fiscally speaking, there is really no comparison. But, lest that discount another factor...

(4) Lifestyle: This may play a factor in where you apply for your PhD work. For example, you (and/or your family) might have tons of fun in Pasadena, Hollywood, and downtown LA, but that does not mean this comes without a price: I'd guess that a comparable-sized apartment in Pasadena will cost two to three times more than New Haven (not to mention the traffic). So, do not just look at the school but consider what life would be like at school X in city Y. You might be fine spending five years in the libraries, but what about your spouse or children? For example, would you prefer life in Waco, Texas and attend Baylor University or life in Chicago and attend University of Chicago?

(5) Interviews: A month or two after the applications are due, schools will come calling (be aware that some schools do not interview). If you are invited to interviews, it's safe to say that you've done good work, so just try to be yourself. I flew and Skyped for interview sessions and during those weeks, I tried to remind myself that I did not have to fabricate knowledge, provide some undiscovered thesis, or be overly fawning. Personally, I just tried to display genuine interest in the faculty and showed how my interests overlapped with theirs and how my own research could be molded by their program. I can honestly say that all the faculty members were very friendly and interested in getting to know a potential candidate. As far as I can tell, they were not out to "get you," so try not to stress out, just act professionally and be yourself.

(6) The Decision: In a couple weeks, you should have heard something from the admissions committee. If you got accepted to just the one school, then great, the decision is an easy one. However, if you have been accepted to multiple schools, you now probably feel like the LBJ of academia, wondering where you should take your talents. My advice: take your time but be professional in the way you approach this process. If you have been accepted to schools A, B, and C, and know that you are definitely not going to attend school C, there is really no reason to string them along. When you reject their offer, they will seek to fill that spot with another candidate (either for your specific track or across the entire department), but if you tell them 1 hour before the deadline, they will probably be unable to offer that spot to anyone. Professional courtesy calls for timely decision-making.

Anyway, these are my thoughts for now. Hope this will help someone in this process, and to those applying this year, good luck!

Quote of the Day: Seneca

As I wrote in a previous post, I've been reading a little bit of Seneca's Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, and today, I wanted to quote him on one function that letters seemed to play during his time.

"Thank you for writing so often. By doing so you give me a glimpse of yourself in the only way you can. I never get a letter from you without instantly feeling we're together. If pictures of absent friends are a source of pleasure to us, refreshing the memory and relieving the sense of void with a solace however insubstantial and unreal, how much more so are letters, which carry marks and signs of the absent friend that are real. For the handwriting of a friend affords us what is so delightful about seeing him again, the sense of recognition (agnoscere)."
- Seneca, Letter 40.1

In our modern age of easy travel, texting, phone calls, and even video chatting (FaceTime, Skype, etc!?), it might be difficult for us at times to imagine how letters might have been perceived and accepted by their recipients. Consequently, when we come across letters in the NT, we are prone to search out possible universal apothegms that we would like to apply in our current situations. However, a quote like above shows the tender and personal (also in some ways private?) nature of letters that insists on our more careful attention to particular situations, expressions of friendship (or enmity?), etc., that exist in the NT epistles.

Luke the skeptic?

For a while, there was a very popular video on YouTube:

I remember watching this video with a bunch of church friends, going back and forth in debate about the feasibility of such a feat. We never came down to one firm conclusion, but I think everyone felt a bit skeptical of such thing. In our Synoptic Gospels class, we've been looking at various pericopae, and one thing that is striking is what's called Luke's "Great Omission," where he basically leaves off his Markan material from Mark 6:45-8:26. Particularly interesting is the first pericope that he leaves out of his own Gospel, Jesus' walking on water (Mark 6:45-52 + pars.). What's striking about this is that even John includes this in his Gospel which, to me, shows the prominence (or popularity?) of this scene in the Gospel sources. Why does Luke leave it out? Again, just like the video, our class didn't come to one satisfactory conclusion, but if you follow the Farrer Theory (as Dr. Goodacre does) or the Two-Source Theory (positing Q and Markan Priority), the absence of this pericope in Luke does a number on you.

What was it about Jesus walking on water that Luke felt compelled to leave out of his own Gospel narrative?

Gospel Communities?

I blogged earlier this week about Richard Bauckham, who, as I suspected was not a big fan of scholars who put much stock in viewing the communities of the Gospels as the limited main audience of the first four books of the NT. This was first confirmed to me by Nick Norelli in a comment he posted on my blog, suggesting that I read The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences, edited by none other than Bauckham himself. It just so happened that a chapter of it was assigned for class anyway, titled "For Whom Were the Gospels Written?" by Bauckham, and in it, Bauckham makes some pretty strong arguments against reading too much into the Gospel communities being the only audience in a limited, specific way. Here's one paragraph that I thought was very good:

[This is following his paragraph about the debate on the genre of the Gospels]

"However, the full force of the difference of genre will come home to us only if we add a second consideration. We need to ask, about both an apostolic letter and a Gospel, the question: Why should anyone write it?—by which I mean: Why should anyone put this down in writing? In the case of 1 Corinthians, for example, the answer is clear: Paul could not or preferred not to visit Corinth. Paul seems only to have written anything when distance required him to communicate in writing what he would otherwise have spoken orally to one of his churches. It was distance that required writing, whereas orality sufficed for presence. So the more Gospels scholarship envisages the Gospels in terms approximating to a Pauline letter, addressing the specific situation of one community, the more odd it seems that the evangelist is supposed to be writing for the community in which he lives. An evangelist writing his Gospel is like Paul writing 1 Corinthians while permanently resident in Corinth. Paul did not do this, so why should Matthew or the other evangelists have done so? Anyone who wrote a Gospel must have had the opportunity of teaching his community orally. Indeed, most Gospels scholars assume that he frequently did so. He could retell and reinterpret the community's Gospel traditions so as to address his community's situation by means of them in this oral context. Why should he go to the considerable trouble of writing a Gospel for a community to which he was regularly preaching? Indeed, why should he go to such trouble to freeze in writing his response to a specific local situation which was liable to change and to which he could respond much more flexibly and therefore appropriately in oral preaching?

This was a very persuasive argument to me, and since this is only one chapter of the book, I'm hoping to delve further into this issue as the semester goes on.

Sounds weird?

I remember during my Ephesians exegesis class, I ran into a weird phenomenon. In Ephesians 6:12, the Greek reads:

ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν ἡμῖν ἡ πάλη πρὸς αἷμα καὶ σάρκα ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὰς ἀρχάς, πρὸς τὰς ἐξουσίας, πρὸς τοὺς κοσμοκράτορας τοῦ σκότους τούτου, πρὸς τὰ πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις.

Which can be translated: "Because/For our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this darkness, against the spiritual things/forces of evil in the heavenlies."

What is interesting to me is the fact that many major translations (NIV, TNIV, ESV, NKJV, NASB with the exception of NRSV) translates it as "flesh and blood." As far as I can tell, there was one other place where this happens in the NT, at Heb. 2:14, which even the NRSV goes ahead and flips the order around to translate it as "flesh and blood." Is there something about the way the phrase sounds that appeals more to the translators? Even as I say it out loud, "flesh and blood" versus "blood and flesh," the latter sounds a bit more awkward. But then again, I'm wondering if it's because of the striking presence of the first instance of this phrase in the NT, Matt. 16:17, where Jesus declares to Peter that his confession is not due to the revelation of "flesh and blood" but rather his Father in heaven. However, I didn't have time to check the critical apparatus, to see if there is some textual variant that might have caused this.

Either way, I think it's interesting that translators take certain liberties with the ordering of certain words, and while it might not have significance in terms of theology, it's still one example of how reading the text in its original language can be helpful.