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?

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).

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:

QOTD: John Barclay

Teaching/dissertating has been taking up most of my time, hence very little blogging as of late. I recently borrowed John Barclay's Paul and the Gift, a book that has been a highly anticipated work.  As far as I am aware, Barclay doesn't publish a ton of monograph length material, but when he does, people read and listen. I'm less than a 100 pages in, but so far, I think this book is no exception. The book is not germane to my research, but I've very much enjoyed reading it when I can make time. It is a refreshing investigation into a term/concept in Pauline theology that continues to receive much attention, though as Barclay shows, with much terminological and conceptual slippage among those that talk about it. 

Back to the title of my blog post, I will leave you with a short quotation:

"When two different authors speak of divine benevolence or grace, but disagree on its meaning and its implications, this may be not because one emphasizes grace more than the other, or grasps its 'true' meaning while the other does not, but simply because they are perfecting different facets of grace. As we shall see, Pelagius held firmly to the superabundance of divine grace, which was prior to all human activity; but (for theological reasons) he could not accept Augustine's perfection of the incongruity of grace. Augustine did not believe in grace more than Pelagius; he simply believed in it differently." (p. 77)

If you are attending SBL/AAR this year, you probably know that there is a review of his book. I'm planning to catch the session, which I expect will be very well attended. Unfortunately, I also have a meeting with a publisher that overlaps, so I'm hoping someone out there will have some kind of review of the entire session... If you read this and you are attending, please take some notes! :)

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.

Duke Divinity School & NT Wright

Just this past week, N.T. Wright was at my alma mater, Duke University's Div School and it appears that the school has recorded two videos: first a panel discussion with NT Wright that included three of my teachers at Duke (Profs. Campbell, Eastman, and Hays) and Ross Wagner (who was not at Duke at the time). The second video is titled "Why and How Paul Invented 'Christian Theology,'" a lecture by NT Wright on this issue.

Enjoy!

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?

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:

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.

New Issue of JSNT

I see that the new issue of JSNT is out and one article in particular seemed interesting:

"Whose Abraham, Which Promise? Genesis 15.6 in Philo’s De Virtutibus and Romans 4"

Here's the abstract: 

This article creates a dialogue between Philo’s and Paul the Apostle’s interpretations of Gen. 15.6 specifically, their understandings of Abraham’s faith. Both Philo and Paul see Abraham as functioning in a formally analogous way: for example, Abraham’s faith identifies him as a representative or paradigmatic figure for those who follow him. Yet Philo and Paul develop their interpretations in remarkably divergent fashions. Accordingly, this article will seek to discern the hermeneutical fault line that allows two near-contemporary readers of the same text to construe it so differently. As will be demonstrated, Philo reads Abraham’s story as the narrative of Abraham’s becoming virtuous, and thus how one attains virtue is the key to Philo’s hermeneutic; Paul, by contrast, interprets Abraham’s faith from the vantage point of the Christ-event, such that the focus is on the incongruity between God’s gift and the human recipient.

I haven't been reading much Paul scholarship lately (my coursework right now isn't dealing with any Pauline letters), but two of my classes (Acts and Greco-Roman Backgrounds) deals heavily with working with primary sources outside of the NT, so this seems like an interesting exercise in using a Greco-Roman source for NT exegesis. Also, in my Pauline theology seminar at Duke, we had to read some Alisdair MacIntyre, and I don't know if this author did it on purpose, but his title reminds me of a book by MacIntyre, so we'll see. I haven't read it yet, but for those that are interested, go check it out here.

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.

Quote of the Day

This past semester, we talked at length about Paul's letter to the Romans, and despite spending an entire semester looking hard at the text, it's evident to me that there is much more to be wrestled with and learned before I can confidently say I know something about Romans. The more we seemed to dig into the text, the more I became convinced that much of my own understanding of the letter was built on assumptions that may not necessarily be right. Granted, my teacher had a specific angle to the text that colored our own discussions, but nevertheless, it was very helpful to think critically about this important letter in the NT. One issue that we began to unpack a little bit is the fact that Romans is, in the end, a letter. This means that we should be careful about viewing the book wholesale as a systematic theology book, where we might be prone to believe that everything we wanted to know about anything in Christianity is found in Romans. I'm currently reading Richard Longenecker's Introducing Romans: Critical Issues in Paul's Most Famous Letter, and in it, he makes the same point. I would like to quote some words from a wise Pauline scholar:

"Throughout the first eighteen centuries of the Christian church, Romans was most often understood as a theological treatise or tractate that sets out a relatively complete statement of Christian belief — or, at least, that clearly enunciates the basic features of Paul's teaching ...
Romans, however, is a real letter, not a contrived literary epistle. It contains personal allusions, definite travel plans, and rather specific instructions for a particular people. There are in it, as in Paul's other letters, digressions, parentheses, and unfinished sentences. More importantly, while the longest of the apostle's extant writings, Romans lacks a number of subjects that seem from his other letters to be absolutely essential to Paul's thought and proclamation — most obviously, (1) the omission of any discussion of the resurrection of believers, which was such an important topic in his earlier letters (cf. 1 Thessalonians 4-5, 2 Thessalonians 2, and 1 Corinthians 15), and (2) the lack of any reference to the Lord's Supper, which was a matter of great concern when writing to converts at Corinth (cf. 1 Cor 11:17-34). As a theological treatise, therefore, Romans is somewhat truncated and a bit disappointing in its coverage of important doctrinal themes."

This is something that I think we need to wrestle with a bit further, but at this point, it is significant to note that Romans was not written at the end of one's life. Actually, as Longenecker points out (following the quote above), "Paul writes as a man in mid-career," having completed much of his work in the east, and setting out toward missionary work in the west.

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...