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.

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!

QOTD: Bultmann

The introduction to Rudolf Bultmann's Jesus and the Word (p. 15) ends with the following sentences:

"The essential difficulty in this book ... lies not in the theoretical understanding nor in the acceptance of it as a 'point of view,' but in the actual encounter with reality which it demands. Now for a great end one must be ready to pay the price, and I would rather frighten a reader away than attract one who wants something for nothing."

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?

QOTD: Käsemann

"No one has ever been compelled (in the true sense) to make his decision between faith and unbelief, simply because someone else has succeeded in representing Jesus convincingly as a worker of miracles." 

- Ernst Käsemann, "The Problem of the Historical Jesus," in Essays on New Testament Themes, 19.

(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.