Biblical Studies

Narrative Criticism and North America

/ Luke Wisley / Leave a comment

Over at Crux Sola, Christopher Skinner has a very intriguing post on narrative criticism research on the Gospels being geographically located mainly in North America or to North Americans who study abroad. Conversely, research in Europe has continued to focus more on historical questions. I think his question is an intriguing one, why are North Americans and Europeans asking different questions?

As I’m at my second UK university, I can verify that generally (but not all) of the research among faculty members is of a historical nature. A correlation I’ve noticed has been that scholars who are doing more narrative critical work tend to be those who are seem to be either be more hermeneutically self-aware or who are interested in reading the Bible as scripture. This isn’t the only factor, but a trend I’ve noticed.

Do you have any thoughts?

Debate on the Divinity of Jesus

/ Matt Emerson / Leave a comment

Mike Bird has announced a debate via monograph concerning whether or not Jesus is divine. Bart Ehrman, lover and recycler of all things Baur, Bauer, and von Harnack, is set to publish a book arguing for the development (invention?) of the doctrine of the divinity of Christ after Jesus’ death and the earliest versions of Christianity. Bird, Craig Evans, Simon Gathercole, Chris Tilling, and Charles Hill will be responding with their own monograph, How God Became Jesus.  You can read Bird’s comments, along with each book’s Amazon.com blurb, on his blog.

This should be a great debate. Ehrman has always been able to to put arguments against the veracity, historicity, and antiquity of the Bible in language that can be understood and adopted by the masses (and of course he’s been helped by Dan Brown in that as well). This particular issue is one that strikes at the heart of Christianity, and I look forward to what I will assume can only be a witty but penetrating and insightful critique of Ehrman’s position by Bird et al.

And who can talk about Ehrman debating Christ’s divinity without mentioning this episode of the Colbert Report? (apologies for any ads that pop up…not under my control)

Kevin Vanhoozer on Inerrancy

/ Luke Wisley / Leave a comment

Below is Kevin Vanhoozer’s presentation of an Augustinian perspective on inerrancy of Scripture that was shown at the annual ETS meeting in November. I’m generally in agreement with most of Vanhoozer’s work on hermeneutics and am also happy with his nuancing here as opposed to some others. Hope you enjoy.

HT: Mike Birtd

C.S. Lewis as a ‘Man of Letters’ rather than Scholar

/ Luke Wisley / 1 Comment

downloadAs many are quite aware, this year marks the 50th anniversary of C.S. Lewis’ death and there have been various functions in Cambridge to commemorate his life and work since moving here in October. In whatever time has alloted this term, I have been trying to read more Lewis and books about him.

Recently I read Jacqueline Glenny’s short booklet, “C.S. Lewis’s Cambridge” and I came across a quote from John Stevens, one of Lewis’ Magdalene College colleagues at Cambridge. Stevens’ description of Lewis is a healthy reminder to those of us engaged in biblical research.

“…if talk was his play, books were his love. The enthusiasm and relish which C.S.L. brought to his reading, and that not only in the fields where he was acknowledged master, were infectious. He did not regard himself as a scholar, but as a man of letters. The backgrounds of academic controversy, research and criticism were kept rigorously in their place. He spent his time reading texts rather than reading about them.”

See:

Jacqueline Glenny, “C.S. Lewis’s Camridge”, Cambridge: Christian Heritage Press, 2003.

John E. Stevens, ‘In Memoriam: Professor C.S. Lewis’, Magdalene College Magazine and Record, 8, (1963-1964), p.13.

Gordon McConville on the Paradox of Deuteronomy

/ Luke Wisley / 3 Comments

Lately much of my research has focused on the Solomon narrative in 1 Kings 1-11. With this it is impossible to escape the voluminous amount of secondary literature that has been written on the Deuteronomistic History where the narrative is embedded. While researching various theories on the DH and the theology of Deuteronomy in general I came across a lecture on Deuteronomy from Gordon McConville. McConville is a leading scholar on Deuteronomy and OT Theology. This lecture is on the Paradox of Deuteronomy that he delivered at the Lutheran School of Theology in Aarhus. You can listen to the lecture here.

Brian LePort’s Short Review of Runge’s Greek Discourse Grammar

/ Luke Wisley / Leave a comment

Brian LePort recently posted a positive short review of Steve Runge’s Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament (Hendrickson 2010). My linguistic journey began when I was introduced to using linguistics as tool for exegesis when I took a Biblical Hebrew Syntax course at Southeastern Seminary. Then while at Edinburgh I purchased Runge’s DGGNT and ultimately utilised the concepts from the chapter on Information Structure (Word Order Analysis) for my MTh dissertation on fronting in Amos 3-6.

Three things confirmed for me on the reasonableness of the concepts advocated in DGGNT: First, it was a cross-linguistic approach. The principles found in the grammar have been utilised by linguists and fieldworkers working in numerous types of languages. Thus, the principles are reasonable because they derive from how language works and is processed.  Second, while at Edinburgh I worked with a lecturer in the linguistics faculty and she found the framework linguistically responsible. Here was a linguistics scholar, not a Greek scholar, validating the linguistic framework. The last reason is the explanatory power I found while writing my dissertation. I found that I could explain particular phenomena in Amos that either scholars just make intuitively, but with no exegetical basis, or simply could not answer because they felt the evidence was ambiguous.

A great quote from Brian’s original post that sums my own feelings:

I confess that prior to reading this book I overlooked most (or read without being very conscious) of the devices used by authors to do things as simple as emphasizing the main theme over against an athematic point, or when the author seems to be commenting/explaining the text within the text, or when the author wants to introduce a change in time or place. In fact, many of these chapters introduced ideas that were completely new to me. If not completely new, then paradigm shifting and mind expanding. I found that my reading of the text seemed to go from 2-D to 3-D in the process.

Read the entire review here.

Dirk Jongkind on the Syntax of Revelation

/ Matt Emerson / Leave a comment

Dirk Jongkind has posed some interesting questions about the syntactical construction of Greek prepositions in Revelation. Looking specifically at chapter 4, Jongkind notes,

I was looking at Revelation 4:9 where the text reads τῷ καθημένῳ ἐπὶ τῷ θρόνῳ with the variant ἐπὶ τοῦ θρόνοῦ. . . . In the construction ‘he who sits on the throne’ the case of the prepositional phrase ‘on the throne’ (ἐπί + article + θρόνος) that follows the participle ‘he who sits’ is normally identical to the case of the participle.

So we have ἐπὶ τοὺς θρόνους … καθημένους (4:4); τῷ καθημένῳ ἐπὶ τῷ θρόνῳ (4:9); τοῦ καθημένου ἐπὶ τοῦ θρόνου (4:10).

There are a number of exceptions. With the nominative (ὁ) καθήμενος we find both ἐπὶ τῷ θρόνῳ (21:5) and ἐπὶ τὸν θρόνον (4:2) and with other combinations of κάθημαι ἐπί (e.g. with αὐτός) it doesn’t apply as much. It would be nice if someone could give a good linguistic explanation of this phenomenon.

You can read, and perhaps interact with, the whole post here.

Old Testament Law and Living Biblically

/ Luke Wisley / Leave a comment

Christopher Wright has an article over at Christianity Today on reading Old Testament law and the Christian life. The starting place for his article are two recent books: A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible and Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood which show how clueless many of us can be when thinking about how Scripture speaks today. In his article, Wright provides some helpful ways for us to think about how law still functions as Christian Scripture. My favourite line from the article:

The idea that all the imperative statements in the Bible should be taken literally, as if they all apply to me, is a nonsensical way of handling Scripture.

You can read the whole article here.

A Short Yearly Review

/ Luke Wisley / 5 Comments

This past Thursday I submitted my masters dissertation Topicalization and Focalization: The Function of Preverbal Word Order in Amos 3-6. Now that I have officially finished with the masters degree I have been trying to reflect on some of the broader things that I’ll take away from this year of study. The two things that stuck out to me were a desire to be faithful and the benefit I received from community.

I find it true that for most who study the Bible academically, it is easy to become distracted from the purpose of why they wanted to study the Bible in the first place. This is not to say that studying the Bible academically isn’t a worthwhile pursuit, only that academics should be for the benefit of others and too often the work isn’t thought through of how to make the work accessible to others outside the guild. Thankfully, I was able to step back and reorient myself at times this year that was crucial to how to approach the work. The one thing that really stuck with me was the desire to be faithful. I wanted to be as faithful as I could be to Scripture, to my dialogue partners, and to the gifts I have. I was constantly reminded that the work I do is never perfect and never fully finished; I would never fully please or satisfy everyone and there is always more I could have said or said differently. Stepping back and asking, “Was I faithful?” was critical to being content in the work while also knowing it will never be fully finished.

A second area that I reflected on was the benefited I received from community; both academic and ecclesial. Academic community for the most part is fairly easy to come by on a daily basis: shared study areas, lunches, reading groups, seminars. Twice this year many of my Old Testament colleagues and their families met up together at someone’s home for an evening for tea and coffee (and the occasional cupcakes with Ugaritic letters in icing or sugar cookie in the shape of a tablet). It was a great time for our families to meet socially. There is a definite sense of camaraderie when several families who are all going through similar life circumstances get together for an evening.

Perhaps maybe even a greater benefit to me this year was the community from the small group from our church, St. Paul’s and St. George’s. Meeting with others who are concerned with living their lives before God in his kingdom brought a lot of sanity and perspective. It is easy for me to make more out of being accepted by peers than serving and bettering the Church through the research.

It has been a tough but good year here in Edinburgh and I am thankful to have had the opportunity to study here. My program has ended and many others are getting ready to resume again. I wonder what types of reflections others have had when they had a chance to step back from the grind. Anybody have any thoughts?

The Johannine Split

/ Matt Emerson / 16 Comments

If you were to walk into a bookstore or library with a section on the New Testament, and if you were to look for the books that discussed Luke, chances are you’d find a large number of volumes combining Luke and Acts under whatever topic. So “A Commentary on Luke-Acts,” “A Theology of Luke-Acts,” “The Spirit in Luke-Acts,” and so on. This is true also of NT Introductions, which often discuss Luke and Acts together. On one level this makes sense; Luke is the author of both books, the introduction to Acts calls it the second part of a two part work, and there are a myriad of linguistic, narrative, and theological points of continuity.

But on another level, the canonical one, it makes little sense. The fact is that John almost always comes at the end of the Fourfold Gospel corpus (see Metzger, The Canon of the NT, 296), and there are only three cases of Luke coming at the end, each of which are late (6th, 14th cents.) and regionally isolated.

Why don’t we follow the overwhelmingly dominate order of the NT in our interpretive practice when discussing Acts? While I would not go so far as to say we should start having “John-Acts” monographs, we ought to consider seriously the fact that Luke almost never comes immediately before Acts in any of our available lists, codices, or MSS. The arrangement of material matters in interpretation, even on a canonical level, and John splitting Luke and Acts ought to give NT readers pause in how the interpret the NT exegetically, narratively, and theologically.