It must be summer again . . .

. . . because memes are abounding in the blogosphere again. I’m always ambivalent about them.  On the one hand, it’s nice to be recognised by other bloggers as having something worth linking to.  On the other, one of my friends once suggested that they’re not far removed from chain letters…

However, I’ve been tagged with two in the last week or so and  I want at least to acknowledge the taggers.

noblesse oblige logo

The first was Tim Bulkeley from SansBlogue, who tagged me with the noblesse oblige meme. The rules of this meme are very simple – you display the logo on your blog and tag up to 9 other bloggers whose work you think deserves it. The concept, for those who are not familiar with it, is that with nobility comes obligation (in the case of the French aristocracy, the obligation to look after their serfs, in the case of the tagee, to tag others). Tim is a scholar of Hebrew Bible whose blog has recently concerned itself with the ethical dilemma for people from the developed world of spending money on life’s little luxuries when people in developing countries don’t have adequate food, clothing, shelter or education. Malheureusement, so many people have now been tagged, which makes selecting targets challenging.  Those whose interest in biblical studies extends to putting the study into practice in worship might find both Cheryl Lawrie’s hold :: this space and Roddy Hamilton’s abbotsford.org.uk sites interesting and thought-provoking, maybe even refreshing and encouraging.

Today, the person who goes by the nom de plume Theophrastus Aristotle and writes over at What I Learned from Aristotle tagged me with the far more work-intensive meme. This one, Books that Influenced My Reading of the Bible, as the name suggests, requires five books that have influenced how you read the Bible. I find this very, very difficult to do, because I actually can’t remember any books that have had a lasting influence, but there have been people:

• Prof Brendan Byrne, sj,  who helped me to understand what exegesis is all about and how important it is to read meaning out of rather than into the text
• Prof Nigel Watson, who introduced me to Koine Greek and to the concept that it’s OK to change how you interpret biblical text based on new insights from other scholars
• Prof David Scholer, about whom I’ve written elsewhere, who introduced me to the concept of lenses or grids through which we view the bible
• Dr Morna Hooker, who showed me that a female biblical scholar could have credibility without being ordained or trying to write like a male one and whose “On Using the Wrong Tool” I have also written on elsewhere
• Prof Majella Franzmann, my doctoral supervisor/adviser (does this make her my Doktormutter?) who gently reminds me when I am reading biblical texts wearing my “person of faith” lenses and making  assumptions based on church dogma.
• Prof April DeConick, my mentor and friend, of The Forbidden Gospels Blog, who also reminds me about my faith lenses and who helped me to see why having a clear methodology for approaching text is so important.

While it is very tempting to tag Jim West, just because everyone knows how much he hates memes, I am going to resist.  Tim Bulkeley has just moved house, but might wish to participate, seeing he tagged me with the other one. Hey, if you read this blog and would like to join in because you have books or people you’d like to mention, consider yourself tagged. Oh, and my daughter has just wandered past and after getting over the shock of discovering that bibliobloggers do memes, suggested that I should mention her personal favourite blog, I can haz Cheezburger, although I can’t really see them getting excited about writing about books that changed how they read the Bible or feeling noblesse-ily obliged to link to other blogs. Anyone got a picture of a cat looking at a Bible that we can caption “O, u mean ai should look at it from dis saide”?

Oh, and just so you know, here in lovely Armidale, NSW, Australia, I am wearing thermal underwear in an attempt to deal with the winter cold in a way that has less negative impact on the environment. Our students started end of semester exams on Tuesday and classes begin again on 28 July.

 

Creating Jesus

As readers may be able to tell from the sudden flurry of posts, life around my place has become significantly less hectic.  The first of the end of semester exams begin today, so the students basically all have their heads down working and the things that have been taking up much of my creative headspace are beginning to settle.

I have been meaning for some time to call attention to a series of posts on April DeConick’s Forbidden Gospels Blog around the topic Creating Jesus – How a Jewish Rabbi became God. In her first post (there are 19 so far, written over a two month period) she says:

This has always been the central question to studies of Christology and there have been many scholarly models which have varying amounts of success taking into account the vast amount of written evidence. What is certain is that Jesus was not being worshiped as a god by his disciples during his life. This came later after his death. The question is how long it took to happen, and how it happened that a “monotheistic” Jewish sect took on the worship of a second god.

If you click on the link above, it will take you to all the posts on the issue archived together and you can begin at the bottom and read up. It’s created a huge amount of discussion on the blogsite, most of which I haven’t had time to read, but just reading the postings gives a great insight into how studying early christian documents from a “secular” academic perspective happens.  This is quite different to devotional or confessional biblical studies in which the student is asking different questions and therefore using different methodologies and coming up with different answers.

 

Dynamic equivalence and inclusive language

In response to my previous post on dynamic equivalence, Mike Grondin asked some questions about my approach to inclusive language on the Gospel of Thomas email list. In particular he asked

1. why I think that “kingdom” excludes women since women can be both subjects and rulers?
2. why worry about the word “kingdom” when Coptic Thomas talks about the “kingdom of the Father”?

Seeing I am sure that not all readers of this blog also belong to the email list and I thought these were very good questions that made me think further about the issue, here are my responses in a somewhat more considered form than my response on-list:

Re Question 1:

I don’t think that the notion of  kingdom actually excludes women.  It simply makes them into second class citizens. Growing up as a woman in a British Commonwealth country, I have known ever since I was quite small that a kingdom is a place where men are privileged above women in the leadership stakes. We’ve had a queen for as long as I have been alive, but only because Elizabeth had no brothers. Although Princess Anne was her second child, as soon as her younger brothers were born, she was moved down the list of those in line to the throne to third and then fourth. While the wife of a king is a queen, the husband of a queen who is ruling in her own right is only a prince. A king or queen can have twenty daughters and their succession to the throne is in birth order, but as soon as a son is born, he gets shunted straight to the top of the line. This is why England has only had six queens in modern history – two Elizabeths, two Marys, an Ann and a Victoria. To give you some sense of how few this is, Elizabeth II’s father was George VI and his father was Edward VIII, then there were at least 8 Henrys, 4 Williams and quite a few James and Charles.

Because Commonwealth countries are constitutional monarchies, we all learn this stuff at school. It is quite clear to us that a kingdom is a place where a male is in charge unless there is no male available.  A woman in charge is always the last resort and the choice is based on chromosomes, not ability. Of course, it doesn’t work like this in all countries and in the US, I suspect that this kind of gendered hierarchy is not so deeply engrained and obvious.

In addition, if Crum is to be believed, Coptic speakers didn’t have the option of an alternative to MeNTERO to talk about the concept that we name “kingdom”, so the writer of Gos Thom didn’t deliberately choose a term which has masculine overtones – that was the only option available to express the desired concept.

Re Question 2

The term “Father” is the title, or  one of the titles,  of the current ruler. It doesn’t say anything about who’s allowed to be ruler, just who is currently in charge. The fact that the author of  Gos Thom has chosen to use  “Father” rather than “God” is at least as likely to be because the term “Father” emphasises the relational aspect of the divine as that the divine is conceptualised in masculine terms. I think the use of Father lines up with the notion that we are reading the secret sayings of Jesus that only those “in the know” get to hear.  Surely the readers of this kind of thing would be encouraged to think about the divine in the closer “Father” terms rather than the more distant “God” terms?

Comments, anyone?

 

gospels.net relaunch

Andrew Bernhard relaunched his gospels.net site this week.  It has a new look and in his words:

It is now “an online resource dedicated to the Gospel of Thomas and other early Christian gospels” … The design is straightforward. It includes a blog, which will focus on providing the latest news relevant to the study of early Christian gospels not included in the New Testament.

It also includes three web pages, which I have labeled “resource centers.”

Each resource center provides extensive lists of helpful online and offline resources. These lists aren’t intended to be exhaustive. Instead, I want to focus on highlighting top-quality websites, blogs, books, and articles that deal with the pertinent gospels and related subjects. I will ultimately be providing a summary of the nature of each offline resource, effectively creating a select annotated bibliography for each of the different gospels (but this will take some time since I’ve already got nearly 100 bibliographic entries posted).

The Thomas material is already linked in the blogroll from this blog, but I expect that some readers are also interested in the other non-canonical gospels. Andrew currently has material on the Gospels of Judas, Mary, Peter, Ebionites, Nazarean, Hebrews, Secret Mark, Infancy Gospels of Thomas and James, The Unknown Gospel: Egerton Papyrus 2 and Oxyrhynchus Parchment 840.

 

Dynamic equivalence in translation

I finally found time to have a look at Jim Getz’s Biblical Studies Carnival XLII, which contains links to some interesting posts and also has a Hitchhiker’s theme, so is doubly awesome. On it, I found links to AKMA’s series on exegesis.  The first post made me to think  about the whole issue of translation, how biblical scholars approach it, and why we approach it that way.

As I type, the SheepWorld glasses case that my daughter brought back for me from her student exchange to Germany is sitting on my desk. It says “ohne Mama is alles doof” and it has cartoon pictures of a range of things that are “doof” without Mama.  Now LEO, my favourite on-line German dictionary, tells me that doof can mean: daft; ditzy(Amer.); dopey; dumb; foolish; gormless (Brit.); or silly. The two big paper dictionaries we own say similar things and my daughter’s school German text-book translates it as “dumb”, so she is hesistant about adopting my contemporary Australian translation: “Without Mum, everything’s lame”, despite the facts that this is so much closer to the way she normally speaks than “everything’s dumb” and she only ever calls me Mama when she’s speaking German. I would argue that my translation gives your average Aussie a better feel for the intent of the words, even though the dictionary doesn’t give “lame” as an option for “doof” – clearly an example of dynamic equivalence. Dare I suggest that it also  displays a more sophisticated grasp of the relationship between the two languages?

Recently, I read a blog post where  someone was lamenting the fact that Bible translations are often wooden and unpleasant to read, unlike a good translation of some of the classic authors of antiquity. My response was “well, yes, but it doesn’t matter if they lose something in the translation – no-one is going to start a war over the way Pliny is interpreted.” All this has set me wondering about my own approach to translating Scripture and to translating Thomas and whether they’re different.

I know that when I translate both the Christian canon and Gospel of Thomas, I lean much further towards formal equivalence than I do when translating the words on glasses cases, mugs and T-shirts. The genres are, of course, entirely different and my translation goals are different, too. The text on glasses cases, mugs and T-shirts is generally only trying to convey one idea, although sometimes you simply can’t get it across in translation. Even my monolingual husband can hear that “Ich habe zehn Zehen, aber du kannst sie nicht sehen” loses something in the English  “I have ten toes but you can’t see them.” And I’m sure this is not nearly as amusing if you haven’t been part of the community of my daughter’s year at school where “I have toes” is the standard response when someone doesn’t want to answer a question.  As in: “Have you started that assignment yet?” “Um…I have toes?” Or a random comment to break an awkward silence. Or… but I guess you just had to be there.

It wasn’t until I started studying theology that I had any real sense that the writers of the Bible deliberately used various sorts of word play, including double and triple meanings, to convey ideas that we simply can’t get across in English translation without clumsy circumlocutions or footnotes.  It’s quite possible that they also used “in jokes” that we’re simply not aware of because we’re not part of the community out of which the text arose. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be funny bits in the Bible, which, after all is “inspired by God” and therefore “holy”, whatever you might understand by those terms.

So, what I am trying to do when I translate the texts I work with? When I work with the Canon for teaching and preaching purposes, I want a gender-inclusive text because I believe that we have sufficient evidence to believe that Jesus/God intended us to have a gender-inclusive community. I get cross when people insist on translating anthropos as “men”, thus taking an inclusive Greek word and making it into an exclusive English one. OTOH, I tend to lean towards “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did no master it” for John 1: 5 because, despite its masculine overtones,  “master” is the only English word I know that picks up the sense of the Greek katelaben – both understood and overcome are possible translations and I think this is intentional.  (I need to add that this is not an original thought – Prof Nigel Watson suggested it when he was teaching John’s gospel at the United Faculty of Theology – my theological alma mater). My other solution is to say “the darkness neither understood nor overcame it.” Here, I am using dynamic equivalence to get the idea behind the word across, whilst maintaining the inclusivity of the text. And, of course, I am making a judgement call in saying that I think that the author of John’s gospel was deliberately using a word that conveyed both those meanings.

When I started work on my PhD, I had as a working title “The parables of the Realm in the Gospel of Thomas and their parallels in the canonical Synoptic Gospels”. This arose out of my commitment to inclusive language translations and one of the academics who attended my preliminary presentation seminar suggested that this wasn’t a good enough reason to drop the word “kingdom”. I now talk about the “parables of the Reign in the Gospel of Thomas” because in Thomas it is quite clear that although the term MeNTERO (from eReRO – king) is used, the emphasis is clearly on the act of reigning rather than on the sphere in which the reigning is taking place. The fact that it also satisfies my desire for inclusivity is a definite bonus. It does mean, however, that I often have to say reign/kingdom because people tend not to make the link between reign and kingdom as readily as they do between realm and kingdom.

The problem, of course, with dynamic equivalence is that it sometimes makes it more difficult to get behind the translation to the original text, so if I am wrong in my assumptions about what the author was trying to convey, my reader has less chance of working out for her- or himself what the author (or God?) really intended. I am leading him or her up my personal theological garden path, which may get them into trouble. But then, unless my reader has a fairly good facility in the original language of the text, s/he is quite capable of making wrong assumptions anyway. I can’t remember any specific example off the top of my head, but I have a number of times listened to a preacher interpreting a piece of Scripture based on English synonyms, syntax or idiom and thought “but you can’t do that in Greek”.

I am far less worried about the possibility of making wrong assumptions about the mind of God in my research than in my preaching. I think this is partly because, as I said above, people are not going to start a war or make life-changing judgements about themselves or others on the basis of what I say in my thesis/dissertation. I don’t have that kind of authority in the sphere of academia. They are probably not going to start a war on the basis of my preaching, either, but could easily make wrong judgement calls. The fact that I am ordained means that people will often pay more attention to me than they do to lay people. It is also partly because just about everyone who is going to read the results of my research has a sufficiently high level of biblical and linguistic sophistication to understand the limitations of what I am saying whereas most of those who listen to my preaching don’t.

AKMA expresses dissatisfaction that his students tend to express their exegetical views as questions of the “could it be this?” type, rather than as assertions, and I understand both why he wants this and why the students don’t feel confident to do it. The more I work in the field, however, the more I am inclined to make assertions such as “on the balance of probability, it seems that X is true because Y” rather than “as you can see, X is clearly true.” And I guess that part of this is trying to steer the middle road between dynamic and formal equivalence in my translation.

 

Oh, oops!!

It has just been pointed out to me that my blogroll does not contain Michael Grondin’s website The Coptic Gospel of Thomas in Context. This site contains a number of very useful resources for the study of the Coptic text, including a Coptic-English interlinear version of the Gospel of Thomas and a transliteration scheme for Coptic.

Definitely worth a visit.

 

New Gospel of Thomas site

Last week, Mark Goodacre drew our attention to a Wayback Machine version of an on-line Gospel of Thomas bibliography which was maintained by Sytze van der Laan, a student of Tjitze Baarda, and which disappeared early this century.  I was just about to add the link to this page when Sytze himself posted to the Gospel of  Thomas email list that he is in the process of resurrecting the site. The new site contains an extensive bibliography of Gos Thom works, althought it doesn’t currently include any recent works. the bibliography is currently listed alphabetically by author’s family name, but he hopes to make it interactive.

The site also has the Greek text and translation of the Oxyrhynchus papyrus fragments and he plans to add the Coptic text and translation in the future.  Well worth visiting and bookmarking

 

Thomas and Origen email discussion

Mike Grondin, the owner of the Gospel of Thomas email list, has organised for Stephen Carlson to lead a discussion on the paper he is presenting at the New Orleans SBL annual meeting on Origen’s use of the Gospel of Thomas.  His abstract ends:

In short, this survey shows that, despite Origen’s recognition that the Gospel of Thomas did not rank with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and despite the presence of some content he must have found objectionable, Origen nonetheless thought that the Gospel of Thomas contained historically useful and homiletically edifying material.

Stephen has volunteered to post excerpts from his paper during the month of May and I’m certainly looking forward to the discussion. It’s a Yahoogroups list and you’ll find it here.  It seems that you can read the posts without joining, but in order to be part of the discussion you’ll need to join.  You’ll be asked to provide information about why you want to be a member, so mention the discussion (and say you read about it on this blog, if you like).  If your email address doesn’t make it obvious who you are, giving your name would also be good. The default setting is that posts are moderated to make sure that spammers (of either the commercial or religious kind) don’t post, so don’t be surprised if your first post or two is held for moderator approval.

 

Fast-tracked off the gym reading list

I have just officially removed Luise Schottroff’s The Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006) from my gym reading list for two reasons:

1. it requires a higher level of concentration than I am able to give it in the gym where music is playing and people are talking
2. I actually want to find out what she says faster than I can in my half-hour exercise bike riding sessions.

Schottroff details her problems with traditional interpretations of parables that are anti-Jewish and/or portray God as some sort of monster and develops a methodology for looking at parables that explicitly works to avoid both these problems.  The book begins with a section entitled “Learning to See” and ends with one called “Jesus the Parable-Teller: the parables in the literary context of the gospels”.  These both demonstrate her methodology.  Sandwiched between them is the section in which I am most interested: “In Search of a Non-Dualistic Parable Theory”. In it, she looks at four hermeneutical assumptions that have resulted in what she (and I) see as problematic interpretations of the parables and develops a methodology that endeavours to avoid them.  The assumptions are:

1. the ideology of Christian superiority over other religions, especially Judaism
2. dualisms in various areas of theology
3. assumptions that underlie Chrisaain notions of guilt and sin and human suffering through violence
4. orientation toward a “Christian” duty to maintain the social status quo and its structures of power (p 81)

I am part way through this section, which I am finding exciting, but requiring careful consideration.

Her appendix summarises her approach:

How Should I Read a Gospel Parable?

1. I understand a parable narrative as a stylized and fictional combination of experiences from daily life. I attempt to recognize the connection to social structures. The parable narratives frequently contain depictions of violence and injustice in society.
2. I look within the literary context for the explicit or implicit statement about God’s action that belongs to the parable narrative. It can appear in the form of a “saying” as application, or in many other forms.
3. God’s story is connected to the narrative by only a few bridges. The narrative often contains an antithesis to God’s story. “So” (houtös) or “like” (homoios) are to be read as a challenge to critical comparison, not as an invitation to equation (e.g., not: God is like a king, who … ). I ask: Where is the God of the Torah, and the Torah itself, to be seen – alongside, behind, and/or in the parable?
4. The parable narrative and the Story of God connected to it are part of a dialogue. This dialogue took place in oral form – in Jesus’ time and thereafter. Its written traditions in the Gospels presume oral responses that often are not written down. These are to be sought in Jewish traditions of address to God or praise of God. I attempt to flesh out this dialogue for myself.
5. I try to unlearn the triumphalistic ecclesiology of the Christian tradition of interpretation, which works by contrasting us against them, good against evil, Gentile church against Judaism. This kind of interpretation rests on the identification of groups and their association with or opposition to “us,” the church, which is always on the right side.
6. I attempt to think eschatologically, to pray, and to speak with and about God. That means: (1) leaving it up to God to judge good and evil and (2) understanding the present as the hour when God’s justice begins in the world, which makes it my responsibility to do good – that is, to keep the Torah. (p 225)

Obviously, I think the book is well worth reading.  More posts about it anon.  Well, at least one.

 

Is it just me…

…or is it somewhat odd that Review of Biblical Literature would publish a review in German of the English translation of a German commentary on the Gospel of Thomas (or any other book)?

The book in question is Uwe-Karsten Plisch’s The Gospel of Thomas: Original Text with Commentary translated by Gesine Schenke Robinson. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2008 and the review is written by Tobias Nicklas from Regensburg University.

The description from the RBL website (I assume this is the publisher’s blurb) says:

This edition presents the texts in the classical languages and provides an English translation and a readily readable commentary. It includes: an introduction to the Gospel of Thomas; the complete Coptic text; the text of the Greek fragments and a Greek retranslation of all logia with parallel texts from the canonic gospels; an English translation; an extensive commentary; illustrations of the Coptic manuscript; an appendix with an index and bibliography. The introduction and commentary do not assume knowledge of the classical languages, making The Gospel of Thomas accessible to a broad audience.

Nicklas’ review is positive and it contains several passages from the English text which give a feel for Plisch’s writing style.  His concluding paragraph says (in my English translation):

The result is clear: U-K Plisch has produced an extremely interesting, important volume, which not only offers the necessary tools for beginners who are engaged in [studying] the fascinating text of  Gos Thom, but will also be consulted with some profit by the expert.

This is clearly a book that I need to own and I’ve already placed an order.  Unfortunately, it’s not a particularly cheap book (given that it’s paperback) and although the Australian dollar is looking significantly better on the world exchange market than it was a couple of weeks ago, it’s going to cost me AUD91.53 by the time I have it shipped to me.   Readers in the US will be able to buy it much more cheaply through Amazon.com, where it qualifies for their free shipping deal.

And is this a potential gym reading project? Well,  making an informed analysis of the translation of the Coptic text won’t be possible – although the sight of my trying to juggle the commentary and my hardcover copy of Crum on the very small platform on the exercise bike might amuse other gym users. It may well be possible to get an overview of the line of argument though, seeing I won’t need to have a separate copy of the text, and  I should have finished Schottroff by the time this book arrives.

Update

I am impressed! I ordered this book on 30 March from Amazon, using the standard international shipping rate which predicts 18-32 days to delivery.  It arrived on 15 April ie less than the predicted minimum time.  Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to take more than a cursory glance at it.   It also turns out that the book is hardcover, which makes the price much more reasonable.