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Thinking about reactions to the term ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ caused me to reflect on how someone whose faith was formed in a relatively conservative evangelical group came to be researching a non-canonical gospel in the way that I am. When I started my theological training, although we had done lots of bible study, the majority of my colleagues and I found the whole biblical criticism thing very new and strange, because ministers don’t tend to share this kind of thing in their preaching. Some responded by saying “if this is what I have to do to be ordained, I’ll do it, but I don’t believe it”, while others found it exciting and liberating. Very few, however, were prepared to embrace it with the enthusiasm of our teaching staff.

I remember commenting to one of my friends that I had found myself agreeing with Bultmann on some issue or another and that this was scarey. Agreeing with Bultmann wasn’t quite like agreeing with Hitler, but he wasn’t high on our list of reliable interpreters of Scripture, either. Most of us had come to theological study with the idea that the gospels were more or less minutes of Jesus’ ministry - history rather than theology.

One of the people I did like and trust, however, was Ernst Käsemann. The English title of his book Jesus Means Freedom (Der Ruf der Freiheit) stayed with me as the basis of a hermeneutical principle. This has been combined with something that one of my practicum supervisors taught me to ask: “Where is the good news for this person in this situation?” If a traditional interpretation of a piece of Scripture results in imprisonment rather than freedom and is not good news to whole classes of people (like women, people of colour etc) I ask “Is this what the text really says? Is this what Jesus/God really intended?”

A further principle was given to me by David M Scholer when I audited a course that he taught on ‘Women and Leadership in the New Testament’ in Melbourne (Australia) shortly after my ordination. He talked about the fact that how we interpret Scripture depends significantly on which verse or verses we use as the lens through which to view it ie which verse or verses we think of as normative. Those who use “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3: 2 are generally in favour of women in leadership in the church. Those who use “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” (1 Tim 2:12) generally are not. How we choose our normative texts is, of course, influenced by many things, but again, I tend to choose perspectives that bring freedom and good news for people who have no control over the circumstances in which they find themselves (eg minority groups in society).

Perhaps these are of no direct relevance to a study of the Gospel of Thomas as an academic discipline, in that I am not trying to develop principles for living from my analysis of the text. Nevertheless, the practice of holding pieces of text up against the whole and asking “is that what it really says, or am I carrying over ideas from traditional interpretation?” and “does that interpretation make sense when you look at in context?” is, I think, essential for good textual analysis.

Hmmm. Two posts in one day - so much for my hiatus!

On 9 February, Phil S posted a comment to April DeConick’s Forbidden Gospels blog in response to her “Reading History out of Theology” in which he said “I am suspicious of [the hermeneutic of suspicion] because, while it has yielded useful historical results, it is also a distortion because we assume that the authors are simply not able to give a truthful narrative about anything.”

I was surprised that this was how he understood the concept, although perhaps it isn’t surprising when you consider that it’s associated in many people’s minds with feminist theological polemic such as Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s statement that “a feminist critical hermeneutics of suspicion places a warning label on all biblical texts: Caution! Could be dangerous to your health and survival” (in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, Letty Russell (ed) (Westminster Press, 1985)). More recently, she has spoken about it in less emotive and more academic terms as:

A deconstructive practice of enquiry that denaturalises and demystifies linguistic - cultural practices of domination ….. It has the task of disentangling the ideological functions of kyriocentric text and commentary. (Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation, (Orbis, 2001) p 176)

Schussler Fiorenza is, of course, talking about a feminist hermeneutic of suspicion. In more general use, I think the term suggests that we need to recognise that all eye-witness accounts of events are told from a particular perspective and that all interpretations of those accounts are coloured by the perspective of the interpreter. We need to keep this in mind in our dealings with the accounts and their interpretation.

This is not saying that the person telling the story or the person interpreting the story are not telling the truth. It simply says that we should be wary of assuming that we are hearing everything that happened at the time. Different people notice different things about the same events, which is why eye-witness accounts of accidents vary. People also notice different things if they are looking or reading for a particular purpose.

Early scholarship on Thomas was, I think, coloured by the fact that most scholars were Christian biblical scholars looking for evidence about whether or not the discovery of Thomas was going to require radical revision of orthodox Christian theology. Certainly much of what I have read of comparisons of the parables that appear both in Thomas and one or more of the synoptics makes comments about whether or not the Thomas version is more or less ‘authentic’ than the synoptic version. I find that I don’t always agree with the conclusions they draw but the observations they make in the course of reaching these conclusions are often important in developing an understanding of what the Thomas community might have believed. I would suggest that in reading their work in this way, I am employing a hermeneutic of suspicion, but I am certainly not suggesting that they are not telling the truth.

Sometimes, also, we see what we expect to see and don’t necessarily notice something different immediately, or at all. One of the parables that I am working on is the parable of the treasure (Thomas 109; Matthew 13: 44). Christian scholars are used to Matthew’s version, in which the Realm/Kingdom is like a treasure, buried in a field and found by someone who then sells all he has to buy the field. One of the significant differences between Matthew and Thomas is that in the Thomas version, the Realm/Kingdom is like a person in whose field there is a buried treasure about which the person knows nothing. All of the interpretation of Thomas that I have read so far talks about this parable as though the Realm/Kingdom is being compared to the treasure, even when the writer of the interpretative comment has indicated that the subject of the parable is the person, not the treasure!

The parable is much easier to understand if the Realm/Kingdom is the treasure - something valuable from which you can only benefit if you find it. In the Thomasine parable, three people own the field, but only one finds the treasure and uses it. Whether or not you see GTh as a gnostic text, it is quite clear that the writer is interested in knowledge, so if the Realm/Kingdom is the treasure, then we have a story about knowing and not knowing about the Realm/Kingdom. Perhaps this is the way the parable should be understood. Perhaps an error has been made in the copying or an adjustment has been made to suit the purposes of an editor, but the fact remains that this is not what the text says.

The writer of Thomas clearly views the Realm/Kingdom differently to the writer of Matthew, the only synoptic that has a significant number of Realm/Kingdom parables. I haven’t done enough detailed work on the rest of these parables to enable me to decide whether this parable as it stands lines up with the rest of what GTh says about the Realm/Kingdom or whether the easy interpretation is the one that makes most sense, but again I am employing a hermeneutic of suspicion - this time about both the text that we have in front of us and the way that it has been interpreted by scholars who are expecting to see the Matthean version of this story. Again, I am not trying to suggest that anyone is not telling the truth - simply that they haven’t seen everything there is to see.

I previously listed this in my blogroll as “Roger Pearse’s Thoughts on Antiquity Blog”. I apologise to Chris Weimer, Walter Shandruck and Ben C. Smith who work as a team to run this blog which was started by Chris Weimer. I am gradually getting my head around the blogosphere and the concept of team blogs is one I will need to watch. The link to Roger Pearse’s website is, however, correct.

I know having a hiatus in a blog is considered uncool, especially early in the blog’s life, but I am also a university chaplain and Orientation for new students began today and we had a death in the student community on Saturday (a [post] graduate student from my own School) so I don’t anticipate having much time to blog on Thomas until the end of the month.

A pity, really, because I’ve just got a much better vision of what can be done in a scholarly blog and am keen to try it out.

The Forbidden Gospels Blog is April DeConick’s new blog, which looks at a range of texts from early Christianity that fall outside the New Testament canon. April is Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies at Rice University and author of a number of books on the Gospel of Thomas, the most recent being her commentary, The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation. In the first post in her blog, she says:

What impedes our examination of early Christianity is not the limitations of historical criticism as some in the Academy would like to lead us to believe. The impediment is the fact that the majority of biblical scholars still have not dislodged themselves from their own faith perspectives. As long as this is the case, historical inquiry is impossible because the historical-critical perspective cannot be used uncompromisingly. Although I recognize that there can be no “objective” history recovered or written, this doesn’t mean to me that all subjective inquiries are the same. The theological inquiry is not the same as the historical.

This is certainly something I find challenging in my work on Thomas. I am a Uniting Church minister, trained to exegete Scripture for the benefit of the faithful. I find looking at Thomas in some senses liberating - I don’t need to ask the “how then shall I live?” question of it - but there are times when I find myself “stuck” in orthodox theology. I love doing textual analysis, but sometimes it’s a little difficult, given that I am working with familiar parables, to really concentrate on what the writer is saying, rather than bringing with me the baggage of two millenia of traditional interpretation.

I’m really looking forward to my five weeks at Rice later this year!