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One of the things I’ve found most difficult about my research is settling on a methodology. I’ve never been expected to have a methodology before.

In the past, I’ve more or less just read stuff and written about it and while I’ve had some idea of how I was going to tackle my material, I haven’t needed to articulate it up front. I’ve always been wary of methodologies because I’ve seen too many people select a methodology for their research and then twist their material to fit the methodology. The results range from odd to downright worrying.

The example of this that springs most immediately to mind (because I’ve just read about it) is Douglas Oakman’s “peasant reading” of the story of the Good Samaritan (”Was Jesus a Peasant? Implications for Reading the Samaritan Story (Luke 10:30-35)” BTB 22 (1992) 117-25). I think that it’s important that we remember that Jesus was not a white twenty-first century westerner. I also think that the various “peasant readings” of parables are very useful to provide a different perspective on how Jesus’ audience might have perceived what he said, but I am not sure why you would choose the Samaritan story as an example. The context is Jesus having a conversation with a lawyer who is trying to justify himself and his conduct. The encounter, without the parable, appears in Matthew and Mark as well and in both cases, the audience is Pharisees and Sadducees, so it seems to me not particularly useful to speculate on what a peasant audience might have made of the story.

Jesus is portrayed in the Synoptics as a crowd-gatherer. Therefore I think we must assume that he was a charismatic speaker and teacher, one who would tailor his material to his audience. The Synoptics also show him talking to a range of audiences that were not peasants, as well as to those who would have been. I think the more traditional “Pharisee and Sadducee” reading is a better one for this particular parable, fascinating though Oakman’s version is.

That’s why the title of Morna Hooker’s paper “On Using the Wrong Tool” (Theology 75 (1972): 570-81) appealed to me enough to get a copy, even though it didn’t appear to be directly relevant to my study of Thomas. (I have also found Hooker’s work helpful in the past.) The paper was written in the early 1970s and Hooker was looking at form-criticism, which she suggested was a useful tool but not capable of doing what was being required of it - uncovering the authentic teachings of Jesus (570).

April DeConick is looking at the paper in more detail on her Forbidden Gospels Blog. I simply want to comment that it put a name for me to my dis-ease with the notion of settling on a methodology - it is a fear of “using the wrong tool”. Indeed, my original intention was to write my methodology chapter just before I wrote the acknowledgments and abstract. The methodology chapter appears in my thesis outline, but it has nothing next to it. I have, however, come to the realisation that I can’t get much further without at least a provisional methodology because to do so it to run the risk of asking the wrong questions.

My stay in Texas has reinforced for me the problem with asking the wrong questions - you get the wrong answers, or sometimes no real answer at all! “Did I leave my handbag here?” and “Can you tell me where the lift is?” are inclined to be met with blank stares until I realise that I need to ask about my purse and the elevator.

So, in order to analyse my text, I need to have defined what it is that I think I am looking at, so I can ask the right questions, which is part of developing the right tool.

This amazing insight into my character comes from my friend Avril, who got it from her friend Caro.

Yeah. Right. Unfortunately I don’t have time to play around with the questions until I get the right church father.

21 April 08 - had another go at this because I could. At least this offering doesn’t suggest that I’m attached to the traditions of the ancients. Maybe the problem is that I’m the wrong gender to fit a church father?

Methods of language learning have always interested me. Recently, I read in Paul Foster’s “Educating Jesus: the Search for a Plausible Context” (Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus Vol. 4.1, pp. 7-33), a suggestion that amongst 1st Century Jews, there was a group of who could read but not write Hebrew. He suggests that Jesus might have belonged to this group. At the time, I found the idea of being able to read but not write very difficult to conceptualise, because writing has been such an important part of my learning to read languages. I’ve always learned to read a language in part by writing it down (copying example sentences). As I travel around Houston, where all major signs are in both English and Spanish I am, however, beginning to understand how this might happen.

Once, years ago, I was taught the basics of Spanish pronunciation and now I am hearing Spanish announcements on buses and trains and reading Spanish signs with English translations under them. I suspect that by the end of my time here, I am likely to be able to read both silently and out loud a particular subset of Spanish, a language which I don’t actually speak.

Of course, this is a different process, because I can already read and write English fluently and have varying literacy levels in a number of other languages and alphabets. I can now see, though, that if you lived in a culture where there was limited need to be able to write, but it was considered useful to be able to read (so you could read Torah in worship, for example) that you could learn to read in a different way, which doesn’t necessarily require being able to write the characters of the alphabet.

It’s probably not the most efficient way of learning to read a language, but I would suggest that the method employed in most theological seminaries in Australia whereby you learn to read, write and translate classical languages without attempting to speak them is less than ideal, too. Whether or not a teaching method happens to conform to the latest educational theories is not at issue here and I certainly now find Foster’s argument more experientially credible now than I did a couple of weeks ago.

I arrived in Houston at around 6.30 pm on Sunday evening, so I’ve been here nearly five days. Hardly qualifies me as an expert on Houston or Rice, but:

Impression #1: Houston is very, very flat unlike Armidale, which is very, very hilly.

Impression #2: People in Houston and especially at Rice are very, very friendly and helpful.

Impression #3: Squirrels are seriously cute. They are everywhere I go and they seem to come in two colours - two tone grey and grey and reddish-cream, like this one here, which I photographed in a tree near the Rice Student Centre. I can understand why they are considered pests, but we don’t have anything like them in Australia!

Impression #4: The graduate reading room at Rice is a good place to work - quite, comfortable, attractive surroundings, lockers that you can lock your laptop into while you wander the library, wireless connection to the library catalogue and the rest of the world.

Impression #5: It is going to be really good working with April. So much of what she says about Thomas makes so much sense to me!

Impression #6: What I tell our international students about culture shock is true - being in a very different environment really does slow down one’s brain - I’m still finding complex coherent thought processes challenging, although I got over the worst of my jetlag very fast (thanks to melatonin tablets and a very long walk caused by not having a map with me and going the wrong way for a long time before I realised it).

Impression #7: People at Rice and in Houston are really very, very friendly and helpful . . . even if the occasional one is as geographically challenged as I am. I can help lost people on campus too, though, because now I never leave the home without my trusty campus and Houston maps.

It occurs to me that there are two other useful on-line Coptic resources that I didn’t mention in my last posting. Both are now linked from my blogroll - Crum’s A Coptic Dictionary and Bill Arnal’s key to the exerices in Lambdin’s Introduction to Sahidic Coptic.

I find the electronic form of Crum useful because it means you can access it when you are away from your study/office but have internet access. It has a number of limitations, however, which make it a less than ideal source for the serious Coptic scholar. The first is that in the scanning, the bottom line or two of some pages were not scanned properly. The second is that it is very cumbersome to navigate around. The clickable index has all the pages except the ones on which a letter of the alphabet first appears numbered as they are in the paper version. Thus, you have a page labelled RHO followed by pages 288-312. You therefore have to guess on which page the word you want might appear, click on it and wait for it to load, then click again to magnify the image to a size that you can actually read. If you then discover that you guessed wrong, you have to close the page and start again. The pages are also scanned as .gif images, so although it’s an electronic version, you can’t do a keyword search. I would suggest that anyone who is doing any serious work in Coptic would still need to buy a paper copy, which you can do at a reasonable price (for such a big, specialist book) at Wipf and Stock. I haven’t seen this myself, but apparently the pages are just as they are in the hardcover version - it hasn’t been re-typeset. I got my hardcover copy secondhand from a delightful Dutch bookseller at a reasonable price through AbeBooks, but secondhand copies of the hardcover are not all that easy to find and last time I looked, the ones offered at Amazon were astronomically priced.

Bill Arnal, of University of Regina in Canada, has generously put up on the web a copy of his key to the exercises in Lambdin. This saved me some time and hair-tearing at the end of last semester when I got to some of the sentences in the later exercises whilst tutoring one of our undergrads. It certainly did, as Bill suggests in his introduction, reduce my workload as I tried for the first time to help someone else work through those later chapters. It would also be useful for anyone wishing to teach themselves Coptic as long as they could resist the temptation to look at the key before really wrestling with the sentences themselves.