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One of the frustrating parts of research, at least in my field, is the fact that you can spend large amounts of time doing research that only shows that something or other is almost certainly not the answer to your question. You can never show beyond all doubt that it isn’t because you can never prove that you’ve looked at every possible source and it’s very difficult to document your lack of results convincingly.

I am currently working on why all but one of the Kingdom parables in the Gospel of Thomas talk about the Kingdom as a person. “Maybe,” said one of my advisers, “it’s a Coptic story-telling device. Have a look in the Desert Fathers.” Not only did reading the Desert Fathers not reveal any such convention, it was also quite expensive. I had to borrow one volume of works of the DF on interlibrary loan and made the mistake of taking it into the toilet with me. I have possibly done this several thousands of times before with no problem, but this day I managed to drop the book into the toilet while it was flushing. I had to pay to replace the book (fortunately only a paperback Penguin Classics), plus an admin fee and the lending library wanted the book back!!!!! I could understand why they might want something irreplaceable back, but a Penguin paperback??? I put it into a plastic ziplock bag with a suitable warning on both sides and warned our librarians not to open it and went off muttering about obsessiveness.

“Perhaps,” said another person whose judgement I respect, “perhaps it’s a convention of Greek rhetoric.” So I read some Greek rhetoric textbooks in English translation, but to no avail. And, of course, I didn’t read every Greek rhetoric text book, nor have I read every Coptic story of the period so I can’t say categorically that it isn’t either of these things, just that it’s unlikely.

In connection with a problem with a piece of text, I wondered if the Coptic words SOP and OUOEISH were ever used as anything other than a direct equivalent of the Greek kairos. I spent many, many hours with the Coptic edition of the Nag Hammadi library looking at every instance in the index of Coptic words, seeing where SOP and OUOEISH occurred and checking whether they appeared to have any nuancing that might make them mean something other than kairos. I am very confident that there is no indexed usage of either of these words in the Nag Hammadi library where they could possibly mean anything other than kairos, but of course the index may have missed one or two occurrences and the Nag Hammadi library isn’t an exhaustive collection of Coptic of that era, so again I’m stuck with “it seems unlikely that…” [28 July: let me nuance this by saying that I am at least convinced that they couldn't mean what they would need to mean in order for my hypothesis to be supported and that's all I needed to know.]

So, what I want to know is how I go about getting due acknowledgment for all this painstaking but fruitless work. My SOP/OUOEISH thing isn’t so bad. I can say something like “a careful examination of the Nag Hammadi texts reveals no evidence of either SOP or OUOEISH being used in this way”, but “I am fairly confident that this is neither a Coptic story-telling device nor a Greek rhetorical convention” with a footnote indicating what I’ve read doesn’t sound particularly scholarly, somehow. I guess I could put in an appendix called “Dead ends I have pursued in the course of this research” and document how I have explored each issue and the amount of time I have spent in doing so. I could list the issues and indicate why I thought they were worth pursuing, how I went about their pursuit, the references I consulted and what the significance of a null result is. It doesn’t actually seem to be done in academic circles, of course. I’m not aware of any other thesis/dissertation with one of these appendices, so maybe I could become a pioneer!!! OTOH, as I would actually like to be awarded at PhD at the end of all this, perhaps I’d better just keep my records of dead ends in a file in case I need to justify an application for extension of time to complete my work. Who knows, one day I might actually find a use for an Excel spreadsheet documenting all instances of the use of SOP and OUOEISH in the Nag Hammadi Library, together with instances of other words translated “time”.

On Friday, a very miserable young man found his way to my office, referred by one of the counsellors.

Can somebody please tell me how supposedly good Christian parents can disown and cut off all contact with their kind, caring, socially concerned, articulate, intelligent and generally pleasant son just because he happens to be gay? Just exactly what hermeneutical principle does one have to use to get this kind of understanding of Christian teaching?

I can understand how they’d be unhappy, I can understand (although I wouldn’t necessarily agree with their exegesis) why they might think he was not living an appropriate lifestyle for a Christian but . . . “you no longer exist for us”???? Where is the good news for this young man in their behaviour? Where is the modelling of the love and grace of God?

I find helping young people like him to see a different way of understanding God emotionally draining because they have been treated so badly by people who say that they serve a loving God. Of course, it’s far less emotionally draining than burying the ones who decide that living is all too much for them. Why can’t people learn to hold up interpretations of small bits of the Bible against the whole and ask “Did God really say that??”

Update 23 July:

I just discovered that WordPress has a tag called “hermeneutics” and that this post got linked to it. On this page, I found a post by Jay Guin called Interpreting the Bible: Big rocks go in first . In it, he says:

Find the great, overriding principles of the Bible, and never, ever vary from them.

The great, overriding principles are those that the Bible says are the great, overriding principles. The love of God, the gospel, our call to love others, and so forth.

I don’t know anything much about Guin, so we may disagree about what the great overriding principles of the Bible are, but clearly we agree about methodology!!

April DeConick’s new book The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas really says is now available for pre-order on Amazon in the UK, Canada and the US and she has posted a synopsis of the chapters on her blog. While I was at Rice earlier this year, I was able to read a very late draft of the book itself and see the appendices in development. I would highly recommend the book to anyone who is interested in Gospel of Judas and how it fits into the Gnostic spectrum.

The text itself is very readable and I think it will be accessible to a general readership while providing enough “meat” to engage those with more expertise in the area. She lays out her case for disagreeing with the National Geographic team clearly and presents very convincing alternatives to those sections of the text that the National Geographic team use to present Judas as a hero, together with an overall understanding of the nature of the text that makes a great deal of sense.

The appendices also provide a fantastic set of resources for anyone who wants to delve further into Gospel of Judas, second-century Christianity, the New Testament Apocrypha, Gnosis and the Gnostics and Sethian Gnosticism. She presents lists of references in a very convenient form that will save newcomers to the field (and probably also more experienced scholars) a huge amount of time and work. I’m very much looking forward to seeing the final version.

One thing I find difficult to resist is quizzes, so I just had to try The Which Ancient Language Are You Test, thanks to Angela Roskop Erisman on Imaginary Grace . My results was:

You are Akkadian, a blend of the incomprehensible symbols of the Sumerians with the unwritable sounds of the early Semitic peoples. However, the writing just doesn’t suit the words and doesn’t represent everything needed, so you end up a schizoid mess. Invented in Babylon, you’re probably to blame for that tower story. However, crazy as you are, you’re much loved and appreciated, and remain actively in use by records keepers long after schools have switched to other languages.

Not sure quite how I feel about this, mind you. Other members of my family were Linear A and Older Futhark.  I was nearly Older Futhark - if I answered one or two questions that I was tossing up about differently, that’s what I’d be.

The following obituary for Letty Russell was written by her partner, Shannon Clarkson, and posted on the WATER email list.

As a woman ordained in the 1980s I am very conscious of just how much easier people like Letty made being a woman minister for people like me. We didn’t have to be “the first” and we weren’t often the token woman on committees etc. Her theology was also helpful to me, and I am sad that she is gone.

Letty Mandeville Russell, one of the worlds foremost feminist theologians and longtime member of the Yale Divinity School faculty, died Thursday, July 12 at her home in Guilford, CT. She was 78. A leader for many years in the ecumenical movement, she remained active in ecumenical circles until her death, working for the World Council of Churches and the World YWCA.

She was one of the first women ordained in the United Presbyterian Church and served the East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York City from 1952-68, including 10 years as pastor of the Presbyterian Church of the Ascension. She joined the faculty of Yale Divinity School in 1974 as an assistant professor of theology, rose to the rank of professor in 1985 and retired in 2001. In retirement, she continued to teach some courses at Yale Divinity School as a visiting professor.

At various times Dr. Russell was employed as a consultant to the U.S. Working Group on the participation of Women in the World Council of Churches and as religious consultant to the National Board of the YWCA. Her first position was as a public school teacher in Middletown, CT in 1951-52. Over the years she served on numerous units of the World Council of Churches, including the Faith and Order Commission; the National Council of Churches, including the Task Force on the Bible and Sexism; and Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the successor to the United Presbyterian Church.

In an introduction to a festschrift published in Dr. Russells honor in 1999 under the title Liberating Eschatology, fellow Yale Divinity School theologians Margaret Farley and Serene Jones called Dr. Russells influence on contemporary theology monumentaland wrote of her uncanny ability to articulate a vision of the church that is radical in its feminist-liberationist critique but that nonetheless remains anchored in the historic traditions and communities of the Christian church.

In the East Harlem Protestant Parish, Dr. Russell focused her ministry on equipping her congregation of mostly black and Hispanic people to claim their voices as leaders in the parish and the community. Her experiences in Harlem led her to develop Bible studies that encouraged people of color to explore ways in which the Bible gives them voice and liberation.

At Yale Divinity School, Dr. Russells influence extended far beyond the confines of classrooms on Sterling Divinity Quadrangle. She was the inspiration behind creation of the schools international travel seminar program, under which Yale Divinity School students have traveled to countries around the globe for direct encounters with the realities of religion on the world stage, frequently in impoverished countries.

Dr. Russell graduated with a B.A. in biblical history and philosophy in 1951 from Wellesley College, and she was among the first women to receive an S.T.B. from Harvard Divinity School, in theology and ethics, in 1958. She earned an S.T.M. from Union Theological Seminary in New York in Christian education and theology in 1967 and two years later received a Th.D. in mission theology and ecumenics from Union.

A global advocate for women, Dr. Russell was a member of the Yale Divinity School Womens Initiative on Gender, Faith, and Responses to HIV/AIDS in Africa and was co-coordinator of the International Feminist Doctor of Ministry Program at San Francisco Theological Seminary. The author or editor of over 17 books, her book Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretations of the Church and her co-edited work, Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, characterized her commitment to feminist/liberation theologies and to the renewal of the church. In 2006, she co-edited a book with Phyllis Trible of Wake Forest University entitled, Hagar, Sarah and Their Children: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Perspectives.

Letty Mandeville Russell was born in Westfield, NJ in 1929. She was predeceased by her sister, Jean Berry of New Jersey and former husband, the late Prof. Hans Hoekendijk. She is survived by her partner, Shannon Clarkson; her sister, Elizabeth Collins of Salem, OR; seven nieces and nephews; 14 great nieces and nephews; and a great-great niece. In addition, Dr. Russell felt that her wider family included generations of feminist and womanist activists and scholars around the world.

April DeConick poses this question on her blog and I thought, as someone who is studying a non-canonical text, I might have a go at answering it.

Several people have suggested that one of the reasons that the non-canonical texts make us uneasy is because there isn’t a centuries-long history of interpretation for us to fall back on, so we don’t know what they mean. I guess this may be true, but for me it’s an opportunity to look at text without any major preconceived ideas about its meaning. Of course, we don’t have available to us a huge range of other people’s interpretations, just the occasional writing of a Church Father indicating that the author has got it wrong in a big way. If you are among the earliest scholars of the text, you don’t know ahead of time which people you’re aligning yourself with and who you’re disagreeing with. This could make you very uneasy, because some of our colleagues are not exactly gracious when they disagree with you.

One thing that makes me uneasy about drawing conclusions from the extra-canonical texts is that we have so few copies of them. When you look at the number of copies of the canonical texts that are in existence and the differences between them, you realise just how difficult it is to make any definitive statements about a text when there are only one or two or a handful of copies in existence. You might have a very accurate version of the original text, or you might have a wild corruption and you have no way of knowing.

I think, however, that the primary reason that non-canonical texts make us uneasy (or at least those of us who have grown up in a Christian church, no matter what we believe now) is that they have generally been labelled “heresy” by the mainstream church. Heresy, as we all know, is devised by Satan to lead the faithful away from the one true faith and into eternal damnation, so these texts are dangerous.

In fact, this is not how I conceptualise heresy at an intellectual level, but the indoctrination of decades dwells deep within my psyche and looking at “heresy” makes me uneasy (although it clearly doesn’t stop me). Coming to non-canonical texts with an open mind means that you might end up being convinced by what they say and thus end up outside orthodoxy. Which is uncomfortable. You might even end up believing that you should try to convey your new understandings to the orthodox church, which has the potential to be very uncomfortable indeed.

This, I think, is why there was (and still is to a certain extent) such an interest in looking at whether or not Thomas is dependent on the synoptics, and in using dependent/independent language in the first place, rather than talking about whether Thomas might have used one of the synoptics as a source, as we do when talking about the relationship between Mark, Matthew and Luke. If we can show “dependency”, then we feel that we are in a stronger position to argue that it is safe to ignore anything in Thomas that comes into conflict with orthodox Christian doctrine. If it’s not dependent, then we may have “authentic words of Jesus”, which makes us uneasy, because we may have to think about changing long-accepted doctrine/theology.