Objectivity and interpretation of texts

I started writing this post several days ago in response to Christopher Skinner’s interesting post on his PEJE IESOUS blog. It’s part of a conversation with April DeConick about perspectives – here and here.  In his post, he talks about the fact that we all bring biases and presuppositions to our interpretation of texts so that it is impossible to be totally objective in our interpretations. Wade Greiner, April’s husband, has a post that suggests that while everyone has biases, not all biases are equal. Since then, April has added two more posts. The first,  entitled “Choosing your method” outlines her operating principles and is particularly helpful.  The second expresses her frustration at the way the medium allows for misinterpretation. Skinner has posted twice more on the general subject.  James McGrath also has a helpful post. I have previously touched on this issue, but want to explore it further, looking at a different way of thinking about it that I find helpful.

The reader response theory of literary criticism tries to take the differing perspectives of different readers/interpreters seriously, although it is open to serious abuse if taken too far. In part, it sees readers of a text as belonging to particular “interpretive communities” (a term which I think was coined by Stanley Fish), which influence the way in which they interpret particular texts. I think that another way of saying this is that the interpretive community to which one belongs influences the questions one asks of the text and the assumptions one makes about the text. Most of us belong to multiple interpretive communities, which sometimes results in interesting approaches to texts.

When I look at texts from early Christianity for the purposes of my doctoral studies, I ask different questions of them to those that I ask when I am preparing to preach or lead Bible study.  For my doctoral work which I do primarily as part of the interpretive community of academic scholars of studies in religion, I ask “what does this tell me about early Christian communities – how they lived, what they believed, etc?” If I were working on something different I might also be asking  “what does this tell me about the historical Jesus?”, but whatever I ask, I am using the historical-critical method as an end in itself and if I don’t use it properly, I’m in big trouble.

When I am preparing to preach or lead Bible study,  which I do primarily as part of the interpretive community of  Christian biblical scholars, I ask “what does this tell me about how early Christians related to/understood God?” and “what does this tell me about how I should live as a faithful Christian in the twenty-first century?” I have to be aware of the historical context in order to answer  the preaching/teaching questions or I could come up with some very weird answers, so I still have to use the historical-critical method properly.  Knowing the historical context is not the purpose of my questioning, though, it’s a stepping stone to developing a credible theology.

As a practising Christian, I am aware that I make different assumptions about GosThom to the ones I make about the Synoptics, even when I am not wearing my “minister” hat. I am getting better and better at catching myself at it, though. Although I don’t actually believe that there are questions one may not ask about those texts that the church calls Scripture,  I know that there are some questions that it just doesn’t occur to me to ask because I “know” the answers so well. Atheist scholars have different blind spots as a result of belonging to that particular interpretive community. For example, I think they are prone to writing off the unusual as superstition more quickly than is always warranted. James Crossley and Mike Bird’s How Did Christianity Begin?, which I have reviewed, provides a good illustration about the differing assumptions that an atheist and Christian scholar might bring to the texts of early Christianity.

Feminist scholars, womanist scholars, people of colour etc all bring different foundational assumptions to the text from their interpretive communities. I don’t see that there is anything preventing people from all these interpretive communities from doing good historical-critical work or good theology as long as they are aware that they are bringing these biases.

I don’t see that belonging to a confessional interpretive community necessarily prevents one from doing good historical-critical work, either. It depends on the particular confessional community. Things become problematic when the interpreters come from confessional interpretive communities that make strong faith claims such as “God dictated every word of Scripture, so it cannot contradict itself” – which requires some incredible gymnastics of the text  or “The Spirit speaks to me and tells me how to interpret Scripture in today’s world” – which may result in interpretations that have no real basis in the text in its context.

I think I need to finish here in the interests of getting this posted before this topic becomes totally passe.

 

Sexism and other forms of bias/prejudice

Possibly we are fairly much all over the issue of women in the bibliobloggosphere, but…

April DeConick posted about the insidiousness of sexism. I agree. Men who in general are amazingly supportive of women’s equality with men will occasionally come out with some comment that is based on sexist stereotypes of the roles of men and women in society. This doesn’t make them anti-women – it simply means that there are areas of their thinking that haven’t overcome their social programming. Women can also be sexist – and they can have sexist attitudes that are biased against men but they can also pigeon-hole themselves and other women on the basis of their gender. Men can also limit themselves and other men on the basis of gender. The thing is that we have all been taught to differentiate between people on the basis of gender since we were very small. Some do it more often than others and some think it’s perfectly OK and just the way God ordained it, while others don’t.

Racism is the same.  I used to think that I was pretty much immune to stereotyping based on race until I went to the sixth birthday party of my friend’s son.  He came over to tell me something about what Andrew had done.  I asked which one Andrew was and was told “the one in the red jumper”. As well as wearing a red jumper, Andrew was also the only Chinese-ethnicity child in the room and I would have said “the Chinese boy” – although it turned out that both he and his parents had been born in Australia. I have no particular negative stereotypes of Chinese people, although I do tend to expect them to be more polite in general and more respectful of older people in particular than is the average Australian.

That incident, however, caused me to stop and think about how often I actually do make judgements about a person based on their race, or socio-economic status, or job or even gender. I do it somewhat more often than I’d like, but I try very hard not to and I try very hard to get to know people at least a bit before I make judgements about them.  Doesn’t always work, of course, because I’m not perfect and because sometimes I just don’t have time to get to know people. We all stereotype, all the time.  We would go crazy if we had to stop and assess every chair-like object for ‘chairness’ before we sat on it and every table-like object for ‘table-ness’ before we put things on it. It’s not unreasonable to expect that the person in the department store wearing a shirt with the store’s logo on it is, in fact, an employee of the store and most of them would become quite irate if every customer said “Excuse me, do you work here?” before they asked a question about the store.

When this becomes a problem is when these assumptions are used to limit people or when they are used as a basis for hatred and discrimination. If someone has gifts/skills that enable her/him to do a particular task, her/his gender, race, sexual orientation, socio-economic background etc should not stop her/him from doing it. If we consider a particular gift to be of God and worthwhile in one person, surely it must be of God and worthwhile in all? And even if you don’t think gifts come from God (perhaps on account of being atheist), the worthwhile argument still holds.

As you will recognise if you have been reading this series of posts on this blog, I have been suggesting that a significant part of the reason for the lack of women bibliobloggers is that the church as institution has held onto sexist understandings of the role of women significantly longer than has secular society. One of the things we can all do to combat it is to examine our attitudes and try to avoid any that limit people on the basis of their gender. A bit of positive discrimination can’t do any harm, either, as long as it’s not patronising, grudging or designed to show someone up in a poor light. In other words, I don’t think it’s helpful to say things like “this surprisingly good post by a woman blogger….” or “I guess, in order to get the femi-mafia off my case, I need to add some women…” or to highlight the post of an inexperienced and unqualified woman together with those of some of the giants in the field (unless the woman is holding her own amongst them, of course!)

And now, I plan to resume posting mainly on GosThom and early Christianity. At least for a while.

 

How women operate in churches

As I have been thinking about the issue of women bibliobloggers, I remembered that about ten years ago one of my colleagues noticed what seemed to be a discrepancy in who gets most “air time” in church meetings. He decided to do some research during our annual Synod meeting and kept a record of how much speaking time people had. The way that representation works in our church means that Synods have roughly equal numbers of lay and ordained people and they try to ensure that at least one third of the participants are female (which tells you something about representation straight away).

He corrected his statistics for numbers present and found that male clergy took up by far the greatest speaking time in meetings – far more time than would be expected from the proportion of them present. Next came lay men who also took up more than their share.  Female clergy more or less held their own and lay women largely sat and listened. Because only about 20-30% of our clergy are women, my guess is that about half the lay people were women to get the one-third female overall figure right.  And, of course, more than half the members in congregations are female.

In the course of this discussion, it has been noted that the proportion of women studying in seminaries (we call them theological institutions) and doing course in studies in religion in secular universities is significantly higher than the proportion of female bibliobloggers.  Perhaps those who teach in these places can tell us, though, how much the female students participate in class discussions when they are not delivering papers? I suspect that the dearth of women bibliobloggers is a mirror of how women students participate in class discussions and church meetings.

 

Women, men and biblioblogging – the individual and the culture

Mark Goodacre’s comment on my last post combined with Colin Tofflemire’s on the first one made me realise that there is more that I want to say on this.

Mark is right that there are men biblibloggers who consciously and conscientiously link to the work of women. I have also had significant personal encouraging interaction from men bibliobloggers and my feeling is that this is on the basis of what I have to say, rather than on my gender. It is not possible to predict which might do this on the basis of their general theological position. Four that come to mind, with whom I’ve had interaction about my scholarship (as opposed to general friendly interaction -there are heaps more of these) are James McGrath, Tim Bulkeley , Mark himself, of course, and Mike Bird. I think that James is closest to my general theological position and Mike is furthest away. Certainly, if you look at the website of Highland Theological College, where he teaches, you would expect that he might have a bias against women leaders in the church, and he may well do, for all I know, but it doesn’t extend to not respecting the work of female biblical scholars on the basis of their gender.

Update

The other man I meant to mention in the list above is Tyler Williams who actively encouraged me to do a Biblical Studies Carnival. Hard work, it was, but interesting.

So, my experience has not been that nasty, evil, misogynist male bibliobloggers won’t let me into the club. Jim West even let me into the Biblioblogger Big Brother house (although I wasn’t quite certain I wanted to be there).  OTOH, April has certainly become a target and heard stories of this kind of activity since she raised this issue and I know that Suzanne McCarthy has been attacked and marginalized. Perhaps I have been relatively immune because I am working on Gospel of Thomas so the more conservative bibliobloggers would not bother to read me and I haven’t addressed controversial-in-conservative-Christianity areas until now. I don’t know. In general, the guys didn’t target me for their misogynist attacks when I was studying theology, either.

I am saying that the general culture in the church, particularly in those parts of it from which the majority of male bibliobloggers seem to come, is such that women don’t try to enter the club. This culture sees women’s leadership and women’s scholarship as inferior to men’s, and even those people who don’t actually believe this at an intellectual level often have unexamined assumptions that mean that their behaviour isn’t congruent with their beliefs (as Colin said). It’s approach to the Bible reinforces those attitudes, as does its liturgical practices and it sees humour at the expense of women as perfectly acceptable.

So, I think that a number of the contributing factors to the serious underrepresentation of women in the biblioblogosphere come from the church rather than the biblioblogosphere. Linking to women bibliobloggers and increasing awareness of the work of those who are doing it will help, but not a huge amount. Naming personal attacks and inappropriate treatment in the comments sections of their blogs when you see them will also help, although it will make men who do it vulnerable to being considered outsiders themselves. However, I think that there also needs to be some changes in churches.

If you are a man who is actively involved in your church and think of yourself as egalitarian, I would encourage you to look at how you and your congregation act toward and interact with women and what messages your worship gives them about how acceptable they are. If you are a lay man and work outside the church, think about whether it’s different to the way you interact with your female colleagues in the workplace. If you are married, ask if the way you treat your wife in your home is different to the way she and other women are treated in the church. And then see if you can work out ways to change things if necessary.

Over the last century or so, the majority of members of congregations have been women, and a higher proportion of men than women have been relatively inactive, yet the majority of leaders have been men. When this was congruent with secular culture, it wasn’t such a problem.  However, now that the feminist movement has meant that women are treated significantly more equally in secular society, younger women are not going to be convinced that being involved in the church is such a good thing. If you can be CEO or in charge of the flower roster, which are you going to pick?

 

Five women scholars who have most influenced me

OK.  Now onto the meme Mike tagged me with – in no particular order, and lots more than five, edited so that I give a little more info about each:

• Morna Hooker – New Testament – she uses interesting imagery in her writing and does good biblical studies.  Has presented at Greenbelt, so not just an academic.  My favourite work of hers is  “On Using the Wrong Tool.” Theology 75 (1972): 570-81.
• Marjorie Procter-Smith – liturgy – I used her  In her own rite: constructing feminist liturgical tradition. (Nashville: Abingdon Press. 1990.) as the basis for my Masters Qualifying thesis and it changed radically how I think about liturgy
• Elizabeth J Smith – liturgy – we were at the United Faculty of Theology as undergrads at the same time and then she went to the US and got a PhD and I had a baby and became a rural minister. She supervised my first attempt at a Masters, which I had to give up when I changed jobs and got too busy. She had the task of helping me change my writing style from one that worked for articles in the campus student magazine to one that would pass muster in academia.  She assured me that I couldn’t use “gut feeling” in a masters’ thesis, even if I did have it in inverted commas. “Crafting and Singing Hymns in Australia” in Stephen Burns and Anita Monro (eds) Christian Worship in Australia.  Strathfield, St Pauls Publications, 2009. 183-193 is really worth reading.
• Phyllis Trible – theology – God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Overtures to biblical theology, [2]. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978 – it’s about language, so what’s  not to like;  Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Overtures to Biblical theology, 13. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. Chilling and thought provoking, but hopeful.
• Rosemary Radford Reuther – theology – Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983. – language again.
• Sallie McFague – theology -  Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987 and Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982. I have no idea why I haven’t read anything more recent, because I really like the way she writes and ecofeminism is an area that really interests me.
• Elizabeth Johnson – theology – She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: Crossroad, 1992.
• April DeConick – early christianity – Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas: A History of the Gospel and its Growth. London: T&T Clark, 2005. and The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation, With a Commentary and New English Translation of the Complete Gospel. Library of New Testament Studies. Vol. 287. London: T & T Clark, 2006, but also for giving me the courage to speak in my own voice and own my own opinions, rather than staying with the passive voice.
• Majella Franzmann – early christianity – no publications in particular, but for modelling a way of doing academic presentations that is lively and interesting and for encouraging me to take something I could do well and explore it further.  Without Majella, I would not be doing doctoral studies.
• Judith Plaskow – theology – Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990 and the quote I use as my signature file, from the first multifaith global university chaplains’ conference in Vancouver in 2000 “Politics is the work we do to keep the world safe for our spirituality.” She and I share an allergy to tourist traps.
• Carol Christ – theology – Christ, Carol P., and Judith Plaskow. Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979. My introduction to feminist theology.
• Dorothy McRae-McMahon – liturgy – again, no publication in particular, but she writes beautiful liturgical material that really speaks to me.
• Karen Armstrong – The Battle for God. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
• Karen King – What is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.
• Luise Schottroff – New Testament – now that spelled her name correctly. The Parables of Jesus. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006. Made me rethink my approach to parables.  Like I really needed that when I thought I had my methodology all sewn up.

and I have actually met six of these women!

 

Women and the Bible

Yesterday, I said I’d try to talk about the Bible and its effect on how women function in the church. I think I want to broaden this post a little, but I’ll see how I go.

I think it’s true that when pushed to justify their behaviour, most people will defer to some sort of higher authority. For Christians, this higher authority is usually  God’s will as revealed in Scripture, with or without reference to the tradition of the church. People who believe that they have a divine mandate for their behaviour are less likely to change it than those who appeal to a less powerful authority for justification for their behaviour.

The Bible in its Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic texts is seriously androcentric. Most English translations make it even more androcentric. Phylis Trible’s God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality provides an impressive set of examples of how this is so – how female images in the Hebrew text are “degendered” in English translations.  Her Texts of Terror gives some chilling examples of how Christian Scripture is not just androcentric but also misogynist.

How a particular church views the status of Scripture has some significant consequences for the place of women in their communities today and, as I suggested yesterday, I think that the place of women in a particular church community will influence how likely she is to become a biblioblogger. A church that believes that the stories in Scripture are socially located and a reflection of the culture in which they were written will have a very different approach to one that believes that Scripture is literally word-for-word Gods’ word and true in that form for all time. I don’t think that anyone actually takes the Bible word for word literally, but many people say they do.  There are quite a few commandments in the Hebrew Scripture that Christians cheerfully ignore. Like the one in Leviticus 19: 19

You shall not let your animals breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall you put on a garment made of two different materials. (NRSV)

Even when we still want to stand by some of the Levitical laws, we tend not to think that death by stoning is an appropriate punishment for breaking them, although that’s what the Bible often suggests. And I don’t think that many Christians think that it is OK to offer to throw their virgin daughters out to be raped by a crowd of rowdy blokes in order to protect visitors, as Lot did in Genesis 19.

Nevertheless, if you see Scripture as being socially located etc, you will be more inclined to look at what it meant in the context of the time in which it was written in trying to work out how to apply it today, and thus to critique the androcentricity and misogyny. If you consider it to be literally true, you are less likely to think about the fact that Scripture in general seems to say that it is OK to treat women badly and ask what that means for how you live today.  This is not to say that all members of all conservative churches are misogynist. Scot McKnight is an example of someone from a reasonably conservative branch of the Christian church who has gone into print (in The Blue Parakeet) to argue for a more egalitarian treatment of women and as a professor teaching at a university level tries to instill confidence in his female students.

It was certainly important to me that the professors where I studied theology evaluated our contributions on the basis of their academic worth, not on the basis of whether we were male or female. They also challenged students who made sexist comments, didn’t use inclusive language and so on. This was also important in my formation as a minister and as a biblical scholar.

I indicated at the top that I thought I wanted to talk about more than the Bible. I think what happens in worship also has an important role in forming women who are confident to have their biblical scholarship voices heard in the blogosphere and I will look at that tomorrow (or the next day).

 

Women Bibliobloggers (or lack thereof)

This issue of why there are so few women bibliobloggers has raised its head again in the biblioblogosphere at a time when I am rapidly sinking under a load of the work that I get paid to do so that I can afford to study. Please therefore excuse me for failing to link to all the people who are discussing this and for not acknowledging who said what. Kudos, though, to Pat McCullough for highlighting the issue. I don’t all that often hear men asking this kind of question an we women get sick of asking it for ourselves.

Before I say what I have to say, let me give you some background.  I was ordained by the Uniting Church in Australia in December 1987. My church, which formed in 1977, has always ordained women. Two of its parent churches, the Methodist and Presbyterian churches had been ordaining women since the mid sixties. The Congregational Union in Australia ordained its first woman in the 1930s – internationally, it was the late 1800s. On the surface, my denomination has a pretty good track record with respect to women in leadership.

While I was training, some of the male candidates felt it was OK/their duty to explain to the female candidates why it was against God’s will for women to be ordained. The congregation where I currently worship has had two previous women ministers, one for 9 years. It currently has a woman minister. I have been attending worship there for some eight and a half years while I have been working as the denomination’s chaplain at the university. Significant numbers of members of the congregation still refer to any generic minister as “he”. I recently had a conversation with the chair of a “search committee” (we call them joint nominating committees) from another congregation who told me that a number of members of their committee did not want a woman because the person who has just left to join another denomination was a woman. I have never heard anyone suggest that they should not get another male minister because the previous man had done something they didn’t like – even serious misconduct.  They just say that the last guy was a dud!

The general consensus amongst Christian churches in Australia is that my denomination is so liberal as to be hardly Christian and yet there is still significant misogyny observable and even more if you scratch below the surface. Although we have a significant proportion of female clergy and quite a few of our lay leaders are also female, most of our gatherings are very “blokey”. Men have very loud voices and they pray and sing loudly. Which is why you can have a nicely balanced choir with 7 sopranos, 5 altos, 1 tenor and 2 bases. (Many men also take more than their fair share of seats in aeroplanes, but that’s probably got nothing to do with biblioblogging). My church often feels like a men’s club.

Some time back, someone did a list of bibliblogs that described them according to their theological positions as well as their frequency of posting. I appear not to have bookmarked it, but  it confirmed my impression that by far the majority of well-known bibliobloggers are theologically more conservative, which means that they are also less likely to be female. One of the other chaplaincies on my campus is Evangelical and although they ordain some women, these women are not allowed to teach men, so they are girls’ school chaplains or women’s and children’s ministers. One of the women leaders used to run a bible study group in the meeting room next to my office.  I didn’t always agree with her theology, but she was a great group leader and an excellent teacher. The men’s group thought it was just perfectly OK to disrupt her group by playing pranks, like locking her out. At team meetings (which I overhear), there is almost always a “pick on the female leader” segment aimed at making whoever is currently in the position feel small and stupid.  I actually don’t think this is deliberate. The guys are for the most part genuinely nice people, but their culture simply values women’s input on serious faith issues less than it values men’s. If, every time you open your mouth you’re ridiculed, it would take an incredible amount of self esteem and courage to put your thoughts about Bible out there on the web.

As I suggested on April DeConick’s blog, I think that another problem is that in many families where both partners work full time, there is an uneven allocation of housework and childcare at home.  This is well documented in the literature, and it means that women tend to have less time and less headspace than men to blog. If you are going to blog serious theology, you need headspace (this was pointed out by another woman blogger who rarely blogs theology despite having academic qualifications therein).

I am different. I grew up in an egalitarian family. My mother taught me to cook and my father taught me to fix cars. I went to an all girls’ school where we were told that we could do anything we wanted if we worked hard enough. I was in my early twenties before anyone whose opinion I respected told me that there were things I couldn’t do because I am female. My husband has been the primary care giver for our children ever since they were born. He recognised my call to ministry and was prepared to support it.  This has limited his choices in life.  April is also different. I don’t know about her family and educational background, but she didn’t have a child until she had already established her academic career and from what I have observed, she does have a husband who is willing to share the household chores and child care fairly evenly. This is not the case for many of my female colleagues.

If real life doesn’t overtake me again, tomorrow I will make some comments on the place of the Bible, which I think is really important.

I will close by saying that I really wish I had known about the Emerging Women blog when I was doing my Biblical Studies Carnival.  I really struggled to find women to link to, but here some of them were!!

 

Bible and Critical Theory Seminar 2

Roland has put up a post about the seminar on his blog.  It has photos, which is good because I didn’t actually take any although I did have a camera with me.  Featured in the photo taken outside the Grand are Melissa Pula (University of Denver, “Job’s Body in Pain: Reading Job 16:7-14 with Elaine Scarry”), Simon Holloway (University of Sydney, “‘If I forget you’: a linguistic and stylistic analysis of Psalm 137), Helena Bolle (Macquarie University, “The Vulnerable Body in the Wisdom Literature) and me. I am the one wearing blue jeans and carrying the SBL Auckland bag. Melissa is on my left.

It is interesting that everyone who actually addressed specific biblical texts looked at Hebrew Bible.  In addition to the three above, we also heard from Julie Kelso (University of Qld, “A Woman is being Beaten and Maybe She Likes it? Approaching Song of Songs 5:2-7 with the Formidable Intellect of Andrea Dworkin”), James Harding (University of  Otago’ “Ideology, Intertextuality and the David and Jonathan Narratives”) and Roland Boer (University of Newcastle, “Negri, Job and the Bible”).  Clearly next year the people who are looking at the other stuff need to present  so that there is no need to change the title to Hebrew Bible and Critical Theory.

Not, mind you, that I minded only getting Hebrew Bible (and more general work).  I don’t have the time or the expertise to do work in this area, so it’s fascinating to hear what other people are doing and the conclusions they’re coming up with.

And now, onto the things that struck me about the papers. Note that this is not by any means an exhaustive coverage of the seminar – just things that stood out for me.

A definite highlight for me was Darren Jorgensen (University of Western Australia) presenting “Simulating the sacred: Theodor Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia“. Strehlow was the son of the Lutheran founder of Hermansburg Aboriginal Mission near-ish to Alice Springs and because of his relationship with the Arrernte people with whom he grew up he was entrusted with many of their stories. Songs of Central Australia is a book of his translations of these song-cycles into English, although Darren argues that they are not so much translations as conversions. Instead of simply providing word-for-word English versions, Strehlow converted them in poetic form with a rhythm and cadence influenced by Greek and Norse myth.  This has frustrated later anthropologists who are unable to trace back from Strehlow’s versions to the original Arrernte songs, but in trying to recreate the sense of the sacred for a Western audience, Strehlow used, ISTM, the principles of dynamic equivalence.  Perhaps I’m a little slow, but one of the things that stood out for me about this was Darren’s explanation that although Aboriginal societies have much sacred information that is only available to particular parts of the group, when the community gathers, all the information is available to the community.

Stefan Solomon talked about “Revenant Revelation: Reading the Archive in Carpenter’s Gothic“.  His paper presented me with a new way of understanding the word αρχων.  It is related to αρχηων (or perhaps αρχηον) which means archive, a repository of knowledge.  Thus αρχων, which I have always understood as meaning ruler or judge or authority, is actually (also) a guardian of knowledge.  This, of course, makes sense in the context of  gnosticism and the fact that I had not realised it before probably just shows that my understanding of Greek has been limited to New Testament studies, but still…

Julie Kelso gave us a whirlwind tour through her paper (“A woman is being beaten…”). Despite the fact that she had all her quotes on handouts, I found it too dense to follow easily – given that it is right outside my area of expertise. What I took away was the need to think about how often heterosexuality and heteronormativity are functionally equivalent – another new-to-me concept.

Tamara Prosic (Monash)  talked about “Orthodox Christianity, Utopia and Socialism”. Through my post-prandial stupour,  the bits I latched onto were those that helped me to understand some of the significance between Orthodox and Catholic and Protestant theology – the Orthodox church does not have a concept of Original Sin, but sees sin as something that disrupts community.

Melissa Pula introduced me to Elaine Scarry’s concept that to be embodied is to be without power and that to have a voice is to have power.   To have a body is to have limits and being able to give voice is a means of survival for a body in pain. God in Job has a voice but no body. OTOH it occurred to me that in Job God describes Godself in bodily terms eg when God asks Job (38: 28-29)

Has the rain a father, or who has begotten the drops of dew: from whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfost of heaven? (NRSV)

Interesting.

James Harding’s paper looked at the problems inherent in misuse of statistics in biblical studies in his examiniation of the work of  Sylvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli on the one hand and Markus Zehnder on the other on what it means for David to love Johnathan. He argued that Schroer and Staubli’s problem was assuming that because the particular Hebrew word describing David’s love for Johnathan is used to describe erotic love in Song of Songs, it must  indicate erotic love in the David/Johnathan relationship. Zehnder argues that because it is more often used to describe non-erotic love, it is not erotic in David and Johnathan. In doing so, he fails to take into consideration the respective contexts and genres of his sources. Thus, although there are statistics, they don’t prove what the people using them suggest that they prove.

Simon Holloway, OTOH, was much more careful with his use of statistics. He justified paying attention to a particular Hebrew word by saying that it is used 88 times in the active voice (in the Hebrew bible, I think, but maybe it was just in Psalms) and everywhere else except in Psalm 137, it has a direct object. In 137:5, we have literally “if I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget” (no object). He looked at a number of ways that commentators have dealt with this anomaly and the problems with them. On the surface, a rather nice option is revoicing the verb.  I found myself wishing that I had enough Hebrew and a sufficient understanding of the transmission of the Hebrew Scriptures to be able to consider intelligently whether this option really does imply that we think we are better at Hebrew than the Masoretes.

So many interesting things to study, not enough time to do it in. If anyone has any ideas about ethical ways for me to find enough money to study full time for the rest of my life whist still maintaining the standard of living to which I have become accustomed, please let me know.

Update:

Neither Roland nor I mentioned what must surely be considered the most important point of the seminar (at least by Jim West) – Michael Carden mentioned Huldrych Zwingli in his presentation on “Sodomites, Sodomy and Same-Sex Marriage”.  It was only a passing reference to him when Michael quoted Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor as head of the Zurich church and pastor at Grossmünster, but nevertheless, a mention.

 

Bible and Critical Theory Seminar 1

Just back from the 2009  Bible and Critical Theory Seminar in Newcastle, NSW (10 and 11 July) organised by Roland Boer of  Stalin’s Moustache. My enjoyment of this delightful event was somewhat marred by my neck going out of alignment, so I was in significant pain and/or doped for a significant portion of the proceedings.  I was unable to post during the seminar because I didn’t have internet access and I think I will wait until after I’ve had my neck fixed to talk about the content of the papers but here are the obligatory photos of my room.  Note that it’s the spare room at my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s home, hence the non-motel-room touches.

My room view 2

My room - view 1

Some info about the proceedings, though:

We met at the Grand Hotel, across the road from the Newcastle Law Courts. Despite being a small group, we had international participation – Melissa Pula from University of Denver, Colorado being the person who had travelled the greatest distance to attend.

This was my first B&CTS and I really appreciated the opportunity to participate in a fairly informal gathering which nevertheless offered high quality papers with plenty of opportunity for interaction and discussion.  It was also great to  meet several people I’d only known via blog before:  Simon Holloway from Davar Akher and Michael Carden of Jottings as well as Roland.  I was disappointed that Marion Maddox had to withdraw at more or less the last minute, but the rest of the company made up for her absence.

None of the papers had any direct relevance to my research, but it was very pleasant to be able to be in the company of people who do Bible at an academic level and to be introduced to new ideas and new approaches to familiar texts. My thanks to Roland for putting it all together and to the presenters for their work.  More anon.

 

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.