Thursday, June 25, 2020

Samuel Sandmel on Making Many Books

"A lover of scholarship must in our days wonder if the explosion of learning has not yielded a superabundance. So great a flow has there been of books and essays that no one can keep up with it, as the honest scholar admits. The superabundance in part is marked both by an immense quantity of repetitive writings on the same general subject, and also by articles, some enlightening, but some confused and confusing, on minor points, marked by special theories ingeniously designed to solve the unsolvable." (vii)

"There is no ready cure in our time for the demands of specialization which tend to restrict broad study. Hence, only one who has had the privilege of not years, but decades of study can partially escape from a preoccupation with only a single area of the several here dealt with. Even such a person cannot achieve fullest mastery in all this variety. If I were to set forth a claim of some tolerable mastery, it would be in Bible (Old Testament0, in hellenistic Judaism, and in New Testament. I am experienced in Rabbinic literature, but am by no means an unqualified expert; I have studied and taught the Apocrypha and the Dead Sea Scrolls, but make no claim of special eminence. The full mastery of all these literatures, and of the scholarly writings about them, are beyond what one man can achieve in the normal span of a single life. I have dared to hope that where expertise has eluded me, responsible competency has not." (viii-ix)

From the preface to Samuel Sandmel's Judaism and Christian Beginnings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

6 comments:

Gerry said...

A wonderful quote once again.

I wonder what Sandmel would think now 42 years on when the proliferation of books and articles is beyond calculation like the sand on the shore ?
Martin Hengel complained of much the same thing.
Too many students spend too much time in the secondary sources and too little time in the primary sources much to their great detriment .
Feeling that they have to keep abreast of the currents whilst neglecting the source of their studies .
It is of course impossible to keep abreast of the Literature, at least without some neglect of the object of study in which one wants to gain mastery.
Their can be no mastery of both secondary and primary sources.
I’m paraphrasing him of course but that’s the idea.

Thanks again for the quote .
I liked the Timothy Barnes quote too a while back .

d. miller said...

Thanks for your comment, Gerry. Do you have a reference for the Hengel quotation you refer to?

Gerry said...

Let me try and find it David .
I’m sure I still have the article somewhere

Regards
Gerry

Gerry said...

David if you have an email address I can send you an article by Hengel in which he mentions what I think I tried to convey in my post.
The article is lengthy and I haven’t gone through it to seek out the lines which I sought to paraphrase.
If you don’t find anything that remotely deals with my sentiments then let me know and I’ll seek out where I picked up his thoughts on the subject.

Regards
Gerry.

d. miller said...

There's a link to my email address here: https://sites.google.com/site/gervatoshav/about-me

Gerry said...

Sent David..

All the best
Gerry