Genius and Biblical Scholarship

Difficult as it is to accept one's own limitations, there are giants and there are ordinary mortals. David Flusser, by all accounts, was one of the giants:

. . . the audience, composed mostly of graduate student “groupies,” was mesmerized by his lectures, even if they did seem to jump from subject to subject. While sometimes even these students found some of his musings seemingly incoherent, upon further reflection they (and I) often realized how absolutely brilliant they were, even if totally unconventional at times. There was a method to all this, and it clearly was the method of a creative scholar, humanist, and genius. And it was all outstanding classroom theater. Flusser was at home in Hebrew (and in a dozen or so other languages) . . . (From Joshua Schwartz's RBL review.)

Gadamer on Self-Understanding

"Self-understanding always occurs through understanding something other than the self, and includes the unity and integrity of the other." - Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Continuum, 2004), 83.

It's a good thing I'm reading Gadamer for the big picture because there was a lot in the first 100 pages of Truth and Method (on "Transcending the Aesthetic Dimension") that sailed right over my head.

Martin Luther's Hermeneutic of Faith and Suspicion

I posted Martin Luther's 1522 "Preface to the Revelation of St. John" a month ago because it illustrates Luther's mid-way position between the patristic and medieval "hermeneutics of faith," on the one hand, and the wholesale hermeneutics of suspicion of the Enlightenment and its historical-critical heirs, on the other:

"For Luther, as for Erasmus and all earlier Christian hermeneuts, the disposition of the reader remains crucial: we must preface our reading with prayer and continue with the eye of faith, and our faith is thereby strengthened by our reading. But although his is clearly a hermeneutics of faith, it is also actually a hermeneutics of suspicion, at least in principle, for thereby we grow in faith in a typically circular movement from universal faith to particular inquiry and back to universal faith, which is strengthened in the process." - David Jasper, A Short Introduction To Hermeneutics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 59.

If Augustine would not stop until he found Christ in the text--by allegory if not in the literal sense, Luther was willing to discard New Testament books, such as James and Revelation, in which he could not see Christ.

My own working approach is to accept the canon on the basis of tradition. I assume the Spirit guided the selection of our 27 NT books, and I accept them as given as a rule of faith. I also happen to like Revelation--not least because of its fantastic visions and images.

Arthur Boulet's Review of Kenton Sparks's 'God's Word in Human Words'

This excerpt from Arthur Boulet's review of God's Word in Human Words is thought-provoking:

If the evangelical answer continues to be fideism or pretending that the “problems” do not exist, then the laypeople, seminarians, and graduate students who are approached with the strength of these issues are left without a paradigm or hermeneutical method that can account for both data produced by biblical critics and the faith they hold. Their “liberal” views or their “falling from faith” are not the necessary conclusions of critical biblical scholarship but the necessary conclusions of evangelicals’ negligence not only to deal with the data of biblical criticism but also to integrate it with their theology.

Also interesting is Boulet's affiliation with Westminster Theological Seminary, though he is evidently not on faculty there.

Alec Gerrard's Temple Model

Alec Gerrard has spent 30 years constructing an amazingly detailed 1:100 scale model of Herod's temple in a shed on his farm. Unfortunately, due to copyright restrictions I can't include any pictures here (or use them in my classes), so you'll have to check out the pictures in these Daily Mail and Telegraph articles (with a slide-show here).

Or you can order Gerrard's pictorial guide to the Temple featuring his model. See also Graham Kennedy's discussion.

Evangelical Scholarship on Jews and Judaism 1: Purity

One puzzling feature about Peter's lunch-time vision in Acts 10 is that the four-cornered sheet contained clean as well as unclean food. So instead of replying, "Never, Lord, I have never eaten anything common and unclean" (10:14), Peter might have selected a clean animal from the menu and been on his way.

F.F. Bruce suggests that Peter "was scandalized by the unholy mixture of clean animals with unclean" (206 n. 18), but offers no evidence that such a combination was considered unholy.

Ben Witherington III supplies the lack, drawing on a 1983 AUSS article by Colin House, which in turn appears to rely on F.F. Bruce (see p. 147). Witherington puts the argument this way:

"Peter assumed that because of the considerable presence of unclean animals and the possible problem of contamination, there was nothing fit to eat in the sheet" (Witherington, Acts, 350).

No evidence? No problem:

"It may be true that no known ruling specified that clean animals were automatically made unclean by mere contact with unclean ones, but it stands to reason that this was often assumed to be the case in early Judaism. It was after all assumed in early Judaism that a person incurred uncleanness by mere contact with an unclean person, and it would be natural to assume the same with animals" (Witherington, Acts, 350 n. 95).

There are at least a couple issues here:

1. Arguments about early Jewish belief should never rest on what "stands to reason" or what is "natural."
   
2. This particular argument represents a failure of imagination: Think of all the Jewish shepherds trying to keep their pure sheep from weasels, mice, lizards of various kinds, and all creatures that swarm upon the earth (cf. Lev 11).
   

Memoirs of a Marriage at Forty(-Four)

You were eight when I first met you,

Several years older when I first remember noticing you.

Not the voices, but the background noises I recall first:

Handel’s Messiah as I drifted to sleep,

The beep, beep, beep, of the V.O.K. reading the news.

Then the voices half-understood:

Greeting the neighbours across the fence

with words of welcome;

A full report of the morning’s events

at the lunch table, first names scattered haphazard;

and the sustained, barely audible, hum of reading and prayer—nourishing life.

Not words alone, but laughter, and tears too, nurtured my childhood.

A solitary tear runs down her cheek as I walk backwards, wave and turn,

goodbye.

In fitful sobs, they fall too, reminding me that this is Adam, both new and old,

yearning for yield.

I watched you grow in the lives of your children.

God knows the tears and sweat, the toil and prayer

That feed the sometimes seeming barren soil of ministry.

God knows the names of lives touched and others trained,

That fruit borne of life together:

Not stale or stagnant,

Not shrinking into hardness like a withered citron,

You model—as I watch you growing into wisdom,

growing into love.

DMM

1/09/05

_____________

I wrote this four years ago for my parents' 40th wedding anniversary.