Monday, February 19, 2018

Obadiah and the Feeding of the Five Thousand

One of the things I am finding incredibly fruitful in my research is reading the OT in the Septuagint (Old Greek version) which, at least as far as Mark goes, is key to understanding many of the OT allusions and word-plays with which Mark peppers his Gospel.

However, this morning I was translating 1 Kings 18:1-6 and the discovery was not so much to do with reading the OT in Greek as just reading it slowly. In the Feeding of the Five Thousand (Mark 6:30-45), most commentators find the “groups of hundreds and fifties” of Mark 6:40 reflects Moses’ arrangement of the people of Israel in Ex 18:21, 25; Deut 1:15. And this coheres with the Mosaic and New Exodus Typology found throughout the Gospel (See Marcus, Watts, etc).

However, a closer parallel (as the Israelites are also organised into thousands and tens) is Obadiah's (Abdiou in the Greek) rescue of 100 prophets in groups of 50 in 1 Kings 18:4. Is it really that much closer? I hear you cry. Yes, because the immediate narrative context for Obadiah's act is Jezebel smiting the prophets of the Lord. Whereas the immediate context for the Five Thousand is Herod's smiting of John the Baptist (Mark 6:14-29). And once he has put them in groups Obadiah then sustains them with bread and water, whereas Jesus sustains the crowd with bread and fish (but there is another reason for the fish - see Garland on that). Finally, in Greek, the groups are specifically men just as in Mark (ἀνήρ, 1 Kings 18:4; Mark 6:44)

So 1 Kings 18:4 contains a smiting of prophets and a saviour who groups men in fifties and gives them bread so they don't perish. This seems like a significant parallel to Mark 6:30-45 me and I nearly missed it because it doesn't contain a miracle! 

Anyway, last thing. Immediately following, in 1 Kings 18:5-6 Ahab, who is unaware that Obadiah is really playing for the good guys, divides up the land between his self and Obadiah so that they can find grazing for the animals. Thus Obadiah is a shepherd (well, the animals in question are horses and mules - but it's not a million miles off) who finds a different way (ὁδός - yes as in Exodus). As shepherding (as in Ps 23) and the Exodus are two significant Biblical themes recognised as present in Mark 6:30-45 this allusion to Obadiah (and by extension Ahab) is doubly apposite and serves to reinforce the contrast between Jesus and Herod, already implied by the juxtaposition of the murder of John at Herod's banquet and Jesus' feeding miracle. Lastly, because John the Baptist is an Elijah figure (see especially Mark 1:6) at the account of his death the reader could be expected to be alert to allusions to the Elijah narrative in 1 Kings.

Let me know what you think :-)


Friday, February 16, 2018

The Crucial Missing Elements: Review of Leithart, Deep Exegesis, ch 4

Peter J Leithart Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture, Baylor 2009
Chapter 4: The Text is a Joke

The subtitle for this chapter is “Intertextuality” (p109).  This chapter is an exploration of why some people will get a certain joke while others will not, and why some people can read things into texts that others simply can’t see. Leithart bemoans how students of the Bible are “usually inoculated against literary fancies early on in their training. The more expert they get, the more inoculated they become” (109). Of course this inoculation against eisegesis, that is reading things into the text that are not there, renders the exegetical methods of the patristic Fathers and the Bible itself alien, shocking and inaccessible to the modern interpreter (110). Leithart agrees this is well motivated, but that it has resulted in “drastically under-reading scripture” (111). As a positive example he quotes Dale Allison’s interpretation of Matt 1:1, “The interpretation of this line can be nothing other than the unfolding of what is not stated” (111). For Leithart this gets to the nub of the matter “Interpretation is all about tracing out the crucial missing elements that make the text mean what it does” (112).

Leithart moves on to an illustrative discussion of jokes and humour, finding much use in the movie Shrek, where most of the jokes in the movie rely on the viewer’s prior knowledge of fairy stories, nursery rhymes and other movies. At no point do those things get explained by the movie, but without them no one can “get” what the movie is about (113-15). Returning to the issue of exegeis he argues that “Even the most rigorously grammatical and historical exegesis of the Bible depends on connections between text and text, or text and speech, or text and extratextual reality” (116). Thus the distinction between exegesis and eisegesis is an unhelpful “pretense” (117).

Leithart continues to make his case with an example from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice’s use of the Bible and one from Eliot’s use of Dante’s Inferno (119-24). He argues that in the same way Scripture relies on such intertextual “jokes” to create its meaning giving examples, again, from John 9, in particular Jesus’ use of mud on the man’s eyes and relating it to God’s shaping of Adam from the mud and imagery of God as potter in Jer 18, etc (124-32). He then moves on to argue that what is taken to be a subjective literary reading is not really so different from a scientific historical one because they both involve the same process of “theory formation or hypothesizing” (133). Lest anyone faint at the expansive interpretive horizons opening up, Leithart discusses two constraints upon interpretive freedom: historical context and biblical conventions (136-37). Finally he discusses what kind of person makes a good interpreter, like someone who will get a joke, they need both the right background knowledge, that is comprehensive familiarity with the Bible, (138) but also the correct “hermeneutical equivalent to a good sense of humour” (139).

This was a good chapter, not least because I also love the movie Shrek. For me Leithart’s great strength is coming at familiar issues with bombast and originality. He is interesting and he provides you with a new perspective. In this chapter, with me reading, he was preaching to the choir, but I still learned from the way he illustrated and explained. Should Tim Bulkeley also read this book? I don’t know, are these issues that are bothering him? At the moment, for me, Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative is still a more useful and interesting book for a Biblical scholar to engage with reading the Bible literarily (as opposed to literally!). Deep Exegesis is perhaps more aimed at convincing an educated lay-person (perhaps with high brow literature tastes?), but I am finding it very helpful for my own thinking.

Let me know what you think :-)


Friday, February 9, 2018

"Words are Players": Review of Leithart, Deep Exegesis, ch 3



Peter J Leithart Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture, Baylor 2009

Chapter 3: Words are Players

Leithart’s next target is the privileging of synchronic rather than diachronic word studies. He begins with quotes from Eugene Nida, Moises Silva, Peter Cotterell and Max Turner, Anthony Thiselton and finally James Barr (75-77). He acknowledges that they “all have points” but remains “suspicious” (77). Leithart’s first suspicion is that, as in the battle for the Bible (ch 1), here modern linguistic and communication theory is being allowed to determine how we read the Bible. Modern evangelical hermeneutics expects to determine the the way words work in the Bible prior to reading it (80-81). Again the result is a privileging of meaning over style, content over form. For Leithart this is a “major departure from the procedure of earlier translators”, e.g. the LXX and Tyndale, who incorporated Hebraic style and neologisms in the translations (79). Here I think Leithart is being a bit simplistic. In regard to biblical translation Tyndale and Eugene Nida, and indeed the LXX, are not polar opposites but on a spectrum, and I wonder how many of his interlocutors would feel they are being treated fairly? When he quotes Cotterell and Turner agreeing with him, rather than accepting they might not be so far apart, he suggests they are admitting his point only “sheepishly” (83)!

Polemics aside, the chapter mainly discusses the way words work in poetry (and in jokes) and how past meanings, etymology, and ambiguities can all play a part in interpretation often creating more than one possible meaning and allowing the text to say new, unexpected, things. This is where Leithart really has something to offer, but rigid formal translation is surely not the answer. Many such word plays, etymologies, and ambiguities are simply untranslatable because no two words from different languages will share the same possibilities. Surely the only way to get even close to such an understanding of a text is to read the original languages? Any translation not only disables certain meanings but also creates new possibilities through etymology, word plays, etc. Leithart is yet to address this issue.

Leithart makes the historical case that “ancient writers were very interested in word derivations, etymologies, and histories” (95). Giving as examples Socrates, Aristotle, Ovid, Qunitillian, Philo, Isidore of Seville, Coleridge and Hamann, he suggests Biblical writers were no different and points out that “There are as many as eighty explicit etymologies in the Old Testament, and many of these etymologies contribute substantially to the poetry and theology of biblical narratives” (95). He goes on to discuss Homer (96), Heidegger (96-97) and Seamus Heaney (97-99) in making his point. He then returns to John 9 and argues that John’s Gospel uses many such word plays and discusses how John’s translation of Siloam as “sent” in John 9:7 connects meaningfully with themes throughout the gospel and in the immediate narrative and exposes John’s poetic approach (99-105).

So Leithart’s objection is to “minimal meaning” (105) where the meaning of a text is flattened out to a literal translation of an assumed meaning without recognition of the poetic possibilities inherent in the text. For him, “The Bible is closer to poetry than to a scientific manual” (108). Here I think he is spot on. What I’m not sure, as of yet, is how far Leithart really has a solution to the problem of translation, or if he really thinks it is as simple as returning to the (supposed) translation strategy of the LXX and KJV!

Monday, February 5, 2018

Typology is "Ordinary", Leithart, Deep Exegesis, Review of Ch 2



Peter J Leithart Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture, Baylor 2009

Chapter 2: Texts are Events

This chapter gives an effective but surprisingly mundane defence of typological reading. That is, the practice of interpreting earlier texts in the light of later ones. Leithart begins his chapter pulling no punches, pointing out that Matt 2:15 reads Hosea 11:1 and 1 Cor 10:14 reads Exodus 17 in ways that are to modern minds “unconscionable” and “[mess] with the intended, literal meanings of texts” (35). First he shows how the readings of the NT authors could have been following hints given in the OT itself (37-39), showing how subtle details in the OT text could legitimate apparently anachronistic NT readings.

Then he makes an unexpected move and asks “Can we defend typology as a mode of reading in general, not merely as a mode of reading Scripture?” (39) This becomes the focus of the rest of the chapter. He begins with the illustration that historical events gain fresh meanings in light of later events, because at the time of the event the full significance of what has happened could not be appreciated by the participants and witnesses of the event. It is the historian’s role to give an account of events, not just as they happened, but also of their significance in light of later events. A plain literal description of events would just be a chronicle, not a history.

He then applies this same principle to texts which, “say new things as they come into relationship with subsequent texts and events.” (44) This is an inevitable condition of being a reader, different from the author. Yet even the same author can come back to a text she wrote at a different time and situation and find the words speak to her with new meaning (which of course in no way voids the original meaning they had for her). For (my own) example, a song about loneliness written as a dumped teenager might find new poignancy when confronting the death of a parent. The same words take on new meaning in the new situation (51). This is also a function of narrative. Many detective novels work by presenting the reader with apparently trivial information that only becomes meaningful once the story’s climax is reached and the murderer revealed. Then the reader can “read backwards” to understand the full significance of events and details that had little or no meaning for the reader when the story was read forwards (66-68). His Biblical example of this is the narrative of John 9 where later events modify our perception of earlier, in this case a discussion of sin and blindness, becomes a healing story, which becomes a Sabbath controversy with the spiritually blind Pharisees (60-63).

He concludes, “The apostles teach us to recognize that ‘how it turned out’ exposes dimensions of the original event or text that may not have been apparent, and perhaps were not even there, until it turned out as it did.” (74) That is, when the apostles learn that Jesus is the climax of the Biblical story the texts and events of the OT  gain new significance, new meanings and do so that is in “in principle” nothing special, but just the “ordinary” way that events and texts work (74).

Again this chapter has put Leithart's incredible bibliography on display, with a wide range of different sources, academic and literary, on display, and an almost whiplash-inducing ability to bring examples from unexpected places and take the discussion in different directions. His discussion of the relationship between Darwin and Nazism, e.g., (68-71) is worthy of another blog post, but for me didn’t helpfully contribute to this chapters thesis. Leithart takes you on a winding road, and I wonder how many readers might get put off by that, but he is certainly taking us on a journey, and I’m excited to see where the next chapter will take us.

Thursday, February 1, 2018

"The Text is a Husk" Review of Leithart, Deep Exegesis, ch 1



Peter J Leithart, Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture, Baylor 2009


Chapter 1: The Text is a Husk

The first chapter of Leithart’s book presents the thesis that Western Christians have “emasculate[d] our own scriptures” (3). He presents as the epitome of this process Eugene Peterson’s “translation” (3-4) of Psalm 23. This is a disappointing cheap shot. The Message is explicitly not intended as a translation, but a paraphrase, and Eugene Peterson hardly seems like the enemy for a book about taking the text of the Bible seriously.  After this Leithart gets onto firmer ground beginning with Dutch Lutheran Humanist Lodewijk Meyer whose 1666 Philosophy as the Interpreter of Holy Scripture begins Leithart’s account of the “Battle for the Bible” (7). Leithart’s narrative takes us through Meyer, Spinoza (10), Kant (20), and all the way to Peter Enns (31), who may be surprised to find himself described as a “Kantian Evangelical” (!?!), and finally Richard Longnecker (32). Leithart’s account is lively, informative and effective in demonstrating the lineage of the modern impulse to privilege the “content” of the Bible over its “form”, the text.

The most damming of all his examples is his quotation of Richard Longnecker’s 1999 Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period (33). Leithart succinctly sums up Longnecker’s position: “when the apostles do what we do, we can follow their example. When they do not, we cannot . . . He wants us to draw the same conclusions Paul drew from the gospel . . . [but] does not always want us to follow the reasoning that Paul used to draw those conclusions” (33-34). Thus the message (content) of the text is truth, but the text (form) itself is untrustworthy and is discarded. Can this really be called a high view of scripture?

Here, Leithart finds the real enemy: The nonsense of Evangelical hermeneutics that claims the authority of the Bible but will not allow the Bible’s own interpretive methods to be used. This is the Bridge Paradigm of hermeneutics. This is a personal bugbear for me, so I am excited to see where Leithart goes next. I recently led a session on hermeneutics with a group of pastors and almost to a man (sorry, they were all men in this instance) they agreed that they would not use Biblical methods of scripture interpretation in their sermons, but only the grammatical-historical method which they had been taught at Bible college. I’m grateful that my undergrad hermeneutics teacher, Myk Habets, while he did teach the Bridge Paradigm, also acknowledged the validity of Biblical modes of interpretation and encouraged their exploration. If I remember Habets correctly, “What the NT does with the OT, we are permitted to do with the whole Bible.” I’m still working that one out. My current PhD research is all about the way Mark interprets scripture in his gospel. Let me tell you, there is not a grammatical-historical bridge paradigm in sight!

Overall, this first chapter shows off Leithart’s considerable erudition but takes a long time (longer than necessary) to make the point. I’m also surprised he doesn’t include the enormously influential Schleiermacher in his narrative (or judging by the author index, in the book at all), as he is generally considered the father of modern hermeneutics. I’m eager to see what he does with the rest of the book, and hopeful for some exciting constructive work.

Dale Martin on Ancient and Modern Families

Thanks to Taylor Weaver for uploading and pointing this out, Haven't had a chance to watch this yet but I know it will be of interest to a number of my readers :-) You're welcome.


Jesus treats the Syrophoenecian Woman as a Disciple

[This is an extract from my essay "Breaking Bread: The Power of Hospitality in the Gospel of Mark" which you can read in full and ...