This fall, I’m stepping up the academic challenge. Marianne Meye Thompson has allowed me into her doctoral level course, New Testament Research Methods. Typically, doctoral courses have a small opening for the few, the chosen, the blessed… the lowly master’s-level students. The doctoral students usually have at least twice as much work to do and they have an extra quarter to finish it after the class is over. Though the master’s students have a lighter load than the doctoral students, it is enough to break the back of the one who carries the weight (if that one is not careful). I will be taking two other courses (Pentateuch with Jim Butler and Women, the Bible, and the Church with David Scholer) and will be a pastoral intern at Pasadena Mennonite Church. I’m also hoping to keep up my studying for another shot at both the GRE and the Greek waiver exam. And, oh yeah, I’m married. These are the kinds of things that could distract me from conquering (in good Anabaptist fashion) a more difficult course this fall. Nevertheless, I will give it my all. I will stand up to adversity and sing at top diaphragm capacity with Pat Benetar, “Hit me with your best shot… Fire away!” Maybe I’ll do a little dance too.
There was some confusion as to whether I would be able to crack my way into the course. Dr. Thompson gave me the go ahead to sign up for the class, but then it turned out that there wasn’t a master’s level segment of the course for me to register for this doctoral class. A master’s student can’t register for a doctoral level course. How about a directed study that would consist of me going to the seminar? A student can’t do a directed study for something that is already a course. And we find ourselves at square one. Dr. Thompson was ready to make some different name for the directed study just to bypass the system. Alas, it turned out that they were able to create a master’s level segment. Hurrah! So I am officially taking the course. It was one of those moments when I was thinking that educational institutional bureaucracy was hindering actual education, but some people made a significant effort to get things set up and for that I am grateful.
The course is described in matter-of-fact fashion: “This seminar introduces the various tools, including primary and secondary sources, available and necessary for advanced research in the New Testament.” To give an idea of the kinds of tools to which we are being introduced, we are using Danker’s Multipurpose Tools for Bible Study, Evans’ Ancient Texts for New Testament Studies, Scholer’s Basic Bibliographic Guide for New Testament Exegesis, and The SBL Handbook of Style. We are evaluated based on attendance and participation, regular research exercises, and a sample prospectus for a dissertation. Those last two may be adapted for master’s students, but I think I’d like to give that dissertation prospectus a shot. It may be difficult, but it would be good preparation for the future chaos of doctoral work. We shall see. Classes begin on September 25th.
Update (9/24/06): Walking through the Fuller Bookstore the other day, I discovered that Dr. Thompson had added a required book to the list that hadn’t been previously present: Markus Bockmuehl’s Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Studies. I was happy to see the addition as I’ve been hoping to read Bockmuehl’s work sometime soon, but never have. Also, it is the only book of the class that is not a “reference” kind of work. The other books are not exactly the kind that you’d curl up on the sofa reading with a hot cup of tea. Perhaps others might say the same about a nonfiction work that assesses the state of New Testament studies, but it is actually quite a pleasant read. Bockmuehl is a fantastic writer and has a welcome wit. It is the first time that I’ve seen a New Testament scholar use the words “dog doo” in their work:
In spite of this historical rootlessness and fragmentation [in New Testament studies], or perhaps because of it, contemporary New Testament scholarship is at the same time peculiarly beholden to intellectual juggernauts unmoved by reason or evidence (a point well made by Goulder 1996 in relation to the Synoptic Problem). Too often such aging monster theories imperiously require the homage of countless young scholars until after a generation or three they may finally topple and wither away by themselves. Among this brood of dragons have been self-assured assumptions about authorship, hypothetical fragments and hymns, the so-called gospels of Thomas and Q; wandering charismatics and invisible “communities” playing hide-and-seek behind the text; grand power struggles between irreconcilably divided, “suppressing” and “suppressed” versions of faith; all manner of quasi-Darwinist speculations about ever-ascending christologies and descending eschatologies, early egalitarian radicalism giving way to late bourgeois patriarchalism; and so forth. The list goes on and on. Even unbelievers in these figments of intellectual fashion find that the attempt to ignore them is like trying to escape after stepping into bubblegum or dog doo: they are virtually impossible to dispel, and the aroma lingers wherever one turns. (37-8)
Bockmuehl decries the assumptions made in the field, the fragmentation of vast subfields, the endless libraries of a “publish or perish” mentality, the superficiality of undereducated doctoral students, the neglect of scholarship in languages other than one’s own even as hermeneutics embraces a global perspective. He paints a picture of New Testament studies that is an awful, incomprehensible mess. Those involved don’t even agree about what constitutes the field of New Testament research anymore. He goes further to suggest possible solutions, but I haven’t gotten far enough to see what he thinks is the best way forward. I am enchanted, however, by his eloquent statement of the problems.
