Exegetical Method & Practice: What we're doing
Love Sechrest, the newest addition to Fuller’s NT faculty, is keen on the “practice” part of this Exegetical Method and Practice course that I’m taking with her. Sure, we’ll be learning the method in lectures and reading, but the focus of our assignments is on practice. We have an assigned Greek text for every session of the class; first we’re going through Romans and then Revelation. We are assigned either to do a translation of that text or a journal entry of questions related to the English text. The journal entries should contain 6-10 question from categories such as literary, historical, theological, and some critical questions from secondary literature (but a lighter emphasis on this last category).
On top of those daily assignments are several assignments related to our primary selected passage. Mine is Revelation 4:1-11. For this passage, we will do 1-3 page summary of text criticism in the passage, a sentence diagram of any 7 continuous verses from our passage, and an arcing diagram. Since the narrative of Revelation is not conducive to “arcing” (and don’t ask me what that is, because I don’t know yet), those of us with Revelation passages (me) will submit an arcing diagram for Romans 4:1-16. We will also submit an “Exegetical Working Paper” for the rest of the students in the class to read for the day when our passage it going to be discussed (discussion for my passage is on 5/14). The “working paper” will be three pages (single-spaced) summarizing the significant exegetical and theological issues for our passage. Finally, our final exegesis paper will be based on this passage. This is expected to be 10-15 pages and should put forth a thesis statement and argument regarding how this passage should be interpreted. That might be a little difficult for me because I find it hard to stick to one meaning in any given passage.
Here’s the weight for grading:
- Daily translations and journals (15%)
- Exegetical assignments (15%)
- Exegetical working paper (30%)
- Final exegesis paper (40%)
A lot of work! To be honest, though, I would prefer more work because (1) it spreads the grade out amidst lots of assignments and (2) it provides for a greater learning experience. The grading appears to hold a high standard: A is 96 or above; A- is 93-96; B+ is 90-92! Not much room for error.
As far as learning method, we will be reading through the hard copies of Michael Gorman’s Elements of Biblical Exegesis: A Basic Guide for Students and Ministers and David Alan Black‘s New Testament Textual Criticism: A Concise Guide. Those are the books that were required for purchase. But we also have an electronic reader including large selections from Gordan Fee’s New Testament Exegesis: A Handbook for Students and Pastors, Joel Green’s Hearing the New Testament: Strategies for Interpretation, Sandra Hack Polaski’s A Feminist Introduction to Paul, Amy-Jill Levine’s, et al., “Roundtable Discussion: Anti-Judaism and Postcolonial Biblical Interpretation” from the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 10/1 (Spr 2004). On this CD-ROM reader, we also have two introductions from a commentary on Romans (Dunn) and one on Revelation (Beale). It seems to be a pretty good mix, and not narrowed in on one author’s approach. It will highlight the traditional historical-critical methods, literary methods (particularly OT intertextuality), and we will even explore ideological/reader’s response methods such as African American, Postcolonial, and Feminist hermeneutics.
Speaking of all this reading, I should probably get cracking because I have to read 117 pages and translate Romans 1:8-17 by tomorrow.
Greek Reading: What we're doing
For my Greek Reading course with David Kiefer, Fuller Seminary’s Registrar, we will (naturally) be diving into Greek for this next quarter. Here are the Course Objectives and Learning Outcomes from the syllabus:
Upon successful completion of this course, you should be able to (a) identify all the relevant categories (i.e., to parse) all regular forms and most of the irregular but frequent forms of the articles, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs that occur in the Greek New Testament; (b) know the most common meanings of about 900 words that occur most frequently in the Greek NT, (c) know the patterns of Greek word formation and put this to use in vocabulary development and reading, (d) understand and be able to recognize the basic grammatical structures, sentence patterns, and styles of Koine Greek sentences as found in the Greek NT; and (e) be able to use all of this to read and translate extended passages throughout the New Testament with minimal use of reference tools.
To do that we’ll be focusing on two things primarily: vocabulary development and translation. For our vocabulary development we’ll be using Thomas Robinson’s Mastering New Testament Greek: Essential Tools for Students (for a review of the new edition, see this one in RBL). The major portion of the book (section 2, pp. 11-113) is a grouping of Greek words found in the New Testament under cognate groups, which are listed in order of frequency. First, though, we’ll be memorizing prefixes, prepositions and suffixes that are listed out in sections 3 and 4. We will also be memorizing irregular verb forms from a list that David will provide and discussing various areas of Greek morphology.
For translation we will be doing both prepared and unprepared translation. The class meets twice a week and the first day will be devoted to the prepared translation, while the second day will be devoted to “sight reading.” David said that he didn’t really like that phrase because it connotes a stressful “on the spot” kind of “test” of knowledge. He prefers us not to fret about it and just be willing to put ourselves forward, not worrying about making mistakes. I’m still going to call it “sight reading,” because, well, that’s what it is. For the prepared translations, we’ll be given a schedule (we don’t have it yet) of texts and we will read through taking notes on the things that puzzle us and interest us in the passage. We will also keep a reading and rereading log of the texts that we read for the first time for the following week, read for the second time for the present week, and read for the third time for the past week. A lot of reading! We’ll also have weekly quizzes and a final exam on the material.
Overall, it should be a lot of work, but I’m looking forward to it. It’s a smallish class and I think we’re going to have some fun with it. I’m definitely looking forward to getting some of my foundations more solidified in Koine Greek.
RBL review of Crossley's Why Christianity Happened
Fellow biblioblogger, James Crossley, has had his book, Why Christianity Happened: A Sociohistorical Account of Christian Origins (26-50 CE), reviewed in Review of Biblical Literature. The reviewer, Richard L. Rohrbaugh, does take a couple of jabs at the book, particularly the overreaching title (and I do wonder whether that was actually Crossley’s choice or the publisher’s) and his early dating of Mark. But overall, it’s a relatively positive review, pointing especially to Crossley’s “impressive” knowledge in “Jewish law and rabbinic teaching.”
Added to Biblioblogs.com
I don’t know when this happened (it seems to have been around 3/18), but apparently I’ve been added to the biblioblogs roster! I was surprised to discover that someone found their path to my blog from the biblioblogs.com list of blogs. Many thanks to Jim West and Brandon Wason for including me in their esteemed blogroll!
Questioning Bart Ehrman's (Un)Faith?
It’s often stated that Bart Ehrman lost his faith because of his revelations in scholarship, particularly text critical work. For example, take a look at the quote from Daniel Wallace that I earlier referenced on this blog and to Craig Evans new book Fabricating Jesus (see pp. 25-31). In a recent interview with Biblical Archeology Review, he makes a clarification. Perhaps he’s made it elsewhere; I don’t know. Ehrman lost his fundamentalist outlook on Scripture due to his critical work with the Bible. In his words, “I shifted from being an evangelical Christian to becoming a fairly mainline liberal Protestant Christian.” What made him lose his faith, however, was the question of theodicy, that is, the question of why suffering exists in a world created by a good God. Ehrman became dissatisfied with “conventional answers” to the question, particularly the contradiction of answers that he saw in the Bible, and he “couldn’t believe in a God who was in any way intervening in this world, given the state of things. So that’s why I ended up losing my faith.”
It’s an important distinction to make and one that I wasn’t aware he made. The “enlightened Christians” among us (I’m indicting myself here) might be tempted to assume that Ehrman is misguided in his choice because he did not know how to shed his fundamentalist way of looking at the Bible without shedding Christianity entirely. We might say, “Well, of course inerrancy is wrong. You don’t need to ditch the faith because inerrancy is false!” From my perspective, if we do this, we’re setting up Ehrman to be a kind of “faithless dolt” straw man: his reason for unbelief is silly, so therefore, his unbelief is silly. But I think that Ehrman has raised a valid theological concern here. There are some pretty good answers to the theodicy question out there, but no one has the perfect answer. My undergrad adviser, Mike Cosby, liked to say of Job that he asked the “unanswerable question” and he got the “Unquestionable Answerer.” I like that way of looking at it, but it just highlights the idea that we have no good answer. Furthermore, throughout the discussion, Ehrman raises some valid points about needing to have good “reasons” to choose one faith over another (or faith over unfaith, for that matter). I guess what I’m saying, then, is that I’m not sure Ehrman’s unfaith should be the subject of our critique, at least not in the context of biblical scholarship.
I also appreciate Ehrman’s tone. It does not seem to me that Ehrman is anti-faith, but simply agnostic. He would like to believe, but doesn’t feel compelled by the reasons to believe. He doesn’t appear to hold it against those who do believe. On whether one cannot be a believer in biblical studies, I think he has a helpful and balanced perspective:
Historical scholarship calls into question certain beliefs and can call into question faith. But it can’t resolve any faith issues. There are historians who agree with everything that I think about the historical Jesus, about the New Testament, about the development of Christian doctrine, and yet they’re professors in theological seminaries training pastors. If you ask them, they will say, “Yes, Jesus is God. Historical scholarship doesn’t determine what we believe.” So I think what’s important is that people engage in historical scholarship. It’s better to have a knowledgeable faith than an ignorant faith, and it may be that it will change faith, but it’s not necessarily going to lead somebody to agnosticism.
The article is actually a four-way interview, or discussion, about faith and biblical scholarship. The other participants are “James F. Strange, a leading archaeologist and Baptist minister; Lawrence H. Schiffman, a prominent Dead Sea Scroll scholar and Orthodox Jew; and William G. Dever, one of America’s best-known and most widely quoted archaeologists, who had been an evangelical preacher, then lost his faith, then became a Reform Jew and now says he’s a non-believer.” It is a very good read, recommended.
Thanks for the heads up, Danny.
Do Anabaptists believe in reading Scripture?
This was the google search that someone typed in to get to my blog. That brought them to my post on “What do Anabaptists say about justification by faith?”
I hope that said googler found the answer to be “yes.”
Working on a Writing Sample: Remembering Jesus
In the next six months or so, I will have to create a paper to submit as a sample to doctoral programs. At this point, I am in the planning stages. None of my classes have provided the opportunity for me to create a paper that I feel expresses what most interests me. The topic that I am playing around with is regarding the memory of Jesus in the early church and what that does to people. In other words, how do Christians live out their memory of Jesus who is called Christ? This is a very broad category. Naturally, there will be some overlap with historical Jesus works (right now I’m reading volume one of J. P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew series), but I am not interested in the memory of Jesus as a way of getting behind the memory to find the “real” or even “historical” Jesus (Meier mentions that the “historical” Jesus is not the “real” Jesus, but rather the Jesus that we can “‘recover’ and examine by using the scientific tools of modern historical research” [1:25]).
Instead, I am interested in what the memory of Jesus means to the people of the early church and how it might have affected their lives. I have a feeling that it may be an impossible question to answer, but I’d like to try. I will be taking a class called “The Cross in the New Testament” with Marianne Meye Thompson this next quarter, which I think will concentrate mostly on atonement theories. How the early church conceived of atonement will certainly be part of this exploration, but not nearly the whole. If you have any suggestions for angles or good reading material, please let me know.
Both fortunately and unfortunately, the paper can only be so long. Here are some of the descriptions of the writing sample requirement for a few of the schools on my application list:
- Boston University: “A writing sample of no more than 20 pages. Academic writing is preferred.”
- Drew: “A recent academic writing sample which should highlight the applicant’s writing and research ability. The writing sample should not exceed 20 printed, double-spaced pages, not including bibliographic data.”
- Duke: “a term paper or sample of other scholarly work of 15-20 pages”
- Emory: “a research paper or academic essay of about twenty pages”
- Notre Dame: “A writing sample is strongly recommended but not required. Writing samples should be between twenty and twenty-five pages in length. An applicant should choose a writing sample that highlights his or her strengths for the area to which he or she is applying. In addition to clear writing and ability to frame a theological question, one might, for example, submit a sample that shows facility with primary-text research languages.”
- Princeton Theological Seminary: “We require a 20-25 pg. writing sample relevant to the subfield area of interest.”
- U of Chicago: “Applicants to the Ph.D. program must, in addition to this essay, submit a writing sample not to exceed twenty-five (25) pages, typed and double-spaced. The sample should be from work you have submitted for a course or for publication. It may be an excerpt of such work (but please include a short paragraph contextualizing the excerpt), but it must not be a re-write done solely to satisfy the stipulated length of the submission.”
- UNC-Chapel Hill: “An academic writing sample (no more than 25-30 pages) is suggested but not required.”
- Union in VA: “A research paper or recent essay the student considers representative of his or her work in the proposed field of study.”
In response to the requirement by U of Chicago that it should be from a work submitted for a course or for publication, I do hope that I will be able to submit the paper to a regional SBL conference. I wonder if that fits their expectation. It looks like I have to aim for a 20 page paper to satisfy all of the above. Many say “not to exceed” or “no more than” 25 pages and I wonder if I should have a slightly longer version for those schools.
Video: Anabaptists Reading the Bible
I’ve just been tipped off by Shawn Anthony of Lo-Fi Tribe about the “Rediscovering Anabaptism” video series that’s displayed online over at the Anabaptist Network website. This is the one about reading the Bible. No doubt Jim West will have a bone to pick with it!
The main scholar in the video is Stuart Murray. If you’re intrigued for more in-depth information about the themes in this video, I highly recommend his Biblical Interpretation in the Anabaptist Tradition. You can also catch a survey of it online here.




