This past summer I was digging into some methodological issues (hence, my Social Identity Theory post) and I realized something. Even though my advisor, S. Scott Bartchy, is a long-time member of the Context Group, I had never really dealt with the knock-down, drag-out fight going on between those who call themselves “social historians” and those who call themselves “social-scientific interpreters” in biblical studies and New Testament studies in particular.

In case you haven’t heard of this battle, or it sounds as bewildering to you as it does to me, let me introduce the issue. Basically, the debate comes down to how strictly one should follow social-scientific models in addressing the social concerns of early Christ-confessing communities. On the one hand, you have the social historians who generally adopt a more “eclectic” approach a la Wayne Meeks:

In short, the application of social science in the following chapters is eclectic. I take my theory piecemeal, as needed, where it fits. This pragmatic approach will be distasteful to the purist; its effect will be many rough edges and some inconsistencies.

(The First Urban Christians, 6)

There is much talk of Clifford Geertz (a cultural anthropologist, by the way) and his use of “thick description” ethnographic analysis — this is where the subjective (read: messy) cultural context takes precedence over formal and precise models — such is seen as the key methodological approach for social historians.

Many of the social-scientific interpreters believe that the eclectic approach is sloppy. Bruce Malina is most highly associated with this view. In fact, you might think in terms of two classic representative works, Meeks’ First Urban Christians (originally published 1981) on the social history side and Malina’s seminal The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (orig. 1981) on the social science side. Malina has argued for strict boundaries around what might be considered “social scientific criticism.” He has said:

[T]here are in fact two in fact two main differences between social historians and social scientists. The first is that the social historian’s conceptualizations are invariably implicit, arbitrary, and unsystematic, while the social-scientific interpreter’s are explicit and systematic. The second is the social historian’s tendency to evade, as far as possible, the theoretical issues that underpin historiography, because what historians consider to be sources usually provide them a loose narrative pattern to which the facts can be related. In other words, social historians prefer not to deal with the underlying structures and cultural value orientations; rather, their concern is with so-called events and personalities, which are usually more sharply delineated in historical records (narratives) than in the materials social- scientific interpretation uses.

(“Social Scientific Methods in Historical Jesus Research,” in The Social Setting of Jesus and the Gospels, 16 n. 2)

Malina is not alone. Philip Esler, for example, has had some more harsh words regarding social history:

It has, indeed, proved something of a dead end. . . . Social history has become, in effect, a form of empiricism, whose practitioners regularly employ concepts such as ‘kinship,’ ‘identity,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and so on without subjecting these ideas to the social-scientific modeling they require for clarity of application.

(“Social-Scientific Models in Biblical Interpretation,” in Ancient Israel, 13)

In response to these and other critiques, the “social historians” carry on their work and feel that the “social scientific interpreters” are taking their models too seriously, reifying what are essentially scholarly constructs. Meeks has said recently:

“Our theories and our models are our constructions, whether they are cast in theological language or in the language of experimental or observational science. In the search for truth, they are tools, nothing more, to be prized and carefully honed so long as they work, but remade or discarded when they do not.”

(“Taking Stock and Moving On,” in After the First Urban Christians, 136)

The thing is, though, Esler and others wouldn’t disagree with this. Everybody is saying that these models are purely heuristic. That’s why it seems to me that this is a matter of emphasis and style. And here I sit (I know I’m not alone) thinking, “Why can’t we all just get along?” It seems to me that visualizing a chasm between one group (“social historians”) and another (“social scientific interpreters”) is entirely unhelpful. Instead, why not speak of a wide swath of various types of studies addressing the ancient Mediterranean social world, and biblical studies in particular, which includes within it greatly diverse ways of tackling the questions? It seems that constructing social boundaries around groups of scholars working on similar issues is counterproductive. There is after all, diversity within both “groups,” and overlap between them, such that it is really inaccurate to speak of two distinct, monolithic entities — anyone else see the irony as applied to Christian origins? I’m not the first to suggest these things (see esp. David Horrell), but I’ll write more in a followup post a bit later.