Wow. That’s a long sentence.
This from a scholar I admire and respect. Normally an extraordinary communicator, this particular New Testament scholar writes the following single sentence:
Within the terms of the perspective on communication I will adopt, therefore, the twenty-seven New Testament documents are the evidence for a process whereby, at a particular time and place, certain persons (the authors of the texts) reduced meanings into messages of a particular symbolic form, in this case the written word, for transmission to other persons (the express or implied recipients) and those written messages were in fact transmitted to them by delivery, as with actual letters like Galatians, or by publication, as with the gospels or other documents like the Acts of the Apostles and the Apocalypse, whereupon the recipients perceived and interpreted them, and possibly even acted on the basis of their interpretations.
Oh my. If a student of mine wrote a sentence like this, it could possibly drop his/her grade from A to A-. Several sentences like this: B+. Of course, this particular sentence was authored by a UK author and I understand we have a different appreciation for the efficiency of words across the pond.
“Seems” Like Scholarship, But It “Surely” Isn’t
How is it that I can find in a top flight journal of biblical studies an article that does not offer hardly any evidence, but rather uses rhetorical devices that would give my own students poor grades? The current article I am reading is very interesting and I appreciate the scholar’s perspective quite a bit. The problem is that this is the author’s perspective and little else. It would make for a good lecture, perhaps.
But the article is pure speculation, even when the author contradicts other scholars. The author uses phrases such as “I would expect that” or “I imagine” or “I am inclined to see” or notes that something “seems to me to be unlikely.” Rather than citing evidence, the author merely states that something “certainly” or “surely” was the way he imagines. At every turn, I think I am finally going to find a single piece of solid evidence (even though the entire basis of the argument to this point is built upon a big “perhaps” cloud). But it never arrives. I might forgive one or two cases of “let us assume,” but not 20-plus pages of it.
Otherwise, the article is well written and the author’s insights are helpful and interesting. For those facts alone, I would probably give one of my undergraduate students at least a B+. But I’m afraid this scholar wouldn’t find a much higher grade without the use of evidence.
Laborious Sentences
Scholars need to get a hold of themselves with long sentences. This is one sentence, taken from a book on the historical study of Jesus:
The component features that have been chosen for inclusion in the historical reconstruction and the overall framework in which the details are examined involve awareness of the literary and rhetorical forms in which the ancient evidence has been transmitted, the social patterns of life of the people involved, and the unspoken but powerful assumptions that are operative in the thinking of the ancient speakers or writers, as well as of the ancient reporters who have preserved the records.
What? By the time I reach the end of the sentence, I have forgotten what it set out to do in the first place. The author also has a significant problem with long paragraphs.
My Article on Niche Bibles
I am pleased to announce that my article for my denomination‘s magazine, In Part, has been published. My little article is entitled, “The good (and bad) news about niche Bibles.” The entire issue, with a focus on the Bible (“In Pursuit of the Bible“), is fantastic. The main featured article is “What’s hermeneutics got to do with it?” by Bruxy Cavey (one of the stars of the Brethren in Christ church) followed up by a transcribed panel discussion by BIC pastors and others on the “role of Scripture in their everyday lives.” You can grab the whole issue as a PDF. I have made my two pages available as a separate PDF.
I enjoyed working with In Part’s wonderful editor, Kristine Frey, who recruited me for the piece. It’s fun to write for a wider audience that deeply cares about these issues.
Define Your Words (And Other Exam Advice)
Grading final exams, I find myself writing similar comments on many exams. One of the recurring comments is that the student needs to define a particular word. Here are a few examples:
- Salvation/Saved: If you’re talking about people needing salvation, particularly in a history course at a secular university, you need to explain from what people are being saved. Does salvation mean the same thing for all leaders, writers, groups in Second Temple Judaism and Christian origins?
- Blasphemy: On a question about why Jesus was executed, if you list “blasphemy” as one of the reasons, you need to explain what that means in context!
- God: Seems almost too obvious. What do you mean by “God”? Is it a God interested in individualist spiritual enlightenment? The God of community forming power? Different groups had different understandings of “God,” even within Judaism and Christianity.
- Christianity and Judaism: These are not two separate monolithic “religions” that are somehow instantaneously at odds with one another in the middle of the first century.
- Gospel: If “the gospel” is something that Jesus or Paul preached, state what you mean. What is the “good news”?
- “Literally”: If you’re going to say that some scholar is taking a particular text “literally,” what do you mean by “literal”? This is one of my least favorite words in relation to biblical studies. It is rarely, if ever, used accurately. You might as well just not use it. All biblical scholars should “read the Bible literally” when it is not symbolic, even if they offer alternative explanations for what the text means in historical context.
Other things to remember on exam essays:
Tell me why I should care (answer the question, “So what?” or “What is the relevance of this?”).
Use specific examples as evidence of your blanket assertions. You may not be able to get away from generalized assertions in final exam essays, but you need to at least say why you’re making them.
Try to connect topics in your essays. If two seemingly unrelated topics are included in the same question, the professor thinks there is a connection. Look for the link!
Also, ask yourself whether your answer lines up with what you’ve heard in lectures and read in course textbooks. If you found something “interesting” on Wikipedia that we didn’t talk about in class, you are susceptible to the aforementioned traps. I actually had a student come up to me after the midterm and defend his inclusion of an incorrect fact because it was on Wikipedia. Gasp! How could he be held responsible for incorrect information on unreliable website that he relied on for his exam essay?!
On a related note, get your facts straight. Pliny was not an emperor and Paul was not from a Gentile background (yes, someone actually said that Paul was a Gentile). And don’t just make stuff up, it wastes the grader’s precious time.
Cut the fluff. Don’t waste the grader’s time with flowery introductions and conclusions. Like the Gentiles, you will not be heard for your many words.
I would also like to make a plea that exam takers use caution when making their blanket statements. Note the kinks in your main argument. Acknowledge that it is a complicated topic. Use nuance. For example, avoid using words like “all” or “never.” If you are saying that something is “clear” or “certain,” there is a good chance that you are wrong.
Avoid careless phrases that you might use in common speech. If you say “against better judgment, Jesus flipped the tables of the money changers in the temple,” did you really mean that Jesus had bad judgment? Okay. Who has this better judgment? Why is it better? If you say that a claim that there were no women leaders in early Christianity can be “watered down,” what does that mean? Are you saying that the claim is partially true but not entirely? Okay. Then say that. Just so you know, use of casual phrases open you up to grader suspicion. I will assume you didn’t think through the logic very clearly.
Finally, don’t apologize for your work–if you think you did a bad job. It may actually be better than you thought, but then you make me think you’re not confident about your work. If you’re actually right, but not confident about it, that raises my suspicions.
Assertions vs. Arguments
Marianne Meye Thompson has pushed me towards written precision more than any other educator I’ve had. It’s a bittersweet blessing, of course, because it hurts to have your flaws exposed (I know, it’s difficult to imagine me having flaws). But it makes you stronger. In class today, she shared with us some of the most common advice that she writes on papers. One of the highlights for me is her emphasis on making arguments, rather than assertions. The blogging world is, of course, heavily tilted to the side of assertions. That statement itself is a case in point. I do not provide any evidentiary support to show that the blogging world is full of assertions, but I think it’s something that most of us can agree on. It’s a pithy medium, given to terse and often pejorative thoughts. One may see a few exceptions to the rule (and one hopes one would find these exceptions within biblical studies blogs), but it seems they are simply exceptions.
When writing essays, however, scholars and especially scholars-in-the-making need to rely on tedious argumentation to establish their point. Dr. Thompson says: “The following things do not ‘count’ as arguments: (1) The interpretation of another scholar or even the ‘majority view’ or ‘the established consensus’; (2) your opinion; (3) any body’s opinion.” She points out that you should never say “I think that” or “in my opinion,” but should rather give reasonings and simply remove those phrases. “Similarly,” she writes, “don’t say ‘this argument is convincing’ unless you say why or how it is convincing.”
Here’s an example. One famous essay that we read for our class states:
Nevertheless, it has become abundantly clear that the Johannine literature is the product not of a lone genius but of a community or group of communities that evidently persisted with some consistent identity over a considerable span of time.
The author offers no support. He doesn’t even quote other scholars who make the argument for the putative “Johannine community.” He simply asserts it as fact. Dr. Thompson brought this quotation up in class discussion when we went over the essay a few weeks ago, but she has trained my reading eye so well that I had already marked the sentence and wrote in big letters next to it: “ASSERTION! Why is it clearly the product of a community?” Writing qualifiers like “abundantly” does not make it any more of a valid argument.
One cannot support every single assertion in a paper, of course. It would otherwise become the longest paper ever produced. So we need to make wise choices about which assertions are the most crucial to the argument (the assertion quoted above is quite crucial to his argument). And when we are starting out in scholarship, Dr. Thompson offered, it’s better to err on the side of support.
It seems like a simple distinction to make (assertion vs. argumentation), but I was never quite so cognizant of its importance until coming to Fuller. I think I generally tried to follow the rule, but I just didn’t do it intentionally. And when becoming a better writer and finding my scholarly voice, intentionality is of the utmost importance. And with that assertion, I shall end my thought for today.
Why would anyone write like this?
From a book I’m looking through on a feminist understanding of the church:
. . . my own discourse seeks to demystify the cultural, dualistic, heterosexist, and essentialist as ideological obfuscations of the multiplicative structures of patriarchal domination.
Talk about obfuscations!
SBL Handbook of Style (PDF)
I would simply like to direct you to an enormously helpful electronic edition of The SBL Handbook of Style. For those who don’t know, it is based heavily on The Chicago Manual of Style, but is slightly adapted and annotated with examples for academic biblical studies. If you are a member of SBL, you can find a link to a free PDF version of the book from this page. I could give you the link to the actual PDF file, which anybody can view without a password, but I will heed Jim West’s recent admonitions to stay ethical.
For me, as a relative beginner to biblical research method, I have found it especially helpful for looking up acronyms (both ones I didn’t recognize and ones for which I wasn’t sure of the standard). For example, if you come across a reference to “Str-B” and ask yourself what the heck that is, you can do a search of the Handbook PDF and find that it is: Strack, H. L., and P. Billerbeck. Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch. 6 vols. Munich, 1922–1961. It’s also good for looking to see what someone means by a certain work. You can look up “Migne” or “Lampe” and find out what those names refer to in biblical studies. That at least gives you a starting point to figure out what they’re talking about (for more info you can then look these up in, say, Danker’s Multipurpose Tools for Bible Study). And if you need to find how to cite a journal article, just find “journal article” in the document, the first one is in the Table of Contents and from there you need only click on “Journal Article” to take you the right page.
I’ve heard scholars and some doctoral students talk about how they’re old-fashioned and they like the hard copies. But this one seems like a no-brainer to me: free searchable PDF versus $25 hard copy? I did buy the hard copy before I knew about this, but I may end up just selling it because I’m not sure I’ll ever use it again!
Writing papers like farts and babies
In a conversation about writing papers, I was once reminiscing on a particular paper I wrote in college that was especially easy to write. I said, “That paper just came right out of me.” And the person I was talking to (feeling a little silly) said, “Like a fart? … [laughter] … Well, you said it came right out of you.” She explained her writing process: “For me, writing papers is like giving birth. Papers come out of me like babies.” I’m a little uncomfortable stealing that metaphor as a man, but for me, I feel like papers are more often babies than farts.
That paper in college was an exception. It was a twenty-pager on Thomas Merton for a Christian Spirituality course. I had just spent the past year reading Merton and journaling my reflections about his work. I had even spent a weekend at his monastery in Kentucky, taking solace from the monastic life where “silence is spoken here,” as well as interviewing people who knew Merton. The paper had become a part of me. Long before I registered for the class, I knew that I would choose Merton for that assignment.
Nowadays, while I love to do research, papers are tedious to craft and give birth to, so to speak. And yet, when I’m done, especially for a lengthy paper, I feel like that paper is my baby . . . unless I wasn’t able to articulate exactly what I wanted.
Reflecting on my Merton paper experience, I wonder if someday I will get to a point where some area of NT studies will just flow out of me, like it is a part of me. I kind of imagine that is what it’s like for the big names in scholarship who’ve been in it for so long. They have lived it. I’m just a beginner, learning how things work, trying to figure out the theories. I feel like it will take awhile to get to a point where I don’t have to think about the theories and how to articulate them. It’s encouraging to think that maybe someday it’ll get easier. Maybe keeping at this blog will help the material become more a part of me. I guess we’ll see.
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Elsewhere . . .- Blog titles beginning with "A" to "Z" on your reader Mark Goodacre
- Of making many books there is no end Chris Brady
- Free Online: The Liddell-Scott Jones Lexicon S and C
- Does Higher Criticism Attempt to “Destroy the Bible”? II agathos
- Steven J. Friesen and the Identity of Satan’s Throne in Pergamum alan
- Does Higher Criticism Attempt to “Destroy the Bible”? agathos
- Bloomsbury buys Continuum Mark Goodacre
- Imperial America Peter J. Leithart
- C.F.D. Moule on the Birth of the New Testament d. miller
- Responding to Kostenberger (with comparisons to Marshall) Jeremiah
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