Theorizing ancient texts (and thus problematizing traditional scholarly narratives given for explaining such texts) seems to divide a lot of scholars. There are quite a few who just don’t want to bother with all this theory stuff, and its unnecessary jargon (so they perceive), and just continue along in the exegetical search of an author’s intention with little sprinkles of “historical background” for good measure. One may even find this to be the dominant perspective at SBL conferences, and not just by those working from an explicitly confessional perspective. At the same time, there is an ever-growing group of scholars of ancient texts (including biblical ones) who see various theoretical approaches and methodological considerations as essential for explaining the social functions of ancient texts.

Theory is not mere jargon, or at least it shouldn’t be, but rather more like a toolbox that assists us in deconstructing the rhetoric of ancient texts. In my initial post about Portier-Young’s recent book, Michael Helfield wondered aloud in the comments about the role of theory and what it might have to do with authorial intention, among other things. In her recent book, just reviewed in RBL, Ross Shepard Kraemer captures a sentiment that I have been trying to articulate for some of my friends still struggling with the idea of using theory in biblical and/or classical studies.

Alternative reading strategies, although not denying that authors have intentions and purposes, refuse to privilege authorial intentions and purposes. Instead, they attend to other things: to seeing the ways in which texts function regardless of authorial intention. One of these alternative practices, poststructuralism, explains narratives, texts, myths, and so forth in terms of structures that are inherent in human thinking but not consciously present (although perceptible to trained observers). The binary oppositions (e.g., good and evil, light and dark, right and left, soul and body, rationality and emotion, activity and passivity, masculine and feminine) that occur in many of the texts I treat in this study are aspects of these structures. This in turn is a theory of human activity that claims we do things without being fully conscious of them; that we utilize symbols, for instance, without a conscious awareness of what they are or how they work. Some theorists, particularly but not only the influential French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, have further argued for the centrality of “misrecognition,” to which I return in the last chapter. Humans engage in various practices that we explain in one set of terms even while they are clearly, at least to observers (and sometimes perhaps even to us), doing something else. For Bourdieu, misrecognition is specifically the “misrecognizing” of one’s interests in competitions for cultural and symbolic capital in diverse fields. [Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, page 9; emphases mine]

It is not that these ancient authors do not have intentions worth considering, but their apparent intentions (even if identifiable) may belie the complexity of their social and cultural anchors. “Alternative reading strategies,” as Kraemer calls them, help us to reconsider the often simplistic and narrow lenses with which traditional scholarship views ancient texts.

Update: A conversation with Jim West and Jason Staples on Google+ has me realizing that I should clarify and highlight something: theory remains a servant, not a master, to the task of doing history. Theory helps us do better history. The author’s intention is part of that history. Theory can help us peal back the layers of both explicit and implicit social/cultural assumptions in the author’s rhetoric. So, I’m not declaring the “death” of authorial intention here. I’m just saying that the way it traditionally has been done is problematic, and “well-applied theory” (Jason’s phrase) helps us sift through the confusion.