NT Discourse

My first word study in seminary for Greek exegesis was the word σπλαγχνίζομαι. It occurs twelve times in twelve separate verses. BDAG define it as “have pity, feel sympathy” (BDAG, 938). Of the twelve instances, nine of them are used to describe Jesus’ response to a situation. In the other three instances, it is used to describe the master of the unforgiving servant just before he forgive his debt, the good Samaritan just before he goes to help the wounded man, and the father of the prodigal son as the latter is still at a distance on his return. The closest I could come to an idiomatic English translation would be my heart going out to the person. It is not feeling sorry for them, or looking down on them with pity. The NT usage seems to reflect being struck somewhere deep down in such a way that moves one to take action.¹

I spoke to our church’s high school group last night, actually I was more introduced/interviewed in anticipation of doing some teaching beginning later this month. They put me in the “hot seat” and asked me questions about my past. I did not feel sorry or pity for them. Εγω σπλαγχνίζομαι. I was struck somewhere down deep to do something. The something kept me awake later than I would have wished, thinking and praying through what “something” looked like for me. This Greek word, based on its NT usage, describes how I felt last night. It felt both good and bad. Something snapped down deep to do something. I had been feeling called to help out teaching for several months, but spending time with the student on their terms, on their turf, changed everything.

John Hobbins’ post this morning “Why it is important not to love the God of the Bible” raises a great issue regarding the academic study of biblical language. The question is this: (forward-pointing reference for dramatic build up, with offline information inserted to further lengthen the delay) Do we treat Scripture as the living and active word of a holy and personal God, or is it something we only look at objectively at a distance?

Never allow academic study to harden your heart.

1. I doubt this definition would hold up in broader Koine usage. [↩]

When I wrote the last post on reflections from the academic conferences this year, I really had not expected much in the way of a response.  After getting comments about my illustration of verbal aspect, my expectations changed. I really thought there would be some traction for the idea of convening a new panel to see the discussion advanced, moving beyond just reaffirming positions. Interest seemed to die off when it got to brass tacks, fueling my growing cynicism about scholarship as a quest for greater understanding, for Knowledge.

Just to close the loop on the discussion, I wanted to make an observation. If people do not understand or “get” what you are doing, or why is has any potential contribution to make, you have to ask yourself one question: Whose problem is it? Who bears the responsibility for making something understandable?

One answer that is quick to be offered is “the learner, the novice”. It is their problem, they just need to pay their dues, invest the time, and then they can attain the purer level of knowledge that those specialists with PhD after their name possess. There is a lot of truth in this answer. Not everyone has the proper background to understand Greek grammar, nor can everything be simplified for the least common denominator. This is not what I am talking about.

If I have an idea that I think will improve how we do grammar (and I do), and if I want to influence people to move in a new direction based on this idea (and I do), whose problem is it? If I am really have a solution that will help solve a problem, but no one can understand it, is it really reasonable (or rational) to expect things to change? A common response to this is to blame the incompetent masses for being too unsophisticated to understand the profundity of my work. If only they could understand it, they would see it was correct. But alas….

There is another potential answer to the question of responsibility. There is another way to address the issue. Instead of writing as a specialist to specialists, I could make it my responsibility to make it understandable. Rather than smashing the knuckles of those that ask imprecise questions, I could help them understand why the imprecision will get them into trouble. Who knows, maybe the degree of precision that I am demanding is not even necessary to understand the concept!

Whose responsibility is it to make things understandable? Within the Academy, a common answer is that it is up to the masses to invest the time, they need to pay their dues and our salaries through tuition. But these same scholars can be heard grumbling that no one is giving due attention to their ideas because the attention they deserve is being given to a flawed framework written for the masses that is carrying they day. Why? Because the other guy took responsibility for making the information accessible.

Let’s bring this back to what I was saying about verbal aspect. I contend that it is the accessible books that address a wider audience that have the longer lasting impact than the technical tomes. Tomes are important, but by themselves they will not carry the day. If you compare the distribution of Porter’s dissertation volume compared to his Idioms volume, I would expect that most of the people that cite Porter on aspect are citing the parade illustration from the latter volume, not the tome from Peter Lang. Idioms did a great job of popularizing the integration of linguistics with Greek grammar.

As much as people have criticized Campbell’s volume on technical grounds, based on its accessibility and distribution potential through Zondervan, I expect that it will become the new starting point for reading about aspect. Why? Why wouldn’t the student read one of the more historically authoritative works? Because those volumes are written by specialist for specialists, a group who have the concerns and interests (and pet peeves) of specialists. After all, there are hills to die on, nits to pick, straw men to build and shred. That is the cutting edge of scholarship, right?

Does this mean that I am against precision and accuracy, that I think we should simplify everything to the point that it becomes inaccurate? No way. I am pretty ruthless when it comes to figuring out what is going on under the hood. It takes work to clear away the clutter, to move past the symptoms to the core problem and to describe it accurately.

But the need for precision has too often become an excuse for not understanding something well enough to explain it to a non-specialist.

By non-specialist here, I am talking about competent folks with graduate training, not just “Joe the plumber.” We will return to him below.

This responsibility to make things understandable has been with me for a long time, probably stemming from my background in the trades. I realized that if my ideas were not transferable to others, their impact would be very limited. In response to this, I began explaining my research to the guys at the job site¹ One of the people I practiced on was the plumber. He even had what we called a PhD: a Post Hole Digger. If I could not explain to him what I was doing and why it mattered, I needed more time in the wilderness learning. I also taught K-2nd Grade council times at AWANA. A highpoint was teaching the kids Matt 7:12 in Greek so that we could discuss the significance of the pendens and adverbial KAI to the overall rhetorical impact of the verse. We did this through hand motions. They discovered the joy of syntax that night, along with some of the parents!

One of the most encouraging complements I look for is this (forward-point reference): “I understood what you were talking about, it made sense.” I may not have convinced them, but at least they understood enough to disagree. If they do not understand, if I spoke in inaccessible ways, what’s the point? They may think that I am profound and smart.  They may even think I am right. But if it is not understandable, how will it help? How will I get any meaningful feedback about how to improve my analysis or description? I think this is the spirit of what Paul is getting at in 1 Corinthians 14:6 ff. Does it edify, and if so, how broadly.

I have not yet read Con’s book,² and Con, sorry for using you as an example so much. But I applaud you for doing what you have done by taking what has been a devisive and controversial topic and attempting to repackage it in a more simplified form for the non-specialist. For those who have significant beefs with his work, take note. If you cannot provide a better explanation in an accessible manner, you have already lost the war, even if Con is wrong. One of the common criticisms of his book seems to be that the masses will not have enough background to know where he missed the boat, and therefore the book should not have been released to the masses. We need more academic discussion. They are probably right, but it is too late, the cattle are out of the barn. Now what? How about we convene something that consists of specialists still actively working the aspect problem, boil the issues down to the core differences, and have a practical, applied discussion. If you want to save the masses from being lead astray, then do something.

When Buth and Holmstedt did their smackdown, when all of the dust had settled, the analyses looked pretty similar. The main difference had to do with Rob’s default SV, which meant he did not have to treat initial topical constituents as anything special, it was the default order thanks to his triggered inversion rule. People were able to compare apples with apples in their analyses, and walked away following the analysis that made the most sense of the data. In my mind and that of many others, that was Randall Buth’s. I wonder what would happen with verbal aspect? Perhaps we will never know.

1. I worked my way through my MTS and DLitt degrees (14 years in total) either working in a lumber yard or framing houses by myself as ‘Academic Construction.’ The same skills that helped me with grammar also made me a ruthlessly efficient carpenter. I could build faster alone working a shorter day than most two-man crews, and even some with three. College students always had a bad reputation as construction workers, since they tended to over-think things. I demonstrated that good thinking could have a practical pay off. But I also took a perhaps less-than-noble satisfaction in keeping pace with or outpacing the competition. My nickname for a time was Psycho. [↩]
2. I tried to score a review copy, but failed. [↩]

Let’s face it, scholarship is a competitive enterprise. In as much as there is a desire to get things right, there is typically a corresponding interest in being right, in coming out on top. Competition can be a healthy thing, leading to greater innovation and refinement. But when winning the competition becomes an end in itself, the effectiveness of the scholarly enterprise rapidly deteriorates. Consider the current field of verbal aspect in Greek.

Porter and Fanning were the modern pioneers of verbal aspect, followed by McKay following McKay.* Others include Decker and now Campbell. I choose this field as a representative example of what I consider to be stagnation within the debate. There was a panel discussion of leading scholars when the dissertations of Porter and Fanning were published, chronicled in the volume edited by Carson. It seemed to have the effect more of entrenching the differences than moving the discussion forward toward some kind of resolution. Later work seems to me to have reinforced one position or another. To work in the area of aspect, it seems that one must declare an allegiance, much like Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 1:12. I am not so naive as to think that all controversy can be resolved, that we can all just get along. That being said, we must ask ourselves a question: What motivates our scholarship? What is our primary goal? I apply this not just to verbal aspect, but to NT scholarship in general.

According to the values and vision of SBL, its purpose is to foster and advance scholarship in the field of biblical studies. Focusing on finding the best solutions, the most effective strategies, refining and improving our understanding, all of these advance the goals of scholarship. Whether it is our idea and model, or that of another, our objective must be to advance scholarship in the field. This objective, in most cases, will have the positive impact of building God’s Kingdom. In contrast, as we seek to advance our scholarship, we derail the scholarly endeavor, building our own kingdom instead of the far more important one.

The problem is that the lines between these two quests are very blurry. I may be completely convinced that my method is the right one, and that propagating it doesadvance scholarship. Reception within the guild may not always be the best measure of a method’s efficacy. This is especially the case of importing a method from another discipline into biblical studies. I recall reading John Van Seter’s The Edited Bible. It was humorous yet sad in its documentation of how biblical scholars continue to use a model that had been abandoned for decades by other disciplines after concluding it was not workable. Biblical scholars can be hopeless optimists in this regard, expecting to disprove what other guilds have compellingly concluded. I contend that the same holds true for certain linguistic approaches to Koine Greek. NT studies seems to lag decades behind developments in the broader scholarly arena of linguistics, especially in comparison to linguistic study of Biblical Hebrew. I do not say this condescendingly, but merely as one who spent seven years sojourning in linguistics proper before entering NT studies. One gets a very different picture of “the world out there” from within NT studies compared with the outside. It reminds me of Soviet Russia’s view of the West during the cold war, very different pictures.

For those of you who consider yourselves scholars, what is your primary ambition. Is it to get it right or to be right? In a perfect world, we would do both all the time. Last I checked, the world is not too perfect (though I expect that President-elect Obama will rectify all things). Whose kingdom are we building? Are we engaging broader scholarship, or dismissing it? Do we wish to engage it enough to move beyond our own system and learn the nuances of the competition (see my last post)? How else can there be meaningful discussion and progress? Is that even a goal anymore?

This post is addressed to me as much as to anyone else. I know myself well enough to know my selfish ambition and desire to be right. I thank God for the mentors that he has brought into my life that are quite willing to point out my errors. I am also thankful for the new ones that I met at ETS/SBL.

The calls for papers will be issued in the coming weeks. I would ask you to consider a few questions as you either propose a paper, or as you evaluate them as part of a steering committee:

1. Will this paper advance the discussion, or simply advance an agenda?
2. Is the topic a novel innovation, or simply a novel spin on the same old thing?
3. Will the presentation foster discussion, or will it leave the listeners confused over what exactly was claimed?
4. How does the paper engage the broader discussion: dismissively or engagingly?

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts. I feel as though Nijay Gupta should have written this, as he seems to have mastered these issues far better than I. If you are considering or are currently engaged in doctoral studies, it would behoove you to spend some time at his blog.

*Update: the following is a gladly accepted correction, thanks to Rod Decker: “I’d note that McKay was the impetus for the work of Fanning and Porter, not a follower. Both cite him in their work. Some of his material was published after F & P were published and he does interact with it, but McKay’s work goes back to the 1960s. I doubt that we’d have seen F or P without those initial articles by McKay.” See his full comment below.

**Here is an edited version of my response to Rod, for you RSS folks:
Con’s Zondervan volume seems like an opportunity, but what are we going to do with it? I am not talking about crowning Con king, but about using the huge surge in interest in verbal asepct to organize a productive discussion about the matter. I do not have a dog in this fight, and will leave it to you and the other aspect specialists to winnow down a “to do” list of what needs resolving yet. Based on the blogs, much of it seems to hinge on terminology, not so much the framework. There seem to be two fundamentally different views on the matter: the aspect-only folks, and the mixed aspect-tense folks. If the aspect only group cannot agree on their basic position, then Carl Conrad has correctly assessed the situation as still needing the dust to settle. My sense is that the divisions that exist have as much to do with turf as substantive differences. Below is what I would call a step forward.

I would pay good money to see the the aspect-only/primarily folks provide a basic overview of their position (10-15 minutes), followed by their account of what Buth and others would consider to be temporal usage (15-25 min). Then Buth and others would give an overview of their system, followed by an account of the usage that seems to counter the temporal idea in favor of aspect-only. If each understood the other’s system well enough to actually interact with it, and to make it clear enough for non-specialists (e.g. Carl Conrad) to follow, that would be what I consider to be progress.

It would take a lot of advance work to pull such a thing off, and it would take a willingness of the parties involved to respectfully engage the other. The two camps would need to get their stories straight and pick a representative, as well as the data that they would want the other group to tackle. I do not think this would lead to one big happy family, but it would sure delineate the specific differences and well as the common ground. This is the kind of progress I am talking about. If non-specialists could understand it, they could make their own judgments based on the merits of the explanation and exegesis of the supposedly contrary data. This is what scholarship is about, this is what I signed up for when I started grad school, not trench warfare. We already established in the Great War that it is a colossal waste of time and resources. I do not want to reinvent the wheel by trying to fight the verbal aspect war. If parties would be game for such an encounter, I am sure it could be arranged for the ‘09 meetings.

I spent the last week attending the annual conferences of ETS and SBL. Most of my interest is focused on biblical languages, particularly grammar and linguistics. These conference are the primary time during the year that I have to interact with he handful of other folks that share similar interests. My wife does not believe they exist, just like Mr. Snufalufogous of Sesame Street fame.  This year I attended fewer papers than in the past, but I was struck by some recurring themes. I will break them into several posts. This first one will focus on the presentation of papers.

In 2005 I submitted two paper proposals, one to the Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew section, and the other to the Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics section. I was somewhat horrified when BOTH were accepted, not what I was expecting. I worked diligently on the papers to ensure that they were precise and yet practical and accessible. Thankfully I received some great criticism from the BH steering committee that helped in this process. The BH paper was the last one in the section where Randall Buth and Rob Holmstedt did their smack down on word order in Jonah. It was standing room only. I successfully delivered the paper without throwing up or wetting my pants, and there was even some interaction about it at the conclusion. By and larger, it went over well, and was later published in JNSL.

In listening to Buth and Holmstedt, I was barely keeping my head above water. I was new to information structure, and they both knew their stuff. Each was using a different theoretical framework to describe the same phenomenon in Jonah: word order variation. Though they were different, their analyses ended up fairly similar. They were careful to describe the differences in the methods and to correlate the terminology to the other’s approach. The result was that most attendees were able to clearly understand the similarities and differences, and to be able to make judgments about the merits of each paper. They not only presented original research, but they facilitated intellectual development by allowing listeners to understand the differences in the approaches. They accomplished exactly what the Societies were founded to accomplish. Unfortunately, I feel as though such interaction is becoming the exception rather than the norm these days, particularly at SBL.

The purpose of the SBL, as I understand it, it to promote scholarly interaction and development through the presentation of original research in the form of papers and presentations. However, in the past two years I have felt as though the grammar papers are becoming more myopic in nature, will little regard for interacting with the larger world.

The hallmark that made the Buth/Holmstedt presentations work was each of them understanding the other’s theoretical framework. For grad students presenting their first paper, this may be asking a bit much. But for seasoned scholars, this should be the norm, not the exception. More and more I see presenters using their framework without taking the time to describe how its ideas and concepts fit into the larger field. Many fail to explain where terminology correlates and where it deviates with other approaches in the field. Without this kind of mapping for the listener, there is little hope of fostering meaningful dialogue about the issues. People will continue to talk past each other and there will be little productive interaction. This myopic focus seems to be on the rise.

At times there is interaction with other methodologies, but with the purpose of creating a strawman and dismissing the other approaches. This is not interaction. It may  sound impressive to the novice, but it absolutely kills the kind of scholarly interaction that the Societies are to be fostering.

Here is my challenge (forward-pointing reference to significant proposition, for you analysts at home): move beyond your own system to understand how it fits into the bigger picture. Then take the time in your introduction to map the differences. If your system is really as great as you think, there is no need to strawman, your arguments will stand or fall on their own merits. If you want to win hearts and minds, pave the way for others to follow you into the ultimate solution to all things that your theory provides by having the scholarly courtesy of defining your terms in light of the larger field. They may still disagree in the end, but at least they can understand why. Take the time to integrate your claims into the broader field, and thus do your part in stimulating scholarly discussion. He who attendeth to such issues in this way, behold, he will be called blessed (left-dislocation to activate and promote a salient topic).

Here endeth part one of my rant. I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on this. Is it just me? Is it prevalent in the exegetical and theological sections?