An online place for some friends to get together and argue about what they care most about.

The "b" is silent.


At the seminar table:

Stephen Webb
Trevor Bechtel
Margaret Adam
Phil Kenneson
A. K. M. Adam



Comments, queries, feedback to: A K M Adam

Another approach to hermeneutics observes that the wisest of biblical interpreters have persistently disagreed over legitimate interpretations. The lack of anything resembling a consensus in biblical interpretation (after millennia of spectacularly detailed study) raises the question of which of these scholars has arrived at the single legitimate interpretations.

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posted by AKMA at 3:24 PM

Whoops! I'll get back to Matthew in a while, but first I owe Charlie Cosgrove an essay on hermeneutics. That one begins along the following lines:

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There are at least two leading questions in the study of hermeneutics and the ethics of interpretation. The first is the more familiar: How are we to understand texts? and its concomitant How shall we know whose interpretation is right (or “true” or “legitimate”)? This question has motivated most studies of hermeneutics, and a moment’s reflection reveals the reason such studies often evoke a fervor that far outweighs the extent of their contribution to a debate whose broad outlines have remained largely constant for decades. After all, once a scholar has figured out how to reach true understandings, the unwillingness of recalcitrant colleagues to adopt that true approach threatens the very structure of knowledge, the academy, even the Church’s teaching.

Thus scholars have long sought the right answer to this urgent question. They have offered accounts of insight, understanding, empathy, intention, and various other features of legitimate hermeneutics. I will call this search for correct interpretation “integral hermeneutics,” as it poses for itself (and for the domain of all meaning, over which it usually claims dominion) the task of articulating the positive characteristics of unitary interpretive truth. Periodically, some critics pose a serious challenge to this enterprise. They argue, for instance, that “the author’s intention” is unsuitable as a criterion for assessing interpretations; perhaps it is unavailable, or insufficiently distinct. The practitioners of integral hermeneutics then develop an account of their field that accounts for and overcomes the critics’ objections, refining their account of their criteria, or defining those criteria more precisely, so as to reinstate a positive account of legitimate interpretation.

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posted by AKMA at 3:23 PM

two ways: explaining/justifying unity of meaning, and explaining plurality

summary of watson (T&T; T,C, & w) and Vanhoozer (ITAMITT?). Concern to defend truth, to adjudicate interpretations. Convention is ratified & refined by God.
Summary of fowl (ES) & adam {MSoS, "SoJ," "TtD," "FoOA"). Concern to account for divergence w/o damnation or disrespect (preserving the truth by way of diversity) & accountability of interpreters

strength of integral: attn to unity of truth, uncontrolled by circumstance. Of differential: attn to differences in interpretation & allows for dissent w/o disrespect.

In a certain respect, the two aren't antithetical. The unity of meaning (on a differential account) lies entirely beyond the present order- but don't deny some sort of unity. Similarly, integralists don't deny plurality nor do they wish by main force to impose their interpretive conclusions.

Beginning of argument: our proposal does better at comprehending theirs than theirs does ours.

Presumably F & K believe that the single meaning is found somewhere near the interpretations indigenous to Euro-America; does their ethic of interpretation entail eurocentric privilege? F & A can account for divergence w/o implicit hermeneutical imperialism. Emphatic implications for mission: unity of presence of Christ lies in church (with all its varying interps) not in TEXT.

Does "local & contextual" entail a repudiation of more global truth claims? (Can a local claim make a claim to universality? Does that make the local claim invalid? Does it allow "local" universalities?) does an emphatic claim touniversality transcend its local origin?

Can even professional interpreters discern with confidence what the single unified meaning might be? If not professionals, what about amateurs?

Word of God -- are we ever in a position to make claims about the unity? If God makes divinity known to us through the economic trinity, and if the godhead is the locus of ineffable Truth, ought our interpretations not dwell in the domains of plurality & entrust the unity to God?

Welker on plurality (bad) & pluralism (good)
NW "truth" as "measuring up." "Standard" sense of "true" serves as default--other uses are special. Fish's response is cogent but not refutation; illustration of *difference*.

Difference between integral and differential often amounts to little more than consideration of scope of truth-claims; at other times, difference amounts to much more, especially when dispute concerns the status of those claims

in a sense, differential is more catholic, since it points to the unity of god in its faith that "right" interpretation is comprehended among many varying proposals in god's charitable grace (is God's unity in doubt?). Integral is more protestant in its focus on "purity" or "correctness") which sometimes itself provokes schism (virtually necessarily when so much depends on getting Bible or doctrine orwhatever *right*).

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posted by AKMA at 2:21 PM

The discussion with Steve Webb having settled down, I thought I'd try working on my boook about Matthew's Gospel on blogline. As David Weinberger says, "Let's just see how it goes."

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Chapter Two: Matthew and Judaism

¶ 2.1 In the first chapter, I asserted a number of times that Matthew is a faithful follower of the God of Israel; in contemporary language, he is a Jew. While this point seems painfully self-evident to me, wiser readers than I have questioned that premise. Indeed, some of the leading interpreters of Matthew's Gospel have supposed that Matthew was himself a Gentile. Since much of the rest of my picture of Matthew depends on my claim that Matthew operates squarely within the traditions of Judaism (as he construes them), this chapter will explain why, in the face of learned dissent, I imagine a Judaic Matthew.
The case for a Gentile Matthew has positive and negative sides. On the positive side, Matthew's Jesus shows a high regard for the various Gentiles he encounters in his ministry. Several of the explicit theological assertions in Matthew compare Gentiles favorably to the people of Israel. The treachery against Jesus arises in Judaic circles, whereas Pontius Pilate and his wife try to distance themselves from what they take to be an injustice. Assuming that Matthew copied from Mark, he seems to have omitted a number of Aramaic expressions found in Mark, possibly to accommodate readers who would not understand Aramaic. Finally, the Great Commission in Matthew 28 seems to culminate the whole Gospel in a command to include "all the Gentiles" in the Matthean community.
The negative case for thinking of Matthew as a Gentile observes that the unfavorable comparisons to Gentiles imply that Jesus' Judaic neighbors lack even Gentile-quality faith. At one point, Matthew treats the Pharisees and Sadducees as a united front, not differentiating these divergent parties. Matthew's Gospel features numerous withering attacks on Jesus' opponents among the Pharisees and scribes; Jesus describes his opponents as snakes, hypocrites, exploiters of widows and orphans, murderous conspirators. In Matthew's Gospel alone, the hostile crowd demands Jesus' execution with the cry, "His blood be on us and on our children"--a call whose echoes have resounded in the voices of generations who perpetrated atrocities against Jews.
In short, scholars have inferred that no one who belonged to the people of Israel could have pictured Jesus as so fiercely antagonistic a critic of Judaism. The best explanation they can offer for Jesus' critical tone over against his contemporaries is that a Gentile Matthew envisioned Jesus as "one of us [Gentiles]," and imagined that Jesus shared the Matthean community's hostility to Judaism.
While several important critics hold firmly to the Gentile-Matthew perspective, the preponderance of Matthean interpreters have supposed that Matthew was a Christian convert from Judaism, whose angry writings reflect the hostilities between Judaism and its offshoot, Christianity. On this account, the conflicts between Jesus' followers and their neighbors in synagogues had reached a point of no return, and now Jesus' disciples had been barred from participating in the synagogue community. This proposal often follows a common supposition that after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce, the Judaic leaders gathered in Jamnia (sometimes spelled "Jabneh") of Galilee and determined many of the constitutive practices that identify post-Temple Judaism. Among these was the adoption of a daily prayer, the "Eighteen Benedictions," one clause of which (known as the birkat ha-minim , the "blessing of the sectarians") thanks God that one is not a heretic or a Nazarene. On this account, the surviving leaders of Judaism devised this ingenious prayer, reasoning that Christians would not be able to repeat that clause, and hence would voluntarily exile themselves from the community that used the prayer. Scholars who adopt this hypothesis explain Matthew's anger against scribes and Pharisees and their adherents as the mirror-image of rabbinic hostility to Christian faith.
Scholars who propose a hostile "parting of the ways" between Matthew's friends and the synagogue from which they emerged can thus explain the acrimony of Matthew's rhetoric. Embroiled in a divisive conflict, expelled from their faith community, Matthew's colleagues used Jesus' words to fight back against the synagogue that rejected them. Many readers of Matthew have noticed that Matthew persistently refers to "their synagogues," as though to mark Judaic congregations as "over against us." Perhaps Matthew was like the ideal disciple described in chapter 13: "a scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven," thus a disciple with Judaic training, who has turned from his former adherence to synagogal, proto-rabbinic Judaism in favor of the gospel of Jesus Christ--incurring the enmity of those whom left behind.
The problems with this model are manifold, and an increasing number of scholars have found this approach deeply misleading. To start with the most detailed aspect of the theory, many students of first-century Judaism doubt that the birkat ha minim can be securely dated to the 80's of the common era. Even if, however, one were to demonstrate that the birkat belongs to the 80's, one may doubt whether it was specifically directed against Christians; why would the prayer characterize its objects so obliquely? Would a Christian necessarily think of himself as one of the minim in question? The hypothetical meeting at Jamnia, too, has come into question. Most comprehensively, though, the notion that any gathering could promulgate teachings authoritative for all of Judaism misreads the social and cultural texture of Judaism in this period. Apart from the Temple, Judaism had no over-arching principle binding all its adherents to a given structure of authority. Nothing supports the notion that a congress of leaders who might have gathered at Jamnia would have had the stature to bind synagogues to a code of worship and theology. Different congregations ("synagogues") will have adopted different attitudes to Jesus' followers at different times, without any magisterial instruction.
Matthew's use of "their synagogues" may be no more illuminating than are hypotheses about Jamnia and the birkat ha-minim. The preponderance of the times when Matthew uses this phrase, he refers to the places that Jesus' pharisaic debaters gather. Under the circumstances, how else might one imagine Matthew identifying these assemblies? Certainly not as "our synagogues," and a simple "the synagogues" would neglect to specify the connection between the congregations to which Matthew referred and the Pharisees who gathered there. The passages in which the expression "their synagogue(s)" appears could conceivably be recast to read "nearby synagogues" or "the synagogues from which they came"--but these circumlocutions would be more cumbersome and less obvious than the simpler expressions Matthew uses.
If Matthew wrote as a rebuttal to synagogal Judaism, as a rationale for having left the fold, we might expect him to criticize Judaism as a social system. Whenever Matthew wrote, there will have been people of Israel who didn't identify strongly with any of the parties whom Matthew excoriates; if Matthew finds the entire business unsatisfactory and inhospitable, he expresses that dissatisfaction by criticizing only partisan subgroups of the greater whole.
Finally, it may also be the case that millennia of custom have ingrained the separation of Christianity from Judaism too deeply for readers of Matthew to un-think. If one approaches Matthew with the assumption that Judaism and Christianity are different religions, then Matthew's rhetoric will certainly tend to confirm that assumption. Nonetheless, the possibility that the separation that seems so obvious in retrospect need not have seemed equally inevitable to Matthew; indeed, an increasing body of scholarly opinion suggests that Judaism and Christianity do not constitute distinct categories until well after Matthew was written. Whatever exegetical and historical reasons one may cite for attributing Matthew to either a gentile author or a Judaic author who "converted," those reasons should be tested carefully against the possibility, perhaps the likelihood, that the reasons derive inappropriate force from retrospect.
If on the other hand Matthew writes not as a Gentile, nor as a convert from Judaism to Christianity, but as an unwavering devotee of the God of Israel, what signs indicate his allegiance to his ancestral faith? I take as my cornerstone texts two sayings that bookend the first discursive portion of the Sermon on the Mount: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished" (5:17-18) and "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (5:48). These texts, when read in tandem, articulate Matthew's fundamental reliance on the Torah and its enduring role for Jesus' followers.
Take, for example, the fundamental question for Judaic (male) identity. Scholars have often noted Matthew's silence on what was for Paul a burning issue: do male gentile adherents to Jesus' movement need to undergo circumcision? Was the issue settled by the time Matthew write (about twenty years after Paul's death, according to the standard chronology of New Testament texts)? The shift from Paul's fervent insistence that this question struck to the heart of faith in Jesus, to Matthew's hypothetical "no big deal" seems surprising, especially over a relatively short interval, especially again since Matthew demonstrates no hesitation to set Jesus over against Judaic opponents. If Matthew writes at a time when circumcision no longer constitutes an open debate for followers of Jesus, we lack any convincing way to account for that decision reaching finality, spreading across the regions and varieties that separated the scattered, small congregations that honored Jesus.

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posted by steve webb at 11:12 AM

I highlighted the "obviously" there because I took it to refer not to the claim that Matthew criticizes Judaism (that really would be obvious!) but to the claim that he does so within Judaism. That is, I thought you were saying that it is obvious to historians now that Matthew was working within Judaism, not against it, and that claim was not obvious to readers of the text a few generations ago, who probably saw Matthew as standing outside of Judaism--indeed, most conservative Christians probably still see Matthew as Standing outside of Judaism altogether. So I think there is historical progress in that most people today acknowledge that Matthew was writing with Judaism.

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posted by AKMA at 7:15 PM

I had been forgetting that the model of interpretation Steve has been articulating should be recognized as culturally-specific, if not culturally-determined. The Orthodox churches have typically interpreted the Bible on a different basis altogether, following the practice of "reading Scripture through the Fathers." If someone wants to argue that Western (mostly Protestant) understandings of hermeneutics form an undebatable basis for legitimate biblical interpretation, she or he ought to give an account of the difference that premise makes for evaluating the practices of Orthodox theological interpretation.

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posted by AKMA at 9:52 AM

Steve,

Relative to the "obviously," I wasn't aware that anyone contrued Matthew's vituperative rhetoric as directed anywhere but against Judaism (as though, perhaps, the Pharisees were a pasteboard stand-in for his real adversaries, a faction of Antiochene idolaters or something). If that's not an "obvious" conclusion for any of my readers, they will of course doubt the rest of what I say. That's okay with me; I'm not trying to persuade everyone in the world, and I'm willing to start with people who think it's obvious that Matthew has a bone to pick with some of his Jewish colleagues. I don't think that that's a historical advance; it's just a generally-held picture of the way to read Matthew. I don't need it to be "an advance in our historical understanding."

I'll stick with my claim of "impossibility" relative to reading back from an ancient text to its ideological interests," because I'm not acquainted with a way of ascertaining, especially from a bare text, what ideology drove its author. I appreciate your mention of the 1994 article, because one of my main points (having to do with Defoe's "Shortest-Way") argued exactly, from the reception of a text in its very own day, that Defoe's ideology wasn't immanent in the text; the ideology comes visible when we read "The Shortest-Way" in what we take to be its proper cultural setting, with a view toward Defoe's biography. How much more, when we have no significant biographical information about an author, when the "proper cultural setting" in question is usually derived hypothetically from the text that's being discussed, ought we to acknopwledge the tenuousness of our conclusions about texts' ideological entanglements. "A priori impossible"? I might back down from "a priori," but the force of evidence (just who agrees about the ideology of the Book of Daniel? How do I know whom I should rely on?) pushes me awfully close to the brink.

Sorry, Steve, that technical difficulties contribute to our losing your voice in inter-academic conversation. Your responses have sometimes seemed harsh, but given your take on hermeneutics--that there is a meaning to texts, a meaning whose existence I wrong-headedly deny--I can see why you would be vexed by my resistance. One reason I adhere so fast to the take on hermeneutics from my side of the controversy is that my perspective enables me to explain why you and I might disagree, each of us thinking with strong justification that he is quite right, while enabling me to attribute our disagreement to more generous a basis than that one of us possesses superior insight or that the other is perverse, that one is sophisticated and the other ignorant.

Keep in touch.

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posted by steve webb at 4:20 PM

Interesting that in AKMA's article on Matthew in SBL Seminar Papers (1994), he argues that texts don't have ideological meaning precisely because historians cannot determine that meaning, i.e., interpretation is solely due to communal standards and practices. And yet he says: "Matthew obviously excoriates various Judean parties, but he does so from within Judaism--not over against Judaism." This seems to me to be a historical argument that proves that advances can be made in our historical understanding of texts (note the obviously there--the text's history was not obvious to previous generations, but it is obvious to us today thanks to historical scholarship). I was also interested in Akma's quote of Fowl where Fowl says "it is often very difficult to read back from an ancient text to its ideological interests..." and AKMA adds, parenthetically, he might as well say it is never possible. I am comfortable with Fowl's comment, but not AKMA's, precisely because the parenthetical aside turns what is no doubt a very difficult task into an a priori impossible one, and thus moves out of hermeneutics and into metaphysics. By the way, I thought this essay was brilliantly argued, even though I didn't agree with some of it; I have really benefited from reading AKMA's work, and now I must sign off from Blooger for good because 1) it keeps eating my messages, so that I have to write them several times, and end up summarizing what I remember having said in short, condensed ways, probably distorting my own meaning and 2) I have been told that my remarks are repulsive and embarrassing, and I fear I have lost friends over my argumentative style, for which I sincerely apologize.

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posted by steve webb at 9:09 AM

Eno's comments are typical of the cultural elite, who think everything is a product of social construction. Indeed, social constructionism is the dogma of the academy, but I think there are signs that it too has had its day, and there is a renewed interest in realism. It flatters academics to think that the world is a product of their own making.

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