In New Testament studies, readings of a book or author (1 John, say, or Paul) are, as far as I can tell, generally judged on the basis of (1) the sense they make of the text itself, (2) their grounding in the relevant sociohistorical context, and (3) their impact on broader readings of the NT. So a reading of Romans will be considered a good one to the extent that it does a good job of explaining Romans, with as few unanswered questions or cheap moves (e.g. ‘I know what I just said contradicts what I said before, but really it was Paul who was contradicting himself) as possible; to the extent it makes sense within whatever it is people are believing today about the context of Romans (when it was written, what was going on in the wide world of Rome, why it was written, what the culture around the recipients was like, etc.); and to the extent that it helps to makes sense of the Pauline corpus as a whole (this point is what allows N. T. Wright, for example, to criticize Ernst Kasemann’s Romans commentary on the charge that what Kasemann says about justification in Romans could not be said about justification in Galatians). Of course there are other criteria that are sometimes brought forward, but these seem to be the main ones.
I’ve noticed that in philosophy, the criteria for a good reading of a book or author (the Republic, say, or Aristotle) are nothing like the criteria used in NT studies. I’m sure there is someone out there trying to read Plato on the basis of sociocultural trends in the fourth century BC, but generally the main criterion of a good reading of a philosopher is the quality ascribed to the philosopher in question. So a reading of the Republic will be a good one if it makes Plato out to be a better philosopher than other readings make him out ot be. Discussions of an ambiguous sentence will proceed not on the basis of which reading the text best lends itself to, and certainly not which reading is best explained by historical data, but which reading makes the argument work best – even if it makes more linguistic sense to read the sentence otherwise. An exception I can think of is scholars who put a lot of stock in this or that theory about the chronological order of Plato’s writings, and use that data to interpret what Plato meant. But by and large, I see less language about ‘what Plato meant’ in a certain section and more about what makes the argument of the section work better.
I would be interested to see how it would turn out if this method were applied, mutatis mutandis, in NT studies. Or is something like it already used? A prominent feature of the way philosophers often read other philosophers is that the philosopher being read often turns out (surprise!) to have the same views as the philosopher doing the reading. Is something like this behind certain fears about typological and allegorical interpretation? Could interpreters forgo talk about ‘what Paul meant’ in favor of some other interpretive goal?
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28 November, 2008 at 10:59 pm
I think you raise a valid question – whether something akin to NT studies is done to other forms of literature – and the answer is a resounding (and horrific) “yes!”
Consider the “cultural studies,” that rule virtually every humanity (analytic philosophy seems to be immune to it) and the social sciences as well (which don’t matter because they are fakes). The term was popularized by intellectuals like Raymond Williams, who in Culture & Society asserted that our idea of culture as a revolutionary act has its origins in England. The tendency is to examine authors for their historical value. There is an element of history expressed in cultural artifacts like fine art or (in Williams’ case) literature, and literature is to be prized for these particular elements. I am equally sure that the cultural studies crowd would deny this challenge, that they would still be unable to refute it in their actions, and that none of them could actually tell a story.
For an example, Williams thought that the remark “Dickens didn’t get the economics of the industrial revolution quite right” was somehow worthwhile.
Michel Foucault actually has an article called “What is an author?” in which he suggests that authors, being in a coercive sort of language game, only reproduce given ways of thinking. So if you buy that, you’re naturally going to look for the elements of modes of coercion and restriction – i.e. the historical contextualization of a given piece.
I don’t know if you buy that stuff. I certainly don’t.