Category Archives: New Testament

AAR/SBL News

The conference went very well. M and I did most of the things we wanted to: did some exploring of the city (and found this free gallery that has some nice icons and Old Master paintings), enjoyed the whirlpool, had some nice meals without children (though we missed them terribly), and met up with a bunch of folks–like Christopher, Mother Laura, and Anastasia. We took in some sessions as well (including Mother Laura’s paper on Perpetua and Felicity).

And we hit the book room. Restraining ourselves, we left as empty-handed as we came—but the book room was still a joy to behold…

Jesus on Marriage

In light of the earlier discussion on Christian chastity, I was struck by Sunday’s reading and noticed something in it I’d never seen before. Here it is with emphasis:

Luke 20:27-38 27Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him 28and asked him a question, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. 29Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; 30then the second 31and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. 32Finally the woman also died. 33In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.” 34Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; 35but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. 36Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. 37And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. 38Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”

From Oremus.org’s NRSV.

Luke has Jesus making a contrast between two ages. These ages are not temporal, rather, they are paradigms of existence. He opposes “this age” (i.e., the present age, the status quo) with “that age” (i.e., those worthy of and who will participate in the resurrection; read with Christian eyes=us).

The explicit message of Jesus on marriage, then, is that children of the resurrection don’t do it…

Old Latin Gospel of John Online

The superlative New Testament Gateway blog points us to a great new site that represents the future of academic tools in the humanities. It’s The University of Birmingham’s Vetus Latina Iohannes Electronic Edition. A word of explanation on what the Old Latin is and why it’s important and why this project matters…

As you may recall, back in the patristic period there was general griping about the crappy state of the translations of the New Testament into Latin from the original Koine Greek. A classic example comes from Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine II.11.16:

The great remedy for ignorance of proper signs is knowledge of languages. And men who speak the Latin tongue, of whom are those I have undertaken to instruct, need two other languages for the knowledge of Scripture, Hebrew and Greek, that they may have recourse to the original texts if the endless diversity of the Latin translators throw them into doubt. . . .But the knowledge of these languages is necessary, not for the sake of a few words like these which it is very easy to mark and to ask about, but, as has been said, on account of the diversities among translators. For the translations of the Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek can be counted, but the Latin translators are out of all number. For in the early days of the faith every man who happened to get his hands upon a Greek manuscript, and who thought he had any knowledge, were it ever so little, of the two languages, ventured upon the work of translation.

Later in Book II he recommends one version in particular, the Italian (Itala) (CD II.15.22) though—to the dismay of biblical scholars since then—fails to give any identifying features of this particular translation…

In any case, this was the condition that led Jerome to undertake his work of translating, editing, and updating that resulted in the Vulgate as he describes here in his prefatory letter to Pope Damasus:

You urge me to revise the old Latin version, and, as it were, to sit in judgment on the copies of the Scriptures which are now scattered throughout the whole world; and, inasmuch as they differ from one another, you would have me decide which of them agree with the Greek original. The labour is one of love, but at the same time both perilous and presumptuous; for in judging others I must be content to be judged by all; and how can I dare to change the language of the world in its hoary old age, and carry it back to the early days of its infancy? Is there a man, learned or unlearned, who will not, when he takes the volume into his hands, and perceives that what he reads does not suit his settled tastes, break out immediately into violent language, and call me a forger and a profane person for having the audacity to add anything to the ancient books, or to make any changes or corrections therein? Now there are two consoling reflections which enable me to bear the odium—in the first place, the command is given by you who are the supreme bishop; and secondly, even on the showing of those who revile us, readings at variance with the early copies cannot be right. For if we are to pin our faith to the Latin texts, it is for our opponents to tell us which; for there are almost as many forms of texts as there are copies. If, on the other hand, we are to glean the truth from a comparison of many, why not go back to the original Greek and correct the mistakes introduced by inaccurate translators, and the blundering alterations of confident but ignorant critics, and, further, all that has been inserted or changed by copyists more asleep than awake? I am not discussing the Old Testament, which was turned into Greek by the Seventy elders, and has reached us by a descent of three steps. I do not ask what Aquila and Symmachus think, or why Theodotion takes a middle course between the ancients and the moderns. I am willing to let that be the true translation which had apostolic approval. I am now speaking of the New Testament. This was undoubtedly composed in Greek, with the exception of the work of Matthew the Apostle, who was the first to commit to writing the Gospel of Christ, and who published his work in Judæa in Hebrew characters. We must confess that as we have it in our language it is marked by discrepancies, and now that the stream is distributed into different channels we must go back to the fountainhead. I pass over those manuscripts which are associated with the names of Lucian and Hesychius, and the authority of which is perversely maintained by a handful of disputatious persons. It is obvious that these writers could not amend anything in the Old Testament after the labours of the Seventy; and it was useless to correct the New, for versions of Scripture which already exist in the languages of many nations show that their additions are false. I therefore promise in this short Preface the four Gospels only, which are to be taken in the following order, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, as they have been revised by a comparison of the Greek manuscripts. Only early ones have been used. But to avoid any great divergences from the Latin which we are accustomed to read, I have used my pen with some restraint, and while I have corrected only such passages as seemed to convey a different meaning, I have allowed the rest to remain as they are.

So–the Vulgate became the standard Latin translation of the Western Church…eventually. In the Early Medieval period, though, both the Vulgate and “those others” still circulated. Modern scholars dub “those others” the Old Latin text (or OL) to distinguish them from the Vulgate (Vg). For people who do stuff with Early Medieval England knowing the specific textual variants between the Vg and the OL can be quite helpful because by and large the Irish retained the OL while the Rome-based mission to the Anglo-Saxons brought the Vg. As a result, Irish influence on a particular writing or manuscript can be determined by identifying OL features of Scriptural citations. So, what this electronic edition does is to present all of the major witnesses of the Old Latin so that those who do that kind of thing can sift through the various layers of evidence.

(Another reason why the OL is important is because it is through the OL tradition that some of the differences between the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and the Septuagint appear in the writings of the Scholastics. I remember once being amazed that Thomas Aquinas referred to a Septuagint text not found in the Hebraica Veritas and wondered how he got his hands on it.  Later, I discovered that the OL was one of the major ways that these differences were passed through to the High Medieval period.)

While this sounds rather boring to virtually all sentient life on the planet, there are a few of us who get quite excited about it…

One of the reasons I’m lifting it up is because it represents the way that academic tools need to be going in the next few decades. Knowledge is power–but it must be organized for that power to be harnessed. We need a lot more initiatives like this that maximize the power of relational database and the information-sharing capabilities of the internet.

Random Pedagogy Thought

If I ever get to teach an advanced exegesis class on a book of the NT where a knowledge of Greek is presumed (like a PhD-level course), I’ll not use Nestle-Aland/UBS as my base text. Rather, I’ll have them read (at least in part) from an uncial codex–preferably Vaticanus if it’s one of the gospels…

Communio Project Completed

The communio is the music and texts appointed to be sung during the distribution of the Blessed Sacrament in the Roman Rite. The texts tend to be a combination of psalm texts and other parts of Scripture interwoven with one another. As such, they represent a classic form of interpretation through juxtaposition that is at the heart of the Western liturgical tradition of biblical interpretation. That is, the meaning of the biblical texts is neither declared nor forced upon the singers/hearers, but instead is coaxed forth by the apposition of two or more texts joined by context and experience.

NLM reports the final completion of a project of its mother organization, the Church Music Association of America, that I will reproduce in full:

The Communio Project of putting all communions with Psalms online is now finished. You can see them here. This the one place where you can find the music for the communion antiphon sung in the manner recommended by the General Instruction. They were typeset by chant master Richard Rice. At last, the full collection is available to the world for instant download and, we can hope, singing every Sunday forever more.

Do visit and check out these treasures. While they are listed for ease of convenience on the site in alphabetical order, the index file at the top shows their proper liturgical ordering. They are in Latin with the traditional square notation, but the scripture references are included and the second page contains an English translation of the text. I’ll offer one here in the spirit of the season.

On Censored Lectionaries

Dr. Deidre Good of GTS has written a short thought about ++Rowan’s lecture on Scripture interpretation. (h/t *Christopher) In it, she specifically addresses something that is a major concern of mine. That is, if the liturgical gathering is the primary and normative locus for the Body of Christ encountering the Word of God, why are our lectionaries piece-meal? Why do they consciously skip certain texts–and what does this say about us as an interpretive community…

One of the fundamental things that make Christians Christians is that
we share a canon. We have wrestled and struggled with the Scriptures for centuries and that is part of what makes us who we are. What does it do to us and to our formation when we choose to not wrestle with God?

Some of the comments engage the whole idea of selected readings at all. I have thought a bit about this and point back to something I wrote on this topic a while ago. I’d like to revisit it again soon but time, at present, does not permit…

On Monastic Interpretation

A junior colleague of mine stopped me in the hall after a class we teach together and wanted to get my advice on the history of New Testament interpretation. He’s in the usual graduate seminar that surveys such things. Now, my program is such that it actually gives an entire semester to the pre-Reformation history of interp. I don’t think most other programs do this, considering such “pre-critical” readings as not useful for modern NT scholars. Anyway, he’s been assigned to present on medieval monastic interp and want to pick my brain for a bit. His first question was essentially that which any NT scholar would ask: “They’re just reading the Fathers and using that, right?”

My answer was a classic yes–but no. It took a while…

In the aftermath, I was thinking through how I would go about teaching medieval monastic exegesis to try and communicate just what was going on. Here’re some initial thoughts:

  • Give them a sense of monastic life as life within an intentional liturgical community.
    • Yes, have the students read the section in the Rule on the Offices to give them a sense of Benedict’s concept of the monastic cursus.
    • Then, have them read a corresponding section from the 10th century Regularis Concordia to show them how different and how much more complicated the monastic liturgical life was than Benedict had ever envisioned.
    • Then give them some photocopies from the Breviary to reinforce that a) all liturgy is not just your Sunday morning liturgy; b) Scripture is constantly in juxtaposition with other Scripture and with non-Scriptural texts; c) this is far more complex in practice than it sounds.
  • Give them a sense not just that the patristic authors were used but how and in what contexts
    • Remind them about manuscript production costs, then emphasize and re-emphasize that the monastics didn’t have the Patrologia Latina at hand. Or even the Ante/Post Nicene Fathers. No–Paul the Deacon’s homiliary for the Night Office & Cassiodorus on the Psalms really were the sources for 90% of what 90% of medieval monks knew of the Fathers.
    • Yes, some monks probably read the Fathers for study material but the paradigmatic encounter with them was in the liturgical setting. The sermons, homilies, or commentary extracts would be interrupted four times for responsaries thematically tying the third Nocturn back into the main biblical content of the first Nocturn as determined by the liturgical season… The main point being: their encounter with the patristic interpretation was in a far different setting than either ours or even the works’ original contexts–and that would effect how they would hear it.
    • Have them read a homily by Bede or Gregory–then have them read the corresponding “adaptation” by somebody like Aelfric. Highlight, too, that what was on the page was not necessarily what was heard…
  • Give them a sense that biblical interpretation in this setting is not fundamentally about data and information. Rather, it was about experiencing the text and its transformative potential through an elaborate and interconnected system designed for this purpose.
    • This is underscored and reinforce by how the many lectionary cycles fit together. The way (as I was saying before) the Mass Epistle shows up in the versicles & responses for the Little Hours and verses from the Mass Gospel appear as the Canticle antiphons through the week…
    • Guiding and directing a lot of this is the liturgical year. The seasons themselves are interpretations of biblical events and texts and the texts within the seasons were chosen to fit within them–but, at the same time, their actual content nuances the meaning of the seasons. Furthermore certain kinds of interpretive material either appear or disappear based on the season…

It’s complicated. And, in many ways, this is my chapter 3–to lay all of this out in a (more or less) comprehensible fashion.

One of the major themes that I see running through my pedagogical attempts is interpretation and appropriation through recontextualization. That is, yeah, they used patristic material–but in a different way from which it was intended which has the effect of altering its purpose so the same text is acting in a new way and producing a new result.

Another major theme I see is reinforcing the alien nature of the interpretive culture. This kind of interpretation is not about a guy at a desk with a book. Its about a communal experience and embodiment of the text. There’s a reason why so much of the monastic exegesis can be classified as “moral”–it’s because a major focus was not on “thinking thoughts” about the text but rather on how to put the text into practice. Maybe what we label the “moral sense” might be better labeled “the sense capable of being embodied”…