Learning to Fish: Part 2—New Questions/New Methods

The following excerpts of David’s upcoming book, Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach: Reflections on Education as Transformation through Dialogue (2015), are used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

When I taught at seminary, we had a required course that actually focused on method. The course was called “New Testament Interpretation.” It was a methods course that focused on the ways we go about constructing potential meanings of a text in its first century context. Ironically, all the students assumed from the title that we were going to interpret the New Testament for them by telling them what it meant. They were disappointed in the class. Not only that, the students tended to equate “interpretation” with “appropriation.” That is, they thought that by “interpreting” what the New Testament meant in its original contexts, we would be determining the proper “appropriation” or “application” of a text for today. This expectation by-passes method altogether and reads the New Testament as a document addressed directly to (all) contemporary times and situations. So we changed the name of the course to “New Testament Methods of Interpretation.” This worked much better.

 More Methods than Ever

 To be honest, the task of teaching methods in biblical studies is enormous these days. When I went to seminary in the mid-60s, there were basically four methods:

• Text criticism (to determine the original text from many copies).
• Source criticism (developed to identify where the Gospel writers got their information).
• Form criticism (meant to ascertain what the oral tradition was like before the Gospel writers got hold of it)
• Redaction criticism (designed to figure out what the Gospel writers added to the tradition and what that told us about their purposes).

At that time, these methods were usually in the service of (re-)constructing either the historical Jesus or the history of the early church. Together they were referred to as the historical-critical method. In the last three decades, there has been an explosion of new methods. The last time I taught a methods class, the number of methods I had to teach was up to nineteen! In the field of New Testament, some of the more recent methods include:

• Narrative criticism (to analyze the literary dynamics of the Gospels and Acts).
• Reader-response criticism (to assess the impact of narrative on an audience).
• Social science criticism (to employ cultural anthropology in interpreting the New Testament).
• Rhetorical analysis (to analyze the considerable influence of classical rhetoric on the New Testament).
• Linguistic/discourse criticism (to understand the dynamics of biblical Greek).
• Orality criticism (to investigate early Christianity as an oral culture).
• Performance criticism (to assess the meaning and impact of New Testament writings as oral literature). [1]

Any one of these could completely occupy a researcher or a class. These days, it is common and almost necessary not only to specialize in one writing of the New Testament, but also to specialize in one method. Add to the methods listed above additional approaches such as postmodern interpretation and deconstruction. And these need to be supplemented by liberation methods designed to grasp the ethical and power dynamics of the writings and of their interpreters: feminist criticism; womanist analysis; liberation criticisms of various kinds; ideological criticism, intercultural criticism; postcolonial criticism; empire criticism; and ecological-justice criticism.

 Methods are Interrelated

 Another factor that complicates the teaching of method is that these methods are inter-related. That fact became apparent when I taught the course mentioned above entitled “New Testament Methods of Interpretation.” In this course, I would choose one short book of the Bible from the latter part of the New Testament such as the Letter of James or I Peter as a case study for the application of methods.

The methods logically followed a certain sequence. First, we had to see how scholars established a probable original text (textual criticism). Then we needed to reconstruct the context and audience (historical criticism). This led to the interpretation of meaning (genre criticism, form criticism, narrative criticism, cultural anthropology, and inter-textual analysis). Then we looked at the impact on first century hearers (rhetorical criticism and performance criticism). Finally, we considered how contemporary critics from diverse social locations interpreted and evaluated the text ethically and ideologically (liberation criticism, feminist criticism, eco-justice criticism, post-colonial criticism, and so on).

The students wrote several papers on the text for that semester, each based on a certain method of their choice. Because the biblical writing was short and because the students went over the same text many times with different questions based on the different methods, there was a wonderful sense of discovery among the students. It was a seminar that probed into some deep waters.

 New Methods are Comprised of New Questions

This is the delicious part about new methods. They produce new interpretations. Actually, most innovations in biblical studies come not from new discoveries out of the ancient world but from the introduction of new methods. To be sure, some developments come from new discoveries—such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hamadi texts, and the excavation of archaeological sites. Some innovations come from reading the New Testament writings in light of already-known ancient texts or events not previously connected to them, such as the works of the Stoics or the writings of Flavius Josephus or the events surrounding the Roman-Judean War of 66-70 C. E.

However, most breakthroughs in biblical studies come from adopting new methods—that is, from addressing new questions to the same texts. The new methods in biblical studies are usually adopted from secular disciplines in the study of secular subjects and then adapted to biblical materials—such as narratology, cultural anthropology, postcolonial analysis. The new methods do not usually produce new information. Rather, they offered new angles of vision that enabled us to see features of ancient texts and past events that had not been explored before.

Take narrative criticism, for example. Until the late nineteen-seventies, we did not appreciate the narrative qualities and features of the Gospels. Then a group in the Markan Seminar of the Society of Biblical Literature began to apply methods to the Gospels drawn from secular literary methods to investigate plot, characters, settings, norms of judgment, ideal author and reader, and literary rhetoric. Before that, most scholars had been occupied with peeling away the layers of tradition and redaction to get behind the Gospel traditions in order to reconstruct the historical Jesus, the history of the Gospel community, and the way the author put it together. They also looked at each passage separately to decide if they thought a passage fit with Mark or not. These methods taught us much but they also fragmented the text of Mark. By contrast, narrative analysis was interested in the dynamics of the final product of a Gospel writer. Narrative analysis looked at the whole text as it stands before us and asked after its impact on readers. We came to appreciate the incredibly skilled way in which the composers of these ancient Gospels crafted their story as a whole. This had not been done before, and it opened up a whole new arena of interpretation.

For another example, classical rhetorical criticism was introduced to biblical studies in the eighties. Rhetorical criticism led us to look for the first time at the ways in which the New Testament writings reflected characteristics of ancient rhetorical theory and practice. We now analyze New Testament letters as rhetorical speeches. We discern the issue at stake, the species of rhetoric involved, the order of the arguments, the uses of ethos, pathos, and logos as means of persuasion, the tropes and figures of speech, as well as the style—all means to help us understand how a letter might have had certain impacts on ancient hearers. As further examples, postcolonial criticism and empire studies are bringing to light the political relationship between the early Christian communities and the Roman Empire in ways never before explored. These and other methods have opened up new vistas in the dynamics and meaning of the biblical writings.

None of these new methods provided “new” information. Rather, they have taught us how to explore the texts before us in fresh ways, how to notice what had been neglected, how to correlate and organize the material differently, and (re-)construct historical events/dynamics we had not imagined before. All of these methods can be translated into a set of questions to be posed and steps to be taken as a basis for teaching them to students, all as heuristic devices to investigate the text in context. Of course, methods are more intuitive and complex and artful than I am presenting here. But for the purposes of launching students and introducing them to the importance and possibilities of methods, the idea of developing a methodological model to apply to the text is extremely helpful.

Why Give Students a Text Without a Method by Which to Proceed? 

In the book I wrote with Joanna Dewey and Don Michie, Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel, we decided to include appendices with sets of methods—exercises and questions—for students to use in interrogating a Gospel from a narrative point of view. These exercises represent the basic methodological steps of interpreting Mark as a narrative whole and of unpacking an episode within the Gospel. They were developed and tested in classes with the students as a way to enable them to do their own independent analysis of this and other Gospel texts.

Photo Credit: “Lure Selection” by Wapster – CC by 2.0

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