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Ausgabe: | Oktober/2022 |
Spalte: | 923-926 |
Kategorie: | Bibelwissenschaft |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Dinkler, Michal Beth |
Titel/Untertitel: | Influence: On Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation. |
Verlag: | Leiden u. a.: Brill 2021. VI, 106 S. = Brill Research Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences, 4.3 / Brill Research Perspectives in Biblical Interpretation, 4.3 |
Rezensent: | Ben Witherington, III |
I was giving some lectures in Tubingen some 25 years ago on the rhetoric of 1 Corinthians. To my surprise, members of the Classics faculty showed up as did members of the Theology faculty. The lectures prompted me to write my socio-rhetorical commentary entitled Conflict and Community in Corinth soon thereafter. The »reception« of the lecture was positive on the whole, but what surprised me was that it was especially the Classics scholars who were saying »Sehr gut danke« whilst the Theological faculty had some issues with the application of this method to the New Testament. The oldest member of that faculty, Otto Betz even said – do we really have to return to the rhetorical interpretation in the NT that we learned in the 20s and 30s before »form criticism« was around? My answer was »zweifellos«! And indeed, the last more than 30 years has now seen a veritable avalanche of articles and books on this very subject, eclipsing almost any other way the New Testament has been spoken and written about in that period of time. Of course, what I was talking about was historical rhetorical analysis of the text, asking and answering the question – What sort of rheto- ric, if any, did the writers of the NT know and use in their interpretation of their new Christian traditions? What did persuasion look like on the lips of a Paul, or the author of Hebrews, or a Luke?
In their series of volumes entitled Brill Research Perspectives on Biblical Interpretation, we now have another contribution to this sort of approach to the Bible, and though slender in size, the book asks many good questions about rhetorics old and new. As the title suggests, Michal Beth Dinkler is primarily interested in the ques-tion of how such rhetoric sought to persuade audiences about certain beliefs and behaviors that came to be called Christian. How did these configurations of words in Greek actually impact and influence this or that audience. The book is divided into three parts: 1) Defining and Studying Rhetoric, 2) Approaches to Biblical Rhetoric, and 3) Reading the Rhetorics of 1 Peter (a case study on how it should or can be done).
From the outset it becomes clear that the author thinks that »the New Rhetoric« does a better job in helping us understand the Biblical text than what she calls »Heritage Rhetoric« by which is meant historical rhetorical analysis, the sort actually used in New Testament times and thereafter by various of the Greek church fathers such as John Chrysostom. While there is some discussion of »Heritage Rhetoric« as it was reinaugurated in the late 20th century by Hans Dieter Betz at Chicago (and his doctoral student Margaret Mitchell) and by Classics scholar George Kennedy at the University of North Carolina (and his students including Duane Watson and myself) for instance on pages 47 ff. the majority of D.’s discussion lies with the modern rhetorical approaches to this subject matter, about which D. say »To my mind, the New Rhetoric’s focus on rhetoricity as a feature of all texts provides a useful way of grappling with the fact that the New Testament texts were written to per-suade without resorting to reductive concepts of authorial intent as the only or dominant factor in meaning-making. We can consider the persuasive potential of extolling virtues […] without arguing that the author consciously intended to employ the classical category of epideictic rhetoric.« (50, emphasis added)
While I am happy for multiple approaches to the rhetoric of the NT, including some of the fruitful approaches of, for instance Vernon Robbins, what I am not happy about is statements like »we cannot really know the intentions of an ancient writer or the contexts out of which and into which he or she wrote«, which is supposed to give us license to practice anachronism in order to derive a meaning from these Biblical texts. The study of ancient texts, whether Biblical or ancient classics should not begin by abandoning the task of asking »what did these texts mean« in their original contexts, what sort of rhetoric did these authors use then, and how did these texts persuade, using ancient rhetorical skills and approaches? A text doesn’t have meaning in isolation, it has meaning in contexts, in this case the historical contexts in which the NT documents were written. Before we undertake to apply all sorts of modern methods to the Biblical texts, or even impose these methods on the text, the historical task should be attempted and undertaken first. As I tell my students – a text without a context is just a pretext for whatever you want it to mean.
Meaning, in the first instance, lies in these ancient texts themselves, not in the modern eyes that behold them, nor even in the interaction between the reader and the text. This in turn means, that the historical enterprise requires that we ask about things like authorial intent, if it can be discerned from a close reading of the text, and what is the scope of possible meaning based on the spectrum of meanings possible when Koine Greek was a spoken lan- guage, and all texts, including sacred texts, were oral texts – meaning to be heard and be persuaded by. In fact, as the recent studies on ancient literacies and ancient education by such scholars as Wil-liam Harris or Teresa Morgan and many others have shown, we can know quite a lot about the educational level of various writers of the New Testament, particularly Paul, Luke, the author of Hebrews, and the person who actually wrote 1 Peter. It is clear enough that they were in the upper echelon of well-educated persons of their day, knew well the rhetoric of that period, and used it frequently. As Edwin Judge, the great Roman historian has said about the social history of early Christianity, it was led by a group of persons who educationally (and rhetorically) were among the social elite, though in various other categories like wealth, political power, and the like they were not likely among the elites. They suffered from what Wayne Meeks once called »status inconsistency«, high status in various ways, but not high rank in the Roman society.
It is not true that we do not have all sorts of sources to help us discover the ancient meanings and persuasions the Biblical writers used. Beside literary texts, we also have enormous amounts of inscriptions, not to mention archaeological finds, and much more which help us reconstruct the social and rhetorical picture of that period of time. Reductionism happens not when we attempt to fig- ure out what sort of rhetoric the ancient writers used to persuade. Reductionism comes from abandoning or at least making entirely secondary the historical study of Biblical texts in favor of modern literary approaches to the text and modern theories about meaning and how texts persuade in general, as if this was same across all time and all cultures. But alas, it is not. Specific languages provide specific meanings to specific cultural settings in specific contexts, in this case ancient ones. What happens when we apply some modern methods to ancient texts is a reading of things into the text, or a distorting of the original meanings of those texts. It is not enough to ask how a text has been received or even misused by later generations of readers of the Bible. The historical task should take priority in dealing with these texts in their original contexts, and then asking what they meant and mean and how they persuaded and continue to persuade.
To her credit, D. still takes the historical task seriously, though she prefers modern rhetorical approaches to the Biblical text, as is shown by the last third of her study where she tries to shed new light on the paraenesis of 1 Peter, based on her study of ancient Jewish apocalyptic, ancient educational approaches to imitation of historical figures, and ancient household code material. What really emerges from such a study is that in fact, despite all the modern polemics about the household codes and the suppression of women, they are not simply attempts to baptize the status quo and call it good. What is really going on in that material, in the context of the household meetings is counter-cultural to a significant extent. Slaves are to be treated as persons with potential for moral virtue, even for imitating Christ’s approach to suffering, wives are seen as heirs with their husbands of the gracious gift of God. What is going on here is the transforming of the existing pat-riarchal household structure by injecting into it a more egalitarian, a more human and humane, approach to that social structure.
It is the measure of a good book that it stimulates good ques-tions and prompts vigorous discussion. This book by D. is such a book, and is to be commended. I will just say that there is a reason however, that as D. admits, the vast majority of publications in the last 30 years take some form of a historical rhetorical approach to the Biblical text (see now the 2nd edition with a vast new bibliography, of my textbook New Testament Rhetoric, which will be pub-lished in the Fall of 2022). The reason is simple – we don’t just need to know how the rhetoric of the Bible has influenced us and millions of others. We need to know what sort of persuasion the NT writers and leaders used to, as Luke puts it »turn the world upside down« creating a vast new religious movement.