England -- First Term Studies 4

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42. For whatever reason, Jimmy suggested I start by reading Ernst Käsemann's The Wandering People of God. It is a classic in Hebrews studies. Its underlying problem is that Käsemann read Hebrews in terms of Gnosticism. Many scholars of his day saw Gnosticism as part of the context of early Christianity.

Bultmann and others had reverse engineered a hypothetical Gnosticism at the time of Paul out of later sources and their imagination. They created the "Gnostic Redeemer Myth," a hypothetical backdrop to Christian thinking where a spirit being partakes of evil material but is freed upon death and leads others out of the prison house of the body to salvation. The problem is that it doesn't exist. It is a pastiche of bits from here and there. Philo is skewed as a source, for example.

The real Gnosticism didn't rise until the late first century. These days it is only invoked when discussing the background of the letters and Gospel of John. It is gone from discussions of Colossians and Hebrews.

43. I read Lincoln Hurst's, The Epistle to the Hebrews: Its Background of Thought. He went through all the backgrounds that had been suggested for Hebrews up to that point. My main take away had to do with Hebrews 8:5, that the earthly tabernacle was a "copy and shadow" of the heavenly one. Hurst showed that "copy" was not a typical translation of hypodeigma and thus that, while the verse had a Platonic feel, it was not straightforwardly Platonic.

Indeed, from Hurst and James Thompson I learned about Middle Platonism. A few years later I would read Thomas Tobin's The Creation of Man, which helped me more than any other source in understanding how Stoicism and Platonism mixed together at Alexandria in the century before Christ to form Middle Platonism between Plato and Neoplatonism.

So I read James Thompson's The Beginnings of Christian Philosophy. I thought he went a little too far with a Platonic background, but I found him a kindred spirit. At some point I plowed through L.K.K. Day's The Intermediary World and Patterns of Perfection in Hebrews and Philo. I felt like a learned quite a bit about Philo but very little about Hebrews.

44. I went home for Christmas. I remember going for a walk trying to decide whether to move forward with Hebrews or perhaps to switch to something else. I have always liked Paul more than Hebrews, but so did everyone else. There was plenty being done on Paul. Dissertations have to come to some new conclusion, use some new method, or look at some new evidence. [1]

The subject of the historical Jesus was intriguing but potentially perilous. I did not necessarily expect to get a job in Wesleyan circles, but clearly a topic in such an area would require explanation and possibly raise eyebrows. It had only been a year or two previous that Houghton College had expelled another pupil of Dunn for writing a book that assumed Paul did not write the Pastoral Epistles. Some have suggested it was not entirely for his position but also for his attitude.

As a side note, when I was finishing up, Dunn told me he would write a reference for anywhere but Houghton. He wasn't really serious. No doubt the fact that I had studied with Dunn was in the back of Bud Bence's mind when he hired me at IWU. Bud had been Dean at Houghton during the crisis I mentioned above.

One possible idea I had in the area of Jesus studies was to argue that Jesus did indeed keep his messianic identity somewhat hushed because the expectations for a Messiah were different from his own mission. I wasn't too surprised to find that Dunn had already published something along these lines.

By the way, one of the big insights for me in those days was a realization that Jews did not think of the Messiah as God come down as earth. Indeed, not even all Jews were expecting or wanting a Messiah. Those that were generally expected God to anoint a human figure to rise and overthrow Roman rule. The 1987 Princeton Symposium on this topic seems a benchmark here: The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity.

45. With regard to Hebrews, my exposure to literary approaches was percolating. I read Stephen Moore's Literary Criticism and the Gospels. Bill Patrick and I had gone to hear him give a funny SBL session where he read Mark from a deconstructive point of view. His book gave me a certain typology for categorizing literary approaches.

Between Richard Hays and N. T. Wright, I became aware of structuralism as a way of analyzing stories. At some point I plowed through Wright's The New Testament and the People of God. He uses the "actantial" model of structuralism to analyze stories of salvation. By the way, at the time I found Wright's work incredibly stimulating. There was a time in the late 90s when I couldn't wait for his Paul book in this series to come out. By the time it did 15 years later, I had largely lost interest. :-)

One feature I loved in this first volume to the series was the way that he processed worldview in terms of story, symbols, rituals, and answers to basic questions. He also gave me one of my first exposures to critical realism. He gave me my first nuanced sense of who the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes were. It was a major point in the development of my thinking.

Richard Hays had also used the structuralist model in his own dissertation, published as The Faith of Jesus Christ. By the way, by God's grace I just happened to go to the famous 1988 debate between Dunn and Hays on the expression "the faith of Jesus Christ." It would take me years to get a sense of what I think on this issue, well into my time teaching at IWU. I would eventually conclude that Paul argues "from Hays to Dunn."

Hays' work on Galatians looked for the narrative substructure of Galatians. My idea was to look to the narrative substructure of Hebrews. I later set this out in my book, Understanding the Book of Hebrews. If a story has the elements of events, characters, and settings, I eventually decided in my dissertation for focus on the settings in the narrative substructure of Hebrews.

I should mention here that my friend James Quirk was also studying structuralism as an archaeology major. He introduced me to Claude Levy-Strauss. I did not understand it all and of course it was too tangential to spend much time on him. Let's just say I was impressed at how much more advanced the students at Durham were than any of the undergraduate students I had encountered before.

[1] I've always joked that the implication was that all dissertations are wrong. I've also joked that the only thing scholars agree on is that all dissertations but theirs are wrong. Indeed, the unique claims of dissertations are often based on creative thoughts formed before a thinker reaches maturity in their thoughts. I have always viewed Tom Wright's thoughts on Jesus as the embodiment of Israel in this light, as we as his sense that return from exile is a major key to New Testament thought.

I am being a little hyperbolic here. I do think there are some exceptional dissertations out there. There are, I think, some immature elements to my own dissertation (e.g., the annihilation of the creation). But in my defense, it was more of a new method of looking at Hebrews than completely novel claims.