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18. I've always felt like I cheated a little by doing my doctorate in the British system. In the US, you do two years of course work and then take comps before you really are set loose on your dissertation. In Britain, you come in as an MLitt student working on your dissertation from Day 1. If you demonstrate sufficient progress that first semester, your work is retroactively deemed the first semester of your doctorate and away you go.
I think most people who are accepted are upgraded. I did have a friend, however, who tried to jump into a PhD program in philosophy without really having the undergraduate or master's background for it. I think he ended up with two master's degrees in the end. Ouch.
You were supposed to fill in gaps as you worked on your dissertation. However, thankfully, between Asbury and UK, I was in good stead. I knew biblical and classical Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and had passed competencies in both reading German and French.
My weakest area was the history of Old Testament interpretation, and no doubt I had some gaps in the history of New Testament interpretation. At some point in the next few years, I would read Stephen Neill's The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861-1986, helpfully supplemented with a robust final chapter by Tom Wright. I think I could do much better by now. :-) In fact, you're picking up pieces if you're reading this series.
19. I hit the ground running teaching Greek. There was a charming old fellow named William Maurice who had taught Greek for years for the Department of Theology. The year I arrived he did what every Greek teacher wants to do at some point -- he wrote his own Greek textbook for a captive audience. I have one sitting around I wrote too.
If I remember correctly, he would give a grammar lecture on Fridays. Then on Monday and Tuesday a cohort would meet with me and we read through Mark 1-8. In three months, we read through all of Mark 1-8. I did that for three years, if I remember correctly.
By then of course I had all sorts of gimmicks, songs, and mnemonics. I remember a Greek Orthodox priest being rather disgusted by my Erasmian pronounciation. I totally agree that modern Greek sounds much more elegant than Machen. I did enjoy doing that trodden path through the first half of Mark.
I seem to remember Maurice presenting a paper. I dare not throw stones for I have given some wild papers no doubt (and plan to give one or two this year). But he argued that since Tatian's Diatesseron meant "through four," there must have been a fifth gospel in the mix. If you have four openings, you have to have five pillars. He suggested that the fifth was the Gospel of Thomas, if I remember correctly.
It was preposterous of course, but every proposal was given respect.
20. A highlight of my time at Durham was the New Testament Seminar. When Dunn was working on a book or commentary, we would work through the material with him. Some terms we would do background literature. For example, an edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls came out in 1994 and we worked through it together. Other semesters were filled with guest speakers.
If I remember correctly, my first semester was a guest speaker semester. Carl Holliday spoke. I think Ralph Martin spoke. I remember thinking that Martin did not have all his thoughts together for the book he was writing. It gave me hope. I mean no disrespect, but I thought, I can have my thoughts better organized than that presentation. But everyone can have an off day too.
It was an intimidating crowd. Jimmy Dunn led the seminar, of course. Sandy Wedderburn was starting his last year there, although we didn't know it yet. Stephen Barton was a regular feature -- also a local pastor. Walter Moberley was Old Testament but he would join. He was particularly interested in theological interpretation, so just sticking to the Old Testament wouldn't do.
21. While I'm on the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), 1994 was a special moment in the history of New Testament scholarship. When the DSS were discovered in 1947, scholars divided the fragments between them. Some of the big fragments came out fairly quickly. The Habakkuk commentary, for example. The Community Rule.
But there were lots and lots of fragments. Piecing them together was a huge task. And it's perhaps understandable that those scholars who were working on them kept them largely to themselves... for 50 years. At retirement, some of them passed fragments onto their students.
It wasn't a conspiracy. It was perfectionism. It was scholars hoarding fragments to themselves. It was a log jam.
Then a couple scholars from Biblical Archaeology Review took pictures of all the scrolls (Hershell Shanks, Robert Eisenman, with the help of Immanuel Tov) and a copy of them all was published. The gig was up. The next ten years would be a cornucopia of Dead Sea Scrolls studies and dissertations. And I lived through it.
I think it must have been the spring of 1994 that Helen Fox had a visitor. Or perhaps it was a friend of Eleanor Rance (an Anglican ministry student). She was Catholic and was insistent that the Roman Catholic Church had suppressed the DSS because they showed that Jesus was not actually the Messiah.
I lose my cool much more often these last years than I used to, but it was very unusual in those days for me to lose my cool. But this person was so whack that I lost it. She was so absolutely sure that the church was hiding the scrolls and that it was a papal conspiracy. There were some conspiracy books out -- one in 1991 called The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception and another by Barbara Thiering in 1992.
The scrolls were all public within a year. Guess what? No deep dark conspiracy in them. Sheez.
22. The place to start my work with Hebrews was catching up with the literature. At that time, Hebrews was truly a road less traveled. Today, we have a wealth of monographs. I know because I wrote a chapter on Contested Issues in Hebrews for the Oxford Handbook of Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles a couple years ago. It was an overwhelming task.
Two works in particular seemed like the best place to begin: Lincoln Hurst's vaguely named, The Epistle of Hebrews (1990) and James Thompson's The Beginnings of Christian Philosophy (1982).
Hurst would be important for me. There had been a time in the mid-1900s when most scholars thought that Philo stood fairly significantly in the background of Hebrews. Ceslas Spicq's two volume French commentary on Hebrews was probably the peak. Then Ronald Williamson wrote a book in 1970 that most felt debunked the Philo background. In 2000 I gave a paper at SBL reviewing his work.
He made the basic point, but thought he significantly overstated his conclusions. But these sorts of works are like inoculations. You don't have to make the argument. You just say, "Williamson" and can leave it at that.
Hurst stood in that stream. He made some good points. For example, events can't happen in a Platonic archetype. His greatest contribution, in my opinion, was his recognition that "copy" is not a good translation for hypodeigma in Hebrews 8:5 and 9:23. "Example" is better. "Illustration."
However, the Platonism that may have influenced Hebrews was not straight Platonism but Middle Platonism. It makes a difference.
23. Thompson's book was probably a little dated but he represented the Philo position in an updated form. His monograph was a collection of essays. He was my only source for the idea that the removal of the created realm in 12:27 was a literal removal. I would hold that position until 2011 when I gave a paper in James Thompson's honor at Pepperdine.
It had come home to me over the years that Hebrews would truly be unprecedented to see the created realm completely removed. Language of creation out of nothing didn't literally mean absolutely nothing. It was about the formation of unseen hyle. So why would the removal not be the same -- removal of the world as it appears rather than absolute removal. Think 2 Peter 3:10 where the cosmos is reconstituted.
24. I believe I gave Dunn two or three papers that fall. One was on the literary structure of Hebrews. Then the second was a review of Hurst. I can't remember if I gave him one on Thompson.
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