A week or so ago, Pete Phillips proposed the irony of a postmodern type such as I, writing an instance of the very traditional, very modern genre of the commentary (in a comment, of course) (by the way, Pete, your email sig and comment URI give the wrong web address for you — they say "dot org” rather than “dot com,” unless that’s your own postmodern gesture toward the social construction of URIs). (Pete has a few provocative reflections on a new book by Eco, too.) (Back to the point:) “Isn't this colluding with the guild's mystification of the word which you oppose elsewhere? Is a commentary a recording of a reading - or the opening of a new door — or a re-emergence of the intertextual game?”
Well, perhaps it’s a mystification, although most of the Greek students with whom I’ve worked would find it more of a radical demystification. The point of the series is to go through the Greek text, parsing and defining and construing, and (as much as possible) sketching out plausible alternative possibilities without pushing a party line. And once I look into the passages, many of these constructions do look “complicated or obscure,” — and if they look obscure to me, I don’t feel presumptuous in reckoning that they might look difficult to my students as well.
Of course, there’s no way to avoid applying some degree of rhetorical pressure, but we’re trying to put a higher value on discussing the alternatives than to persuading people to adopt one position or another. The series’s orientation is resolutely grammatical-textual, so we don’t fret about whether James wrote it, or where he lived, or whether it’s a composite of six fragmentary letters (although now that I say this, I realize that back at the beginning of chapter 2 I minimized the likelihood that the name “Jesus Christ” is an interpolation — although I have firm textual grounds for so doing).
At the same time, Pete is right to point out the absurdity of multiplying the number of commentaries in the world. I like this series and its goals — to help along readers whose Greek may not be up to full strength — but I doubt I’d want to write one of those passage-by-passage commentaries that purports to tell you what was really on James’s mind as he wrote those very words.
[My book about Matthew’s Gospel will take a more thematic approach; in some respects it may resemble a commentary, but I deliberately take the tack of saying, “When you consider these things, doesn’t it seem as though the whole bit fits together in this way?” It’s more an invitation to read Matthew along with me (closer to what Pete called “a recording of a reading”) than a scientific demonstration that I’m right and everybody else wrong.
But neither my James book nor my Matthew book quite escapes the challenge Pete raises:
Posted by AKMA at July 13, 2004 08:02 PM | TrackBack