I omitted to mention that I learned from Toni Craven that there are 206 named women in the Bible (including the Apocrypha and Deutero-canonical books).
Karl Kuhn gave an interesting presentation, at which I arrived sadly late, on diagramming biblical narratives. He’s working on some interesting approaches to representing the gospel narratives graphically. His work is provocative, but he hasn’t done much specific study in the visual representation of information; Tufte and McCloud would greatly enrich his imagination of this task.
Gregory Glazov proposes identifying metaphors from Genesis 2 and 3 as they impinge on biblical discourses on the control of speech. He mentions the Letter of James in passing (the smallness of the tongue implicitly contrasts with the greatness of Leviathan?), but most of his emphasis falls on Old Testament and intertestamental texts. He name-checks Lakoff and Johnson as a point of orientation for his account of the links among protological metaphors and the lived metaphors of later Hellenistic-Judaic culture: the serpent, the flaming sword, the rivers, jewels, nourishing fluids, and so on have resonances in much of the wisdom literature. Glazov also cites Northrup Frye’s analysis of biblical imagery.
In 1991, Marc Girard proposed a biblical theology based on symbols. He regards symbols as the first language of humanity; he characterizes these symbols based on their roles in depth psychology and the history of religions. (His biblical theology remains incomplete; he has finished sections on the symbolism of colors and numbers, but has yet to write out the section on “the symbolism of human realities.” The lecture as a whole appropriately directs attention away from a reductively propositional mode of interpretation, but Girard has bought so thoroughly into Jungian archetypal “symbol” theory that his talk has limited pertinence for interpreters who doubt that approach’s universal applicability and explanatory power. Without disrespect for the value of Jung’s thought for therapy and for understanding particular instances of signification and interpretation, Margaret and I were unconvinced to the point of being impatient.
This morning, I have a meeting regarding a corrected edition of my Greek textbook. It’s been a long, gruesome tale thus far, so I dare not put too much anticipated glee in my publisher’s venturing a revision — but this meeting comes at their initiative; they have experience with printing revised editions of their language textbooks; and I’m not going to press for much more than corrections, although there’s a long list of useability desiderata for which I’ll lobby gently. Then the Hermeneutics Task Force again.
Posted by AKMA at August 9, 2004 09:01 AM | TrackBack