Let’s face it, scholarship is a competitive enterprise. In as much as there is a desire to get things right, there is typically a corresponding interest in being right, in coming out on top. Competition can be a healthy thing, leading to greater innovation and refinement. But when winning the competition becomes an end in itself, the effectiveness of the scholarly enterprise rapidly deteriorates. Consider the current field of verbal aspect in Greek.
Porter and Fanning were the modern pioneers of verbal aspect, followed by McKay following McKay.* Others include Decker and now Campbell. I choose this field as a representative example of what I consider to be stagnation within the debate. There was a panel discussion of leading scholars when the dissertations of Porter and Fanning were published, chronicled in the volume edited by Carson. It seemed to have the effect more of entrenching the differences than moving the discussion forward toward some kind of resolution. Later work seems to me to have reinforced one position or another. To work in the area of aspect, it seems that one must declare an allegiance, much like Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 1:12. I am not so naive as to think that all controversy can be resolved, that we can all just get along. That being said, we must ask ourselves a question: What motivates our scholarship? What is our primary goal? I apply this not just to verbal aspect, but to NT scholarship in general.
According to the values and vision of SBL, its purpose is to foster and advance scholarship in the field of biblical studies. Focusing on finding the best solutions, the most effective strategies, refining and improving our understanding, all of these advance the goals of scholarship. Whether it is our idea and model, or that of another, our objective must be to advance scholarship in the field. This objective, in most cases, will have the positive impact of building God’s Kingdom. In contrast, as we seek to advance our scholarship, we derail the scholarly endeavor, building our own kingdom instead of the far more important one.
The problem is that the lines between these two quests are very blurry. I may be completely convinced that my method is the right one, and that propagating it doesadvance scholarship. Reception within the guild may not always be the best measure of a method’s efficacy. This is especially the case of importing a method from another discipline into biblical studies. I recall reading John Van Seter’s The Edited Bible. It was humorous yet sad in its documentation of how biblical scholars continue to use a model that had been abandoned for decades by other disciplines after concluding it was not workable. Biblical scholars can be hopeless optimists in this regard, expecting to disprove what other guilds have compellingly concluded. I contend that the same holds true for certain linguistic approaches to Koine Greek. NT studies seems to lag decades behind developments in the broader scholarly arena of linguistics, especially in comparison to linguistic study of Biblical Hebrew. I do not say this condescendingly, but merely as one who spent seven years sojourning in linguistics proper before entering NT studies. One gets a very different picture of “the world out there” from within NT studies compared with the outside. It reminds me of Soviet Russia’s view of the West during the cold war, very different pictures.
For those of you who consider yourselves scholars, what is your primary ambition. Is it to get it right or to be right? In a perfect world, we would do both all the time. Last I checked, the world is not too perfect (though I expect that President-elect Obama will rectify all things). Whose kingdom are we building? Are we engaging broader scholarship, or dismissing it? Do we wish to engage it enough to move beyond our own system and learn the nuances of the competition (see my last post)? How else can there be meaningful discussion and progress? Is that even a goal anymore?
This post is addressed to me as much as to anyone else. I know myself well enough to know my selfish ambition and desire to be right. I thank God for the mentors that he has brought into my life that are quite willing to point out my errors. I am also thankful for the new ones that I met at ETS/SBL.
The calls for papers will be issued in the coming weeks. I would ask you to consider a few questions as you either propose a paper, or as you evaluate them as part of a steering committee:
- Will this paper advance the discussion, or simply advance an agenda?
- Is the topic a novel innovation, or simply a novel spin on the same old thing?
- Will the presentation foster discussion, or will it leave the listeners confused over what exactly was claimed?
- How does the paper engage the broader discussion: dismissively or engagingly?
I would appreciate hearing your thoughts. I feel as though Nijay Gupta should have written this, as he seems to have mastered these issues far better than I. If you are considering or are currently engaged in doctoral studies, it would behoove you to spend some time at his blog.
*Update: the following is a gladly accepted correction, thanks to Rod Decker: “I’d note that McKay was the impetus for the work of Fanning and Porter, not a follower. Both cite him in their work. Some of his material was published after F & P were published and he does interact with it, but McKay’s work goes back to the 1960s. I doubt that we’d have seen F or P without those initial articles by McKay.” See his full comment below.
**Here is an edited version of my response to Rod, for you RSS folks:
Con’s Zondervan volume seems like an opportunity, but what are we going to do with it? I am not talking about crowning Con king, but about using the huge surge in interest in verbal asepct to organize a productive discussion about the matter. I do not have a dog in this fight, and will leave it to you and the other aspect specialists to winnow down a “to do” list of what needs resolving yet. Based on the blogs, much of it seems to hinge on terminology, not so much the framework. There seem to be two fundamentally different views on the matter: the aspect-only folks, and the mixed aspect-tense folks. If the aspect only group cannot agree on their basic position, then Carl Conrad has correctly assessed the situation as still needing the dust to settle. My sense is that the divisions that exist have as much to do with turf as substantive differences. Below is what I would call a step forward.
I would pay good money to see the the aspect-only/primarily folks provide a basic overview of their position (10-15 minutes), followed by their account of what Buth and others would consider to be temporal usage (15-25 min). Then Buth and others would give an overview of their system, followed by an account of the usage that seems to counter the temporal idea in favor of aspect-only. If each understood the other’s system well enough to actually interact with it, and to make it clear enough for non-specialists (e.g. Carl Conrad) to follow, that would be what I consider to be progress.
It would take a lot of advance work to pull such a thing off, and it would take a willingness of the parties involved to respectfully engage the other. The two camps would need to get their stories straight and pick a representative, as well as the data that they would want the other group to tackle. I do not think this would lead to one big happy family, but it would sure delineate the specific differences and well as the common ground. This is the kind of progress I am talking about. If non-specialists could understand it, they could make their own judgments based on the merits of the explanation and exegesis of the supposedly contrary data. This is what scholarship is about, this is what I signed up for when I started grad school, not trench warfare. We already established in the Great War that it is a colossal waste of time and resources. I do not want to reinvent the wheel by trying to fight the verbal aspect war. If parties would be game for such an encounter, I am sure it could be arranged for the ’09 meetings.
When I read blog posts about Khirbet Qeiyafa and archeology, I’m more encouraged. While there are some who are holding out against it being an Israelite site, there are plenty of people who are accepting that the “low chronology” of Israel’s history is flawed. Although, I suppose that up until this discovery, the debate about chronology was extremely stale.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what Greek linguistics’ “Khirbet Qeiyafa” will be. We need one. We need to move past these debates.
[…] a comment » You would do well to spend a few moments reading Steve’s post this morning. He makes some excellent points about research generally and presenting papers specifically. His […]
Well said, Steve. It seems like it should be self-evident, but it reminds me of an axiom presented to me in college: “All truth is God’s truth.” Of course this can be twisted around a variety of ways as well, but to me it says, “Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord and He will lift you up.”
We need to be humble in all our pursuits no matter how many years we’ve studied, letters after our name, how well we’re paid, or how well acknowledged – allowing that we but see through a glass dimly.
Said another way – think of the story of 3 blind men describing an elephant. They were all “partially” right, but all missing something.
I hesitate to comment on one of your illustrations so as not to detract from your overall thesis—which is on target. But I will risk offering, for what it’s worth, some perspective on the illustration.
First I’d note that McKay was the impetus for the work of Fanning and Porter, not a follower. Both cite him in their work. Some of his material was published after F & P were published and he does interact with it, but McKay’s work goes back to the 1960s. I doubt that we’d have seen F or P without those initial articles by McKay. (Mari Olsen is also worth including for her work as a followup to F & P, as well as Evans.)
The panel to which you refer is the fairly well known (at least in NT grammatical circles) as the “Porter-Fanning debate.” I was present at the debate along with perhaps 300 others. Fascinating. The contrast between F & P was obvious from the start, not only in terms of approach/method and content/conclusions, but also in personality. Buist is from Charleston, SC and the proverbial southern gentleman. Stan is younger, was still single then, and obviously right out of the British university system. It took me about half the debate to figure out that these men (as well as Carson, Silva, and Schmidt—moderator and respondents) were *distinguishing* between aspect and Aktionsart. I, as well as most of my fellows, had been taught that these terms were synonymous. That was standard fare for the preceding century. I told my class the next day (it was my second year teaching) that if I understood what was being argued, I had a lot of reading and thinking to do. The upshot of that was my doctoral study two years later when I had a sabbatical. I told my advisor that the one thing I needed to resolve during that year was the aspect question. He was also thinking about these matters, so the NT majors that year spent two semesters in an advanced Greek grammar seminar with that as our goal. I went into that year heavily favoring (“prejudiced toward”) Fanning’s approach. (I’ll skip the explanations as to why.) As providence (and my advisor!) would have it, I was assigned the first half of Porter’s tome to master and introduce to my fellows in the seminar. I struggled with that assignment for weeks. I had no background in formal linguistics, so it was a challenge. Once I understood his system, however, and compared it to Fanning, I was inclined to favor Porter. My dissertation arose out of that study as a means of testing Porter to see if it would “work.” Was it adequate to explain the data in a given corpus? I’d like to think that I attempted it with a mind still open (one of your major points in your post!), though that’s hard to evaluate in the midst of the process. Buist, who was the external examiner on my dissertation, wondered if I had been or if I had gone looking for evidence to support a preconceived position. Fair question (among many other hard ones he posed during the examination!), and I think the answer is no, I was still exploring. Yes, my conclusion in essence “declared an allegiance” to Porter’s system, but I hope it was not an up-front allegiance that determined my conclusions.
Has there been “stagnation” in the field since? Depends on the criteria, I suppose, but there has continued to be work done, and a lot of it does *not* stand in line with the general system adopted. Olsen’s aspect and temporal conclusions do not match either F or P, though her Aktionsart discussion is close to Fanning. Evans worked in the LXX/Pentateuch, and proposes some significant differences. Campbell, who worked under Evans, disagrees with his mentor and comes closest to Porter, but proposes quite different views of the perfect along with some new ideas regarding Aktionsart. His view of the future is closer to Fanning. So I don’t think that there is stagnation here, not any up front declaration of allegiance. Where there has been stagnation is in the interaction with this work by NT commentary writers. Very few have attempted to address that question, though there are some. I look forward to Carson’s NIGTC vol on the Johannine Eps which promises a careful examination of this throughout the corpus. I was very disappointed with the recent BECNT vol on Mark by Stein—who never even mentions this discussion anywhere that I can find, and does not reference any of the work on aspect in his bibliog. (The comm. is useful, but very traditional in terms of the grammatical discussion.)
Rod,
Thanks for the perspective. I was in seminary during the debate, and Stan was my second year Greek prof. I also TAed for his first year class at TWU, and did a papyri readings class with him. My point was not to try and solve the aspect issue, as much as to ask what will it take to move it forward. Con’s Zondervan volume seems like an opportunity, but what are we going to do with it? I am not talking about crowning Con king, but about using the huge surge in interest in verbal asepct to organize a productive discussion about the matter. I do not have a dog in this fight, and will leave it to you and the other aspect specialists to winnow down a “to do” list of what needs resolving yet. Based on the blogs, much of it seems to hinge on terminology, not so much the framework.
My hope is that there would be an opportunity for to hear the aspect-only/primarily folks provide their account of what Buth and others would consider to be temporal usage. Then Buth and others would give an account of the usage that seems to counter the temporal idea in favor of aspect-only. If each understood the other’s system well enough to interact with it, and to make it clear enough for non-specialists to follow, that would be what I consider to be progress. It would take a lot of advance work to pull such a thing off, and it would take a willingness of the parties involved to respectfully engage the other. We can talk more about this if you are interested. I do not think this would make one big happy family, but it would sure narrow down the specific differences and well as the common ground. This is the kind of progress I am talking about. If non-specialists could understand it, they could make their own judgments based on the merits of the explanation and exegesis. This is what scholarship is about, this is what I signed up for when I started grad school, not trench warfare. We have already established in the Great War that it is a colossal waste of time and resources.
Thanks for the comments, and thanks for affirming the thrust of the post. I will try to make the corrections you noted should be made. Thanks for your attention to detail.
[…] Runge posted some interesting comments on scholarship in general, illustrating it with aspect studies. I’ve chimed in and Steve has […]
I’ve finally read through the original blog post and the comments carefully — a second time. I think, Steve, that you have hit several nails on the head — some of them ugly and likely to damage fingers if the nails are missed. My experience as a Classicist now retired for several years has been that promotion of self and one’s own theoretical construct of problems has generally held more sway than any overwhelming passion to discover the truth. It may be that the very requisites of academic survival are almost insuperable unless one has independent means as well as a brilliant mind. I’ve long had the feeling that the great synthetic hypotheses developed and promoted by reputed scholars are like the great intellectual oratorial syntheses created by the masters of Hesse’s Glasperlenspiel (Magister Ludi), games of master game-players against which Hesse’s hero rebels as he deserts his post because he wants to do more than compete and more than create aesthetically-gratifying intellectual grand syntheses lacking real demonstrability of axioms and premises. It seems to me that what is wanted in academia is a willing to recognize the profundity of the ἀπορίαι that call for a sort of probing like that of the Platonic Socrates who seems profoundly aware that the end-result of τὸ εὖ ἀπορῆσαι is another ἀπορία. I do want to understand how the Greek verbal system works, but I have a sense that we’re going to be able to speak and read Greek long before we’re ever going to have an adequate accounting for HOW the Greek verbal system works. I think too that NT Greek scholars ordinarily have a pretty narrow perspective on ancient Greek, and also that the great majority of teachers and students of Biblical Greek have little real interest in acquiring anything more than a semi-comfortable familiarity with the text of the GNT — not anything really approaching understanding (Rod Decker’s teaching and his students, I do honestly believe, must reside on a much higher plane than most). I wish there were as much interest in getting ancient Greek VOICE forms and usage right as there is in getting the narrower realm of NT Koine Aspect right; I suspect that a consensus on voice might conceivably be reached, if only there were any real interest in it.
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