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:

  1. Will this paper advance the discussion, or simply advance an agenda?
  2. Is the topic a novel innovation, or simply a novel spin on the same old thing?
  3. Will the presentation foster discussion, or will it leave the listeners confused over what exactly was claimed?
  4. 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.