I actually did a fair amount of reading this week, most into new areas. It all began with seeing Michael Bird’s reference to a new issue of Trinity Journal. I downloaded one of the featured articles by E. Randolph Richards on honor/shame values applied to John’s temple-cleansing accounts. It was a helpful read, but I was surprised at how uncritically he applied the framework, as though shame/honor was the overriding value in every context. Things were probably not quite that tidy, based on the other influences of the day. The article did pique my interest, so I started looking into his cited works. One of the sources I found at Amazon had a review by Markus Bockmuehl1 This is what cracked my up, take a look at some of the excerpts:
For its new third edition, this celebrated twenty-year-old textbook classic has been spruced up with a new preface and cover, two new chapters, updated bibliographies and 20 pages of study questions at the end, perforated so as to be easily detachable. (For some reason the index pages, which follow the questions, received the same efficient treatment and thus began to take leave of their binding before I finished reading.)
I take it he was not very pleased by the efficiency of the publisher. But wait, there’s more…
Two new chapters explore the extent to which status maintenance is constantly under threat from envy and the evil eye, and the evolution of Jesus groups under the somewhat cringe-making typology of ‘forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning’. A brief ‘theological conclusion’ asserts that to reject such socio-cultural study is to deny the Incarnation.
Here are the happy comments. They should have begun with “while” or “notwithstanding”.
Over the years Malina has done a very great deal to awaken and stimulate student interest in the ‘New Testament world’, as a place that is not just historically and perhaps linguistically distant from us, but whose people inhabited a social and cultural fabric of assumptions that would strike the average English-speaking eighteen-year-old as alarmingly alien. At a time when the hard work of such historical engagement of the ‘other’ has been under threat from all manner of purely reader-generated interpretations, it is hard to overestimate the benefit of Malina’s contribution.
Then the other shoe drops:
Typos old and new continue; so does a prose style that borders at times on the trite and repetitive — even when allowing for undergraduate attention spans.
As a result, astounding generalizations proliferate, seemingly unsupported by evidence and reminiscent of grand anthropological theories of a bygone day, when Polynesian cargo cults could be thought to shed the same inexhaustible light on the social realities of Steeple Bumpstead as of ancient Xanadu. We hear about what is characteristically, and it appears timelessly, ‘Mediterranean’ behaviour. But for every valid or at least plausible insight one stumbles over others burdened with rather too many unmentioned exceptions, be they ancient or modern or both. All the while, the cultural stereotypes merrily accumulate to an extent that would be unthinkable if the object were contemporary ‘African’ or ‘native American’ people groups.
Now he gets on a roll with some helpful word-pictures:
Malina refers to ancient Jews and their literature in curiously arm-waving and unspecific terms (‘Semites’, ‘Semitic subculture’, ‘Ben Zakaiists’, ‘late Israelites’), citing the Mishnah only twice and the Dead Sea Scrolls not at all, and virtually ignoring the first-century role of the Pharisees, who (rather than the priests) were in Josephus’s view the real ‘bearers of the Great Tradition’.
Then there is the final assessment, including an “in no way” statement that seems a bit infelicitous:
But this cannot be the place for a full-scale interaction with Malina’s approach. My insistence on a more culture-specific application of cultural anthropology is in no way meant to detract from his achievement in securing for this field of study a valid place at the table of New Testament scholarship, or indeed from this book’s years of service among undergraduates in North America and beyond. Future scholarship in the cultural anthropology of early Christianity will inevitably benefit from the initiative represented by works like this.
A colleague of mine is fond of saying that if your only tool is a hammer, all the world looks like a nail. My sense from Robertson’s article, and from Bockmuehl’s review, it that it would be good to have more than one tool. In then end, I ordered several books on the matter, but not this one.
- M. Bockmuehl, Review of Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (Third Edition, Revised and Expanded). Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Pp. xv + 256. ISBN 0-664-22295-1. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2002.04.19. [↩]
