More and more scholars claim to be using linguistics and/or discourse analysis in their work. Most often it means they are using something other than a traditional grammatical approach, or that they are borrowing concepts from the other disciplines. Such work can be a real boon to research; it has absolutely revolutionized my work as a scholar. But there is a much-overlooked downside to adopting approaches foreign to your native field. Some fields lend themselves well to quick adoption, such as literary or rhetorical studies. To be sure, Koine Greek has its idiosyncrasies; but Greek literature has done much to influence Western ideas about literature and argumentation. In other words, we often have sufficient background from English to readily understand the basic ground rules  from a secondary field.1 Other fields are not so forgiving.

I did some preliminary reading into social-scientific approaches to understanding NT cultural backgrounds last summer, and was rather surprised at how simply some matters were handled. Authors seemed to have little awareness that the first century setting was more milieu than monolithic. Some acted as though shame/honor considerations outweighed all others, rather than forming one of several influences. There was little effort to weigh conflicting values; matters were all black and white. Markus Bockmuehl‘s comments from a review confirmed some red flags I saw:

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.2

What was the problem? Although the volume provided useful information about the issues, it lacked the sophistication needed to help the reader appropriately apply the principles. I realize this sounds a little snotty, the very kind of thing that I detest about academia. However, if some claim will lead you astray because it is underdeveloped or simplistic, there is indeed room for critique. I have learned over the years that most of the academic hallmarks (like harsh critiques) play an important role, so long as they are executed properly. There are indeed snotty reviews that do little to advance our understanding.

Increasingly I am seeing people wanting to go off and explore new territory, but often they are ill-equipped to do so. This is my sense with Porter’s work. He sought to disprove the presence of tense in Greek, and to develop a framework that understood verbal aspect as conveying prominence essentially as a semantic property. This is exactly what he did in Verbal Aspect, and more recently he has expanded the application of this prominence model to areas besides the verb. But my blog posts have questioned his understanding of concepts that are foundational to his model. These include markedness, grounding and prominence.

Another academic hallmark–peer review–is supposed to safeguard against the kinds of problems I raised in my paper about Porter’s methodology. In other words, if there had been linguists involved in the reviews, his misunderstanding of these concepts would have been challenged (and ideally corrected) much earlier. Peer review assumes that while one person may err, having a second or third pair of eyes coming at it from a different perspective should bring to light problems that need to be addressed. While this works in theory, there are problems in practice. If none of the reviewers were qualified linguists who were experts in the relevant secondary literature, then flaws in this area are much less likely to be caught.

Interdisciplinary study is a mixed blessing. It can be a great help, but it can also be your undoing. If you have not gone far enough into the secondary field to gain the needed competence, you open yourself to catastrophe. Even if people accept your ideas in the short run, they will not stand the test of time if they are ill-formed.

  1. This is not to say that literary or rhetorical approaches cannot be abused, just to say it is less likely than other more technical fields. [↩]
  2. Marcus 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 (2002). [↩]