The SBL national conference was massive. Held jointly with the AAR (the American Association of Religion) it occupied the entirety of the enormous Denver Convention Center and seven hotels, each with multiple floors filled with massive ballrooms the size of small cities partitioned into hundreds of lecture halls. I don’t know what they were all used for. But at any given twenty minute interval, from 9am to 6pm, some fifty talks were being given simultaneously across all those venues, for just the SBL alone, running about fifty concurrent panels every two hours. In addition to a gigantic exhibitor hall, organizational meetings, and all the other usual hullabaloo at large professional and academic conferences.

This continued all day, every day, from Saturday through Tuesday. Seriously. I had to leave Monday afternoon. But I noticed they put all the weakest or least interesting talks from then on. I guess they assumed most folks bug out then. Even so, the days I did attend I had to grieve over missing dozens of talks I so wanted to see but couldn’t, simply because of conflicting presentation times. I had to force rank the options and hope I chose the best. I can here only discuss the ones I could get to.

My participation Friday in the Westar Seminar I blogged about yesterday. Today I’ll start surveying what I sat in on and heard throughout the rest of the conference.

First, the Burridge Panel

Richard Burridge famously wrote What Are the Gospels decades ago, which is now in its latest, extensively updated, 25th anniversary edition. Christians will often cite it as proving the Gospels are biographies. What they don’t realize is (because they rarely actually read the book), Burridge didn’t say this meant they were histories. He fully acknowledged many ancient biographies were entirely mythical, and indeed were often enough about totally non-existent people. This is why identifying the genre of the Gospels is almost useless for the question of historicity (see my discussion in Ch. 10.1-3 of On the Historicity of Jesus). And indeed, in his newest edition he concedes even more, that in fact the Gospels represent a mixed genre, not a single genre. As other scholars had convincingly proved since his original publication.

This panel honored this achievement and the publication of the new edition by inviting Burridge to respond to four papers presented by scholars with their reflections on his thesis in respect to each of the four Gospels. I couldn’t miss this!

On the Gospel according to Mark

On Mark, Helen Bond of the University of Edinburgh made a thorough case for genre mixing in the Synoptics, ultimately confirming many points I made in On the Historicity of Jesus, backed by numerous other scholars I cited there on the point.

For example, Bond demonstrated Mark followed the commonplace model in ancient biographical writing (even of fictional persons, and in fiction about real persons) of using a series of loosely connected “chreiai” (a method of constructing anecdotes taught in ancient schools) illustrating the central figure’s character, especially as an example to teach by or emulate, and to serve as a model for a group identity, establishing, as Bond put it, “this is how we live, and this is how we die” (see OHJ, p. 397; thus verifying my point that the Gospel Jesus is a shibboleth).

Bond also demonstrated much of the literary construction of Mark used existing models and techniques for writing the lives of heroes and sages, which we well know are often highly fictive—from the biographies of Homer and Moses, who almost certainly never existed, to the biographies of real philosophers that contain almost entirely fabricated content (see the bibliography of scholarship establishing this in the footnote on p. 219 of OHJ).

This reinforced the conclusion that Mark is not collecting oral lore. He is constructing a literary work, start to finish. To serve a purpose. I demonstrate this even more thoroughly in OHJ, Ch. 10.4.

On the Gospel according to Matthew

On Matthew, Elizabeth Shively of the University of St. Andrews showed how new cognitive models for understanding genre affect Burridge’s thesis. In particular, understanding how ancient readers understood and responded to certain models and genres is crucial to understanding the significance of genre and genre mixing. She demonstrated that Mark blended multiple genres and models, and that many other ancient authors did that, so it wasn’t unique.

Shively thus questioned the “family resemblance theory” of Burridge by pointing out its criteria are often too vague or insufficiently unique to any genre, and the method is incapable of identifying mixed-genre texts. She proposes “prototype theory” instead, in which we ask how much does a text match a certain prototype that would be cognitively recognizable to an ancient reader. She then presented examples of applying that using “conceptual blending theory.”

The ancient method of genre mixing could often make a text look unique; when really its a common method, that simply gets deployed a dozen different ways. If you don’t recognize what’s being done, you can mistake a text as having a unique genre, when really what you are seeing is not unique at all: a blended genre. And blended genres had functions of their own. She concludes the “genre structure” of Mark is more important than the “genre” of Mark, as much in ancient minds as now.

Applying this method, Shively showed quite convincingly that Mark employed this common procedure in order to frame his “kerygma,” the things Mark wanted to teach or preach to his readers. Every scene is all about that, more so than about Jesus even, who is merely a convenient avatar for the real purpose of the text. And this goal is accomplished specifically by mixing and emulation.

To understand the logic of the process, Shively asked, think of the phrase “that surgeon is a butcher!” We understand it by the juxtaposition of mixed concepts: the “generic space” we understand to be “an agent” and “a subject of their actions” (so we can look at the generic skeleton of what a Gospel is: a narrative of some dude walking around saying and doing things). Then the first input plugs into this generic structure “surgeon” and “patient” respectively; the second input plugs in “butcher” and “animal”; and the blend crosses genres to give us the combined result of “surgeon as butcher” with respect to their “patient.” Notice if we reversed the mixing, and said “that butcher is a surgeon,” the implication is exactly reversed, but we still get it because we understand the cognitive content of the different parts being blended and how they are being blended. Thus we know a “butcher” is only bad in the context of treating patients; yet “good” in the context of processing meat; yet “surgeon” always connotes excellence (precision) in either domain.

For Mark and Matthew, Shively points out the “generic space” is actually universal for all narratives: there is always a teller, audience, occasion, purpose, situation or subject, and setting, structure, mode, literary features, and topics and motifs. Mark and Matthew then use several different “inputs” in these categories to blend their genre: first, the models and techniques of Greek biography (e.g. bioi of Aesop, Homer, Romulus, Theseus, the Seven Sages); second, the models and techniques of Jewish historical narratives (e.g. Deuteronomy; Tobit; the Elijah-Elisha cycle in the Kings literature; etc.); and third, the models and techniques of apocalypse (e.g. Daniel; Enoch; sections of Jeremiah). The blended result perfectly describes and explains the entire structure and content of Mark and Matthew, and how it would have been understood to ancient readers, and thus how its author intended it to be read.

On the Gospel according to Luke

On Luke, Craig Keener of Asbury Theological Seminary (yes, the famous and kooky “I believe in demons and magic” Evangelical apologist) explored whether Acts is a biography or something else, and how then it fits with Luke if Luke is a biography.

Keener was an affable and humorous guy and always erudite. But he tried too hard to push apologetic agendas into his talk. His thesis was basically that Acts is an ancient “historical monograph” but the distinctions that entails are not consistently “clear-cut or very significant.” Which is really what we call a “non conclusion.” “It’s a historical monograph…if you ignore all the ways it isn’t, and don’t conclude anything from it being so.” His talk was a perfect example of the kind of confused go-nowhere thinking Shiveley’s method was designed to fix. He’d have done better to apply her method. He’d have gotten more useful results. Acts is clearly another blended genre. A form of literature increasingly common in the Roman period, precisely when Acts was composed. All of which Keener did, however, acknowledge.

Keener also rightly noted that Acts has several identifiable themes: but especially, comparisons of Jesus with Peter and then Paul; and the spread of the gospel across the Empire “from Jerusalem to Rome” (by way of the Aegean; curiously skipping any account of Egypt or North Africa). It’s really a long type-narrative of loosely connected chreiai once again, this time depicting how Christians behave and are unfairly treated by Jews and then fairly treated by Romans, using focus on Peter and then Paul as the central models. Hence instead of Acts being actually just a historical narrative that explains events and developments as a causal sequence, it’s really just another series of anecdotes meant to illustrate character models for the readers to follow.

Keener tried still to push the idea that Acts nevertheless does all this by relying on prior information (hypothetical “sources”). But his talk contained no evidence supporting that conclusion. We could just as soon claim the many other bogus Acts had “sources” (like the Acts of Paul, the Acts of John, the Acts of Peter, and so on), when obviously they didn’t. They are fictions, passed off as truths, for the edification of readers through the presentation of character models and reification of the desired kerygma. The Acts of the New Testament is no more likely to differ.

On the Gospel according to John

On John, Paul Anderson of George Fox University tried to argue for more historicity in John than most experts deem plausible. He started with the weird argument that there is no evidence for source material behind John (except there is: his obvious use of Mark and Luke for example, now recognized by all leading experts on John), therefore John likely presents an independent tradition going back to a real Jesus. Which is a non sequitur. More particularly, a Fallacy of the Excluded Middle: Anderson left out the third option, which is vastly more common in the total history of Christian narrative writing: John contains unique content because he is making stuff up.

It seemed to me that Anderson was confusing the independent creativity specifically taught in the Greek rhetorical schools that the author of John had to have attended to compose as he did, with evidence “against” John’s use of Mark or Luke, but that’s exactly the contrary of everything we know about the way ancient authors were taught to rewrite and respond to sources. In any event, Anderson presented no organized argument against the more commonly agreed conclusion in the field, that John is rewriting Mark and Luke. All he had was “John rewrote it with his own words and structure,” but that’s how ancient authors commonly used or responded to sources. It therefore cannot be evidence against their doing so.

Nevertheless, Anderson admitted pegging John as “biography” does not entail historicity. As biography in antiquity was often fictional or fabricated. He also urged that scholars stop seeking “certainty” in conclusions about the Gospel, and adopt the methods employed in other fields of history. Amen. But alas, he gave no examples of what he has in mind. Perhaps a plug of his recent (I think BAR?) article was meant to be an example, trying to demonstrate that “John’s empiricism” (i.e. his use of archaeological and regional details) is evidence of historicity for the stories employing them. But that’s another non sequitur. Any fiction can employ such details and dress stories around those details for verisimilitude and enhanced messaging. It therefore cannot be evidence that’s not what’s being done.

Anderson gave what may have been meant to be another example, an argument from memory studies, that memories can be recorded and transmitted non-verbatim, therefore non-verbatim parallels with other traditions (like, say, ta-da, Mark and Luke!) is evidence of historical truth. But that’s yet another non sequitur. Myth, fiction, and legendary development also exhibit nonverbatim transmission and emulation. Indeed, ancient students were specifically taught and encouraged to do that. So “nonverbatim” parallels with other texts can never itself be evidence for historicity.

Anderson is famous for trying to rehabilitate John as a reliable source for Jesus. But all I’ve seen from him so far is wildly fallacious reasoning like this.

Burridge’s Reply

Burridge basically agreed with Bond and Shively and Keener (he didn’t comment much on Anderson). But he did close with an interesting remark: that the lesson of his case, the reception of his then-controversial thesis that the Gospels were “biography” in a broad sense (once the correct sense was understood), shows that consensus takes “twenty to thirty years” to change, and is thus like a gigantic ship, you have to “start turning the wheel earlier” before seeing much change. Basically, it all starts with one study challenging the party line. Then takes decades to sway the remainder. Interesting.

Burridge also included a groovy nugget: as the role of ancient biographies was to teach things through the example of the central figure, and the secondary characters exist and act only as foils for that purpose, we can conclude from the very method of cognitive modeling Shively defended that when the disciples are portrayed as stupid and fickle in the Gospels, this was not even meant by the author as a comment on the disciples; it is, rather, a comment on Jesus: that following and understanding his teachings “is hard.” Everything in the Gospels is written for the purpose of explicating the “model Jesus” and his teachings. And therefore everything in the Gospels must be understood in light of that purpose. Nothing is in there just “by accident” or merely for amusement or any other aim.

Second, Synagogues

Next I attended a panel on Palestinian synagogues in the time of Jesus. I often hear people claiming there is no evidence there were such things, and I’ve always found that claim dubious. So I wanted to see what the latest scholarship said on the matter. I found the evidence presented in this panel for there being many synagogues in Palestine in the time of Jesus overwhelming. I really can’t fathom where the claim came from that doubted it.

In the middle, I skipped one talk about “the aims of Jesus” in using synagogues (because that’s like arguing whether Darth Vader’s stateroom on the Death Star had a bowl of candies in it) so I could run across the convention center to catch another talk in a completely different panel, with the must-see title “Hebrews and Cosmology.” That was a bust. As the talk didn’t discuss cosmology in Hebrews at all. It just pushed a lame apologetic argument for the resurrection of the flesh from a strained reading of Hebrews 1 and 9.

The Synagogues panel was very useful, because it was so definitive. Chaired by James Crossley, it included most especially a lead presentation by Jodi Magness. Magness is a noted biblical archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her slideshow and discussion of archaeological and literary evidence for early synagogues was a tour de force. She basically nuked any suggestion there weren’t such things.

And I mean even apart from the fact that, as Magness explained, “synagogue” just means a gathering place (“congregation”), and thus could be anywhere, from a tent to a wicker porch or wood building, even just a park or open space, none of which would leave archaeological evidence. It simply meant anywhere you could read the Torah as a group. Building in stone was a privilege of the rich; most homes and structures (from markets to barns to anything else) and thus most synagogues in Palestine would not have been made of the stuff. So the argument from silence is a non starter. But we also have excavated structures from the era in stone; and probably have done so far more than we think, since structures for meetings weren’t always labeled as such, in any way we’d still be able to detect today. So there is no way to say some excavated hall “wasn’t” a synagogue.

But on top of that point, Magness showed images and research on a famous synagogue in Jerusalem dating before the Jewish War, which had a dedication inscription declaring Theodotus “the Archi-Synagogos,” Synagogue President, built it “for the reading of the Torah.” The inscription even places him in a long line of previous “Archisynagogoi,” thus proving synagogues had been a going thing in Jerusalem for many generations by then. And this was a Synagogue for Hellenists; if even they had one in Jerusalem, the locals surely would have as well, likely many. Magness showed examples of pre-war stone synagogue structures excavated in Caesarea, Sepphoris, Masada, Gamla, Migdala, Herodium, Messana, and beyond. She also surveyed literary mentions of early Synagogues in the Diaspora (e.g. Philo discusses them).

I consider that case now closed.

Third, Jesus in Hebrews

The Hebrews talk could merit a whole article, but I’ll just be brief here. Presented by David Moffitt of the University of St. Andrews, it was really just a Christian apologetical argument for the resurrection of Jesus in the flesh. Never mind that Paul outright declares Jesus did not rise in the flesh and that no resurrected body could have been made of flesh.

Moffitt’s talk, despite being labeled “Hebrews and Cosmology,” didn’t really cover cosmology; it barely covered angelology. It mainly just tried to argue that because Hebrews 9 says Jesus carried his blood up to the celestial temple in the heavens, that therefore Jesus must have ascended in his (apparently blood-drenched) body of flesh. But Hebrews doesn’t say that. It never says Jesus took his blood up there; it says he gained entry there “by” his blood, and explains this means by submitting to death below (e.g. Hebrews 9:12: “he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood“). His sacrifice, shedding of blood, empowered his ascent. It makes no mention of his having to bring his blood with him—though even if he did, he could do that in his new, celestial body, carrying blood from his abandoned corpse (to, I suppose, activate the magic of the celestial altar stone?).

Indeed every time Moffitt’s intended parallel was the natural parallel to make, the author of Hebrews conspicuously avoids it. For example, Hebrews 9:25 says Jesus did not “enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own.” The natural parallel to have made here is to say Jesus entered heaven with his own blood. Yet Hebrews drops the point and never says such a thing. It switches instead to the power of his sacrifice; never getting around to saying that Jesus brought his own blood into heaven (and “that’s why his blood worked” or whatever). Several times in Hebrews 9 there is an opportunity to complete this parallel; every single time, the author failed to do so. They instead repeat the same switcharoo: priests drop blood on the earthly alter; but Jesus entered heaven by shedding blood below it.

Moffitt also tried to argue Jesus could not have been an angel, because Hebrews 1 says Jesus was better than all the angels (and lists all the ways he is so); but that’s simply describing what we mean by an exalted arch-angel. That’s still an angel, in our parlance. The argument of Hebrews is not that Jesus wasn’t any kind of angel. But that no other angel received his exalted roles and status. As Hebrews 2 makes clear. Likewise Hebrews 3, which argues Jesus was better than Moses: that in no way meant Jesus wasn’t, like Moses, for a time human. And these same chapters make clear Jesus was only human for a short time, and always past tense. So there is no sense in which the author of Hebrews imagined Jesus remaining a human at the right hand of God. Jesus’s status is that of the supreme archangel. Not a soul wearing flesh.

These chapters appear to be responding to some rising practice of worshiping other angels or elevating the revelations of angels to the status of doctrine (the same heresy Paul is combating in Galatians 1:6-12, Galatians 4, and so on), and perhaps elevating Moses to the status of Christ (as we know some Jews did), rather than centering everything on the most exalted of God’s angels, Jesus Christ. As a good Christian ought.

That’s why we see Paul saying Jesus was an angel in Galatians 4:14. And why Jesus is in all earliest literature, including Hebrews, pre-existent. Which means he has to be an angel; no “mortal” lived since the dawn of time, and Hebrews clearly states Jesus only assumed flesh later. So what was he before that? A ghost? This is also why Jesus is described everywhere by Paul, and Hebrews, in identical terms to the supreme “archangel” described by Philo (the high priest of God’s celestial temple, agent of creation, image of God, and so on: OHJ, Ch. 5, Element 40). And why Paul repeatedly says Jesus abandoned his mortal body of flesh upon his death and assumed the pneumatic body of celestial beings, because “flesh and blood cannot inherit” eternal life (1 Cor. 15:50; cf. 1 Cor. 15:35-54).

There is no way to get any other conclusion out of Hebrews.

In all, this was just bad apologetics, and nothing I’d call useful scholarship.

Fourth, Textual History of the Gospel of Luke

The last panel I could catch on Saturday was on the textual history of the Gospel of Luke. This turned out to be boring as hell and totally useless. All dull speculation, no conclusive findings, not even any interesting hypotheses.

One guy tried arguing several interpolations in Luke from John were authentically in Luke, but his evidence was weak and his argument too confused even to diagram. People were falling asleep.

Another guy argued that textual critics need to pay more attention to literary analysis in deciding among variants, and literary analysts need to pay more attention to variants in textual criticism, which was so 101-obvious I was surprised it needed to be said (though apparently it did). Although I do think he wanted to use this as an apologetical tool to bypass sound conclusions in textual criticism, he left no meaty claims to analyze on that score. But this does fit a trend I have observed where Christians love to talk up neglected methods in the pursuit of wanting to then abuse those methods (remember when Bayes’ Theorem was suddenly popular in Christian apologetics and then just as quickly abandoned when their abuses of it were exposed?).

And finally, a talk on Marcion’s Gospel that only listed some examples where the modern critical apparatus might not accurately convey what variants surviving excerpts of Marcion’s text do or don’t support, but since everyone agrees Marcion doctored up his text of Luke, I don’t find that of much startling importance. Perhaps he can persuade some corrections in a future edition. But still, this was deeply trivial.

I should have gone to a different panel. There were a few others I had my eye on in that slot, including discussions of the meaning of Paul’s phrase “super apostles,” Acts’ depicting of the Pharisees, comparative scribal practices (including discussion of observed scribal corrections to Biblical manuscripts and comparison with scribal practices in producing texts of Homer and among the Dead Sea Scrolls), late antique demonology, literary readings of Gospel pericopes (including intertextual layering in the structure of Matthew, use of the OT in constructing the tale of the Syrophoenician woman, and the role of the name “Saul” for Paul in Acts). Any of those might have been better.

Alas, like the villain in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I chose poorly.

Conclusion

So the Luke panel was a bust. The Hebrews talk was lame. The Synagogues panel was useful. And the Burridge panel was educational and greatly increased clarity on the genre issue with respect to the Gospels. I’ll cover the rest of the conference in a following article. Part 3 includes stuff on the Canon, Goodacre on the Synoptic Problem, weird things in Paul’s Epistles, and more.