The New Testament in Comparison

Validity, Method, and Purpose in Comparing Traditions

John M.G. Barclay, B.G. White, John M.G. Barclay, B.G. White, Benjamin G. White, John M.G. Barclay, Benjamin G. White

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780567702159
• eBook ISBN: 9780567684813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The nine essays in this volume, written by leading international scholars in New Testament studies, examine in new depth the method of comparison so frequently deployed in the study of the New Testament. They raise and reflect on deep questions on the possibility and validity of such comparative exercise, on the methods that are most effective and intellectually defensible, on the purpose of such comparison, and on the perils and pitfalls in such exercises. Addressing these questions at both a theoretical, hermeneutical level, and through case-studies of actual examples, the book provides a much needed and up-to-date methodological resource for the numerous comparative projects spawned by New Testament studies throughout the world.

1

Introduction

Posing the Questions

John M. G. Barclay and B. G. White

To put ancient texts into comparison is not only a historical but also a hermeneutical procedure. Comparison seeks to elucidate the meaning of a text by placing it into a comparative frame with other texts or traditions: that act, and the means by which it is performed, is clearly a scholarly act of interpretation. Despite this, and notwithstanding the frequency with which New Testament scholars undertake such comparisons, it is surprising how rarely we have reflected on this procedure, its aims, methods and indeed its possibility. There have been surveys of scholarly projects of comparison, and a famous critique of ‘parallelomania’, but examples of deeper reflection on method and on the intellectual basis of the comparative procedure are few and far between.¹ The most important theoretical interventions on this topic have been provided by Jonathan Z. Smith, whose critical rigour and broad expertise in the comparative study of religion helped to expose weaknesses in some scholarship on the New Testament and early Christianity.² In fact, Smith performed a significant role in conceptualizing the task of ‘comparative religion’ at a time when its methods and, indeed, its legitimacy were brought into question – and with it, the legitimacy of ‘Religious Studies’ and ‘the Anthropology of Religion’. Smith’s initial stance was primarily critical of comparisons, questioning their often one-sided search for similarities and the quest for ‘universal archetypes’ in the work of Mircea Eliade and others. His balancing emphasis on difference, and his insistence that the comparative act is a scholarly construction, were soon subsumed within the postmodern storm that challenged the very notion of ‘comparative religion’ and the whole intellectual structure of anthropology. Within this larger critique, comparison now appeared both intellectually suspect, since it abstracts features of culture from their irreducibly particular context, and politically unacceptable, since it overwrites ‘native’ cultures by the imposition of Western hegemonic categories. In response, Smith came to soften his critique of comparativism, and to offer some constructive rules for its operation, and he thus became the guru for a chastened ‘new comparativism’ in the study of religion.³ In this ‘reconstructed’ comparativism, both the possibility and the legitimacy of comparison are strongly asserted, though with careful attention to the particularity of each item compared, with full recognition of the scholarly artifice involved, and with openness to self-critical reflection and constant ‘rectification’.⁴ Moreover, whatever comparisons now take place, they are accompanied by alertness to the ‘hybridization’ of religious traditions, to the ways that modern selves (both objects and agents of comparison) are ‘multiply situated’, and to the moral significance of comparison at a time when friction between sometimes solipsistic traditions encourages the search for some process that enables communication and mutual understanding.

The exercise whereby New Testament scholars place their texts into comparison with others thus sits within a context of lively intellectual debate, from which we could and should learn much. It seems all too easy to perform comparisons, and alarmingly difficult to perform them well. The mere juxtaposition of texts or traditions can result in little or no illumination. The items to compare can be poorly chosen (being too different to make comparison fruitful), or the comparison can be one-sidedly weighted towards either similarity or difference, in a way that makes the results unbalanced. Comparison can be superficial or trivial, or can abstract individual motifs so far from their context as to render the comparison misleading. It can be conducted without any clear aim (and therefore clear result), or it can be governed by an apologetic or polemical agenda such that the results are determined from the beginning. The categories used in comparison can be culturally over-determined, while loaded claims to ‘uniqueness’ can mask hidden value judgements about the superiority of the tradition so acclaimed.⁵ The potential pitfalls are many. But if there is one theme that has emerged most strongly in the discussion of comparison in the last few decades, it is that any properly disciplined (as opposed to merely instinctive) comparison is, and should be recognized as, a scholarly construct, about which we should be highly self-conscious. In the much-cited words of Jonathan Smith: ‘In the study of religion, as in any disciplined inquiry, comparison, in its strongest form, brings differences together within the space of the scholar’s mind for the scholar’s own intellectual reasons.’⁶

In this creative act, which Smith calls elsewhere ‘a methodical manipulation of difference’,⁷ at least the following five challenges face the scholar at the outset of the enterprise:⁸

1.Choosing what to compare. The two (or more) phenomena placed into comparison clearly have to be similar enough to make comparison possible, and different enough to make it interesting, but it is not always easy to judge how these two criteria should be measured, and how they should be balanced. Comparisons that seem over-weighted by similarity or by difference are generally less satisfactory than those that give full weight to both. Comparisons that search for genealogy (e.g. the sources of ideas) obviously need to establish a historical relationship between the two phenomena, but it is widely recognized that an analogical comparison is equally valid, and is not bound by this historical criterion. Thus, for instance, one may usefully compare the letters of Paul with texts with which Paul has no genealogical relation and which post-date his life, provided that these texts have enough in common to justify their comparison.

2.Selecting for the purpose of comparison. Any comparison is partial: it is hardly possible or even useful to compare complete wholes with complete wholes. As Poole writes, ‘Comparison does not deal with phenomena in toto or in the round, but only with an aspectual characteristic of them. Analytical control over the framework of comparison involves theoretically focused selection of significant aspects of the phenomena.’⁹ But there are clearly dangers here: one may select something relatively trivial, or only superficially similar in the two phenomena, or far more important in one of them than in the other. The necessary selection is in itself a dangerous exercise, if it leaves the larger contexts out of consideration: there is, it seems, an important dialectic between focused selection and the larger, contextual horizon of the items selected.

3.Categorizing the items compared. To put two items into comparison requires placing them together within a common category or frame, and this third action is necessarily an intellectual, scholarly construct. Baptism and circumcision might be analysed and compared as ‘initiation rites’, but whence comes that scholarly category ‘rites’, and what intellectual baggage does it bring? Some categories are so familiar that we hardly notice that they are loaded with historical and philosophical assumptions: culture, gender, person, politics, art and, of course, religion. Within ‘religion’, we have created all kinds of categories that might, or might not, mislead: mysticism, sacrifice, rite, myth, magic, the numinous, the sacred and, not least, ‘God/god’. It is impossible to operate without some such analytical tools; the danger is that their intellectual heritage might obscure or alter the meaning of the phenomena being considered.¹⁰ The fraught relationship between Western rationalism and religion makes this danger particularly acute, but the problem is inescapable. Anachronistic labels can be helpful, or hugely problematic, but deciding which is which is a judgement call.¹¹ The use of a category that is not native to the item being discussed is a sign of our scholarly control over the discussion, and no analysis can avoid the use of such power. To decide where this power enables the text to speak well, and where it overpowers or distorts the text will always be a matter of scholarly judgement.

4.Determining the purpose of the comparison. Every comparison has an agenda, and openness and self-consciousness about that agenda is always better than the opposite. Some comparisons are designed to illuminate only one of the comparanda, others to illuminate both, but in either case it is best to articulate the purpose of the illumination and to be self-critical in that articulation, lest the whole exercise be determined by an anticipated result. Implicit bias can take many forms – cultural, moral and religious – and it is always worth asking how one’s own interests might shape the results.

5.Measuring degrees of similarity or difference. If no two cultural or religious items are completely similar, some may certainly be more similar than others. It is difficult, however, to give a generalized, ‘overall’ measure of such things, and it may be misleading to do so. X may be more like Y than it is like Z in certain respects, but there may well be other respects in which it is more like Z. Similarity and difference is always ‘in respect of’ something, and bringing a third phenomenon into the picture helps to show where similarities and differences are most striking. It is, however, another matter to judge how to weight the significance of the varying points of similarity and difference. Luke may be more like Mark than it is like John in many respects, but not in respect of their resurrection narratives. Is that significant? Significant to whom or for what purpose? In historical terms? In theological terms? The more we are clear about how and why we make such judgements the better. Blanket statements about the ‘distinctiveness’ of a collection of texts are generally based on a judgement that weighs what they have in common with one another as more significant than what differentiates them, and then places their differences from other texts above their points of similarity with them. It is good to be aware of that, and to be ready to defend decisions of this kind.

At all of these points there are scholarly choices to be made, scholarly purposes to be examined and explained, and scholarly constructions at play. Comparison, we might say, is a hermeneutical art, at least as much an ‘invention’ as a ‘discovery’. Of course,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Translations
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Posing the Questions John M. G. Barclay and B. G. White
• 2 ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us!’: Method and Purpose in Comparing the New Testament John M. G. Barclay
• 3 Making Friends and Comparing Lives C. Kavin Rowe
• 4 The Past is a Foreign Country: On the Shape and Purposes of Comparison in New Testament Scholarship Troels Engberg-Pedersen
• 5 The Possibility of Comparison, the Necessity of Anachronism and the Dangers of Purity Dale B. Martin
• 6 Beyond Compare, or: Some Recent Strategies for Not Comparing Early Christianity with Other Things Matthew V. Novenson
• 7 On Comparing, and Calling the Question Margaret M. Mitchell
• 8 A Response to Friend-Critics C. Kavin Rowe
• 9 Relational Hermeneutics and Comparison as Conversation Jonathan A. Linebaugh
• 10 Comparing Like with Like?: The New Testament in Its Christian Literary Environment Francis Watson
• 11 Resemblance and Relation: Comparing the Gospels of Mark, John and Thomas Simon Gathercole
• Bibliography
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Copyright