Thanks for the link. Witetschek says "DeConick’s approach is an instance of a relatively new paradigm for assessing intertextual relationships that might help scholars avoid some 'dead ends' into which a purely literary paradigm sometimes leads—although at times the recourse to orality looks a bit like an escape."
Thanks for this comment. The reason why orality is spoken about by scholars in these types of negative terms is that our field by and in large remains in the dark about it. What graduate program teaches its biblical students about orality? We are so oriented to literate models - dare I say "colonized"(?!) - that we cannot see the forest for the trees. And if we venture outside the box, oh my gosh, the challenges to the literate models leave us in shreds. Our certainties are no longer certain. Source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism just do not work! They don't tell us what we thought they did. It is the job of my generation of scholars, and those we are teaching to reform our models and figure out what this means to our certainties.
I just read your book review from the RBL email last night. Very even-handed, neither gushing nor shredding, which makes it more reliable and trustworthy as far as I'm concerned.
Innovation is exceedingly rare in most scholarly fields, especially this one, and I appreciate your attempt to incorporate such a potentially game-changing source as orality.
3 comments:
Thanks for the link. Witetschek says "DeConick’s approach is an instance of a relatively new paradigm for assessing intertextual relationships that might help scholars avoid some 'dead ends' into which a purely literary paradigm sometimes leads—although at times the recourse to orality looks a bit like an escape."
That's reason enough for me. But seems there are also many many good reasons to read The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation: With a Commentary and New English Translation of the Complete Gospel (with Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas: A History of the Gospel And Its Growth too).
Thanks for this comment. The reason why orality is spoken about by scholars in these types of negative terms is that our field by and in large remains in the dark about it. What graduate program teaches its biblical students about orality? We are so oriented to literate models - dare I say "colonized"(?!) - that we cannot see the forest for the trees. And if we venture outside the box, oh my gosh, the challenges to the literate models leave us in shreds. Our certainties are no longer certain. Source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism just do not work! They don't tell us what we thought they did. It is the job of my generation of scholars, and those we are teaching to reform our models and figure out what this means to our certainties.
I just read your book review from the RBL email last night. Very even-handed, neither gushing nor shredding, which makes it more reliable and trustworthy as far as I'm concerned.
Innovation is exceedingly rare in most scholarly fields, especially this one, and I appreciate your attempt to incorporate such a potentially game-changing source as orality.
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