Loading...The most obvious activity that professional scholars engage in is research, and the most obvious way research becomes known to a wider public is through publication. In some fields of inquiry (most of the sciences), the academic journal is the principal area of significant publication. In other fields (most of the humanities), academic books matter even more. But even in the humanities scholar typically publish in both venues. Books take a lot longer to write, but articles play an extremely important role both in disseminating knowledge – the results of research – and in providing grounds for a scholar’s academic tenure and promotion.
The articles that scholars write – when they are writing as research scholars – are not the sort of thing that you would find in Time Magazine or Newsweek. Every field has its own set of academic, peer-reviewed journals (there are a large number in biblical studies in the U.S. and Europe); and every scholar who is active in his or her field or research publishes in them. These are not journals that lay people would want to read or, in most cases, be able to understand. (Just as I myself would not understand the articles that appear in academic journals in unrelated fields – biology, anthropology, or philosophy, e.g.) They are, as a rule, highly technical venues of publication in which authors presuppose a great deal of background knowledge. This is not only true of the hard sciences, but of all fields. It is true in the fields of Biblical Studies and of Early Christian History. Among other things, these journals presuppose that their readers can handle the ancient languages about which scholarship is concerned (Greek, Hebrew, Latin, etc.).
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Bart, I have a question regarding when you and a fellow graduate student tired to mount a new argument that Luke 22:43-44 was not originally found in the gospel of Luke, but added later by scribes in the second century.
If Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus are the earliest copies of the new testament and dated from the 4th century, how would you have argued the verse from Luke was written two centuries earlier?
I’ve read that Papyrus P52 is the earliest fragment from a gospel, dating back to the second century, but it’s only the size of a credit card. Did you have much luck with your argument?
Ah great question! The answer: even though our earliest manuscripts sometimes date from the fourth century (this passage is found, actually, in two earlier papyri: P66 and P75, from around 200 CE), we can often date textual variants by a different means: quotations of the NT in the church fathers. This particular passage is referred to explicitly by Justin (around 150 CE), Irenaeus (180 CE) and Hippolytus (190 CE). I think I’ll address this question more fully in a separate blog.
Thanks! The more I think I know, the more it becomes obvious that I know less than 1% of 1% of what you know. Which is what I would expect with from an expert. Very interesting reading The works of a professional Scholar. I would never have guessed it was so intense. Really a lifetime spent studying.
I have however, ordered a copy of Didymus the Blind and the text of the Gospels, so that If I meet you again at a lecture, I’ll be able to say I’ve read your first book 🙂
Wow. OK, good luck with Didymus!!
The amount of scholarship on the NT in journals and books has been immense and has gone through many stages and directions, especially since the Enlightenment. One wonders if there is an interpretation of a biblical text that has not been suggested already or if there is a apporach one can take to study the NT that has not already been taken, given what has been done already (most of which is only read or known by the scholars!). As one of the major leaders in NT/early Christianity, what do you think will be the direction of research NT scholars and students will be taking, say, 30-50 years from now? Will we run out of new approaches? Where can NT studies go from here?
I”m not sure where biblical studies will go from here — but I *am* sure it will go somewhere. No one can predict these things. But the reality is that there are some VERY smart people out there being trained in the field, and they will certainly want to take it in new and interesting directions, eventually leaving us dinosaurs in the dust! The trick for someone at my stage is staying ahead of the curve, and it gets harder and harder! Eventually most senior scholars end up just giving up. A very sad thing….
I’ve often wondered if scholars ever have their entry dissertation refuted within their own lifetimes – and if any scholar could end up, at some stage in his career, ever refuting his own dissertation?
I mean, obviously the ideal is to follow the evidence no matter where it leads, but as someone with so much invested in one’s own field of expertise, it must be eithe terribly unlikely, or terribly difficult if that ever happened!
I guess as a corollary, it could be somewhat interesting to look at how long it takes for important understandings to be overturned by new evidence. It might give a metric showing the “liveliness” of the discipline generally, over time. After all, some people’s dissertations would eventually make it into “canonical” knowledge, only to be overturned by new evidence, and so on. Sorry, I’m not explaining myself very well, am I?
Oh yes, dissertations are treated like other books (assuming they are published): they are subject to rigorous scrutiny, often by people who have different views. And often later in one’s career the earlier work looks altogether inadequate….
I would be very interested in knowing what books were included Didymus the Blind’s Canon, and maybe some of the other Canon’s that could have been. I have wondered for a long time about what other possible Table of Contents might have looked like.
He didn’t make a canon list, so we don’t know for certain. But he treats several non-canonical books as canonical authorities, including, for example, the letter of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas.