Bill Heroman

Current Project:

2025-12-01T12:00:00.000-06:00

publication date: tba

Remembering Timelines

& Storylines

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Memory Science for Event Sequence

Why human brains prefer narrative distortions

over detailed chronologies, and how we can leverage

the one towards preserving the other

Exploratory. Multidisciplinary. Monograph.

this project asks the following questions

How can we optimize memory for a timeline, without rote memorization or narrativization?

When chronology does cohere in our memories, does it merely resemble a “story” or is there a more precise cognitive dynamic at work?

How does each type of “Temporal Information” facilitate and distort memory in unique ways?

Event memories that indicate their own temporal sequence (e.g., details featuring causality, movement, location, disruption, and familiar time patterns) accommodate constructive retrieval.

This promising research may support new scaffolding strategies for composition, hermeneutics, pedagogy, and public discourse.

Publication Date

T.B.A.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Chronology & Memory

Part One: Memory Science

M1 Defining the Problem Scientifically

M2 Seeking a Scientific Solution

Part Two: Hypothesis

Temporal Indicators in Memory and Storytelling

T1 Formal Time (and General Caveats)

T2 Schematic Time

T3 Cause & Effect

T4 Location & Movement

T5 Disruption & Equilibrium

T6 Reference & Referent

Part Three: Applications

A1 Story/Memory

A2 Composition

A3 Hermeneutics

My Research Story

2025-01-03T08:16:00.009-06:00

How I transitioned from ancient chronology to memory science:

I bought the Oxford Classical Dictionary, followed its footnotes on the Hellenistic and early imperial eras, wrote my own chronology of the first century CE, and sought feedback from scholars of the New Testament. I then began to discover (1) that NT scholars generally do not think like historians, and (2) that timelines do not cohere strongly in most people’s minds.

I began to consider that informational overload was at least one impediment to my progress. At about that same time, Anthony LeDonne introduced me to cognitive memory studies. My old desire to write down a comprehensive account of the first century soon gave way to a new goal: how can I convey this information so that it sticks? What do I need to do to write differently so that readers will be able to remember all this chronological detail?

Since then, I did this. Two years later, I also did this. I’m currently working to make this research suitable for publication.

As I have said here before, my basic finding is that some types of information effectively imply their own temporal sequence during acts of constructive remembering. Most prominent among these kinds of “temporal information” are (A) causality, (B) movement & location, and (C) disruption of perceived equilibria. Part of my work involves demonstrating that these informational types are reflected by essential aspects of narrative, respectively (A) plot, (B) setting, and (C) conflict.

We have long known that stories enhance memory while distorting reality. My hope is that science can guide us towards more responsible and ethical management of ‘storying’ dynamics.

If anyone is interested in helping me in any way, that would be wonderful.

Anon, then…

Seeing Jesus Not-As-We-Are

2024-06-18T15:46:00.003-05:00

One reason that mysticism has been frowned upon by the church, historically, is that people who get mystical also tend to get kooky, if not down right unstable. That sad trend is well documented. Another reason mysticism has been frowned upon by the church, historically, is that it threatens the clergy/laity arrangement. If each person claims their own profound sense of access to God, then who needs a priest or a preacher?

Personally, I have long considered myself a failed mystic. I gave it up long ago and I do not promote it. As for clergy, I have also loads of evidence that ditching formal hierarchy in the pews often leads to little more than informal domineering in a living room. The challenge of group dynamics is not solved by trusting everyone to stay well-attuned ~~to their own imagination~~ to God.

As Christian historians of Jesus, however, neither institutional resistance nor personal failure nor fear of kooky chaos must ever prevent us from considering ways in which Jesus was not as we are. It may have been a long time since I personally felt a profound touch from the Lord, but that should not stop me from proclaiming that I think Jesus believed he was experiencing spiritual communion with God, probably everyday of his adult life.

As both Christians and historians, then, let us further suppose that Jesus did indeed experience deep and profound interaction with God on a regular basis, during his earthly life. If we do so suppose, then I would urge us to also weigh heavily the fact that Jesus spent his teens and twenties abstaining from public ministry. That is, if we agree Jesus was exceptionally spiritual during his public ministry, then let us also recognize that Jesus at age 12 had no such lock down on God's leading, and that intervening years provided him opportunities to grow. Alas, here's a third reason for religious systems to resist my construction of Jesus, because they're addicted to leveraging youthful enthusiasm and idealism in their leadership programs. More's the pity.

At any rate, I am not a mystic but I think Jesus was a mystic.

Furthermore, as the above thought experiment illustrates, embracing the view that Jesus was NOT like me in some ways can be a prerequisite for extrapolating from there to achieve higher vistas. If we do not first embrace the view that fully-grown Jesus was super spiritual (although we are not), we cannot then proceed to consider that younger Jesus was not yet fully in tune. Perhaps it is only after surrendering our short-sighted need to promote a Jesus who is like us, and after ceasing to fear the promotion of a Jesus whom we cannot imitate, that we can then discover a higher paradigm.

Perhaps Jesus grew. Perhaps spiritual maturity requires decades of growth. Perhaps evangelical leaders who teach newly baptized believers to declare confidence in God's direct leading, are simply perpetuating a tragic and desperately vainglorious pretense. And perhaps older Christian traditions are being too cautious. If we all embraced the simple historical inference that Jesus's own mysticism required thirty years of developing growth before he began making weighty pronouncements, then established authorities might be less worried about kooks, and grass roots ecclesias might be far less at risk of living room insta-gurus.

If spiritual weight was something we expect persons to acquire not without decades of devotion, that expectation might put a stop to all sorts of shenanigans.

Now, I said all this in part because I would love for you all to go read my 2011 draft of Jesus in Nazareth, if you haven't already. Heck, feel free to revise it for me. Thanks in advance!

But the other point I wish to underscore is about courage and self-denial in historical method.

We need to get away from the practice of building into the past only what we promote. I support the military and pay taxes. I'm not sure Jesus ever did either. I refuse to attend religious services. Jesus faithfully attended Synagogue gatherings. I have become an avowed feminist but no person in the first century was a feminist. The list could go on, but the point should be clear.

We cannot see Jesus as he was if we continue using him to justify ourselves.

And we cannot construct history in good faith if the ideological cart is pulling the analytical horse.

Anon...

What Would "Acts as History" Mean?

2024-03-11T13:33:00.008-05:00

History may be one thing after another but a literary history is the author's attempt to convey their own vision. The authorial representation should therefore guide scholarly interpretation of the text.

Steve Mason's dissertation on the Pharisees in Josephus is a masterclass in narratological interpretation. Previous scholars had taken a single line of Josephus's autobiography (an odd phrasing which seemed to declare Pharisaic affiliation) as evidence for doubting all the passages in Josephus's narrative work which expressed criticism of Pharisees. Since that dissertation, scholarship in general has recognized Mason's superior exegesis of the one difficult line and henceforth overturned the previous dogma that Josephus identified as a Pharisee. Also since that dissertation, Josephus scholars have come around to the larger issue raised by Mason's methodology. Unfortunately, NT scholars have not. If you haven't sussed quite yet what that larger issue might be, please bear with me a bit longer.

Frank Ankersmit has argued that a narrative text cannot be comprehended in the same way linguists exegete a single propositional statement. Let us examine the difference.

When reading one sentence, we decode individual words while looking for grammatical cues and patterns of syntax. Piecing those things together is how one comprehends the proposition. The task is to build meaning from the bottom up. If a statement mentions "Elvis Presley" we might wonder whether that refers to Ed Sullivan Elvis or military service Elvis or Blue Hawaii Elvis or Las Vegas Elvis or the Elvis purportedly haunting Graceland today. As exegetes of a single reference, we must deduce which Elvis the author means us to recognize, and our initial deduction may be confirmed or corrected a few words later, or perhaps a few lines later, further down in the text. This is not necessarily the case with a large collection of sentences.

The first distinction to recognize is that a narrative passage cannot "refer" in the same way as an individual word or a propositional statement. If you mention the name of my dog, you "refer" to one identifiable being. It is "picked out uniquely" by the label I use. Even if I may have given my dog a common name, we can easily clarify with further specification. "I mean the cocker spaniel Taffy who lived at Bill's childhood home until he was 13." The ideal one-to-one correspondence is at least achievable, even if our collective vocabulary (or "cultural repertoire") does not contain a single term to label each object on Earth. With enough added words, we can still pick out which dog I mean to describe.

Narrative cannot do that. It simply cannot. A published story about the battle of Waterloo can only "refer" to its subject in general (what Ankersmit idiosyncratically calls "aboutness"). Of course I can cite a year to specify which Treaty of Paris or Ocean's Eleven I might have in mind, but that is not the point. The one and only battle of Waterloo can be identified with a single place and time but it cannot be identified by a single set of words. That is, we cannot select one verbal discourse as the proper description of that singular battle. It was unique, but words cannot designate it uniquely. If that were possible, then we should expect to find only one proper description of the battle, only one proper biography of Napoleon, only one acceptable version of any given event in Earth's history. Obviously, this is not the case. The one-to-one correspondence between words and things cannot be extended to words and events. This necessarily shifts our hermeneutic away from objective decoding of a linguistic construction and towards the subjective interpretation of an aesthetic construction.

Narrative is not reference. Narrative is representation.

The construction of meaning from narrative, therefore, cannot be treated exclusively as a bottom-up endeavor, in the same way we construct meaning from the propositional statement. Unlike the grammatical and syntactical bits of a sentence, the individual sentences within a larger narrative text create a whole which is not merely the sum of its parts. Thus, instead of piecing together the meaning of each text by tackling one sentence at a time, one must rather prioritize a determination about the overall meaning of an authorial representation IN ORDER TO have any chance at properly understanding each single statement within it. Although this prescription may seem paradoxical, because of course we must read the text one statement at a time, the point is that our hermeneutic spiral must build and build and built UNTIL we have reached the point where we can look back on each part and see how they all fit in the whole.

Impressively, that is precisely how Mason engaged the corpus of Josephus's writings. Where other scholars had camped out on one troublesome sentence and erased several passages which appeared to contradict it, Mason argued that we should rather prioritize understanding Josephus's whole body of work before turning again to that difficult bit in his autobiography. When taken in context, Mason demonstrated conclusively, there was a different way to interpret the one bit. Josephus had not joined the Pharisees. He had merely studied them for a while. The single ambiguous statement was best understood in the context of Josephus's larger narratological construction.

I have argued the same thing about Luke and Quirinius: whatever else we think about that difficult bit of text, it cannot be taken as evidence that Luke thought Jesus was born in the year 6 CE. Rather, the larger story Luke tells obviously fits in a world where Judea and Galilee were being administered in a unified way. Rather, a reconstruction of Luke's esthetic vision must be prioritized. The author's view of the story he means to tell should be our first reconstruction, after which we can use that reconstruction as context for attempting to understand what Luke was trying to say about that odd proconsul Quirinius.

I have argued the same thing about Matthew and Archelaus. Instead of getting stuck on one word ("basileuei") and declaring that to be inaccurate (because Archelaus was an ethnarch and not a king), we should rather go back several verses and prioritize Matthew's narratological context. Even if Jesus living in Egypt is pure fiction, Matthew's angel wakes Joseph precisely at Herod's death so that Matthew's readers can recognize the timeframe. Archelaus was indeed, just then, playing the king. He was literally "kinging" in Judea, in his father's position. Recognizing this temporal context lends dramatic irony and praises God's foresight, because Galilee was not yet safe from the dangerous princeling, but it would soon be once Augustus slapped down the upstart.

I have argued the same thing for the book of Acts. Instead of treating each episode as more or less random, we must first reconstruct the authorial viewpoint. First, the author inserts himself into the story, aligns himself not just with the gentile mission and Paul but also with the narrative climax in Caesarea. The author, as character, appears to remain for two years with the Caesarean church as his base. That the apprehensions they feel for Jersualem have lingered is not anti-Jewish but anti-mother-church. Within that context, it cannot be coincidental that Luke's outstanding point of view characters for the early chapters - Stephen and Philip and Cornelius and Barnabas, the ones Luke goes out of his way to introduce and to follow - also happen to align with the gentile mission, with Antioch, and with Caesarea. Philip and Cornelius in particular signal an authorial focalization. These are not random characters with marginal stories Luke felt bound to include. They are some of his favorites. In terms of comprehending narrative to be representational, that authorial construction should be prioritized as the context for everything else in the text.

As I said at the top of this post, history itself may be one thing after another but a literary history is the author's attempt to convey their own vision. One cannot merely analyze bits of narrative content and then think about them as truth claims, or potentially true. The exegetical analysis of any passage must root itself in a larger awareness of the "history" as a literary construction, an authorial representation. The individual truth claims are not merely tainted by authorial bias; they are painted with brushstrokes of meaning. As Josephus's overall view of the Pharisees elucidates a proper exegesis of each statement he makes about them, so should we apply Luke's overall disposition (against the heavy-handed Christians in Jersualem) to our exegetical analysis of each line and episode in the book.

Narrative history is not simply a story, to be taken or left. It is not simply "narrative" because that's what we call this stuff. Narrative history is an authorial representation. Before we judge the potential veracity of a narrated claim, we must first be careful to understand the meaning of that claim, NOT with a bottom-up semiotic and linguistic approach, BUT with a top-down approach of narratology and literature.

The authorial representation should guide scholarly interpretation of the text. After which, THEN AND ONLY THEN, historical critical judgment should absolutely proceed to have its field day by assessing the evidential value (or lack thereof) in each claim and action depicted. But those claims must be judged with a full awareness of their nature as brush strokes, rather than log entries.

At any rate... I said all that to say this.

If any NT scholar happens to be thinking about doing a project called "Acts as History" I dearly hope they pay attention to these important distinctions.

Anon...

Simplify AND THEN Complicate

2024-01-24T06:51:00.005-06:00

When critics frame simple stories versus complex reality as a binary choice, authoritarians thrive. So long as it's one or the other, the domineering "reality is what I say it is" leaders can simply assert "the stories we tell are NOT fictions." Polarization is not the result of such conflicts; it is their fertile ground.

If I could wipe away that false binary and re-write critical dogma I would tell academia to assert that simple stories often are and can more often be a pathway to more complex understandings. Scientists know this. Where the university history professor takes an oppositional stance against stories their students have previously heard, the university physics professor affirms the basic concepts of high school teaching and adds, "now we're going to incorporate friction and wind resistance." Although not everyone can keep up with the math in that case, they gain a new appreciation for how simplified the earlier teaching had been.

Imagine if politicians were culturally expected to share two versions of each story. First, tell me the short version. Next, expand on that with the complicated details. The liars and spin doctors who prefer that the public options for narrative rhetoric should remain binary, suddenly, would be unable to compete. Because they only have their one simplified version of lies, expanding upon which would require receipts. In contrast, the earnest and honest would no longer face an automatic competitive disadvantage. Rather, those who understand the complex version and wish to convey it completely would simply need to learn strategic methods for non-fiction storytelling as an introductory practice.

The logic here reminds me of the twin gatekeepers in Labyrinth. One liar and one truthteller, one guarding safe passage and one trying to doom you; the trick is to ask both of them, "Which door would he tell me to take?" The liar points to doom, the honest one points to doom, and you pick the opposite door.

It may be optimistic of me, but I suspect "Give me the simple version and then follow up with the long version" would upend lots of nonsense... especially if we could establish that every purveyor of claims should be expected to follow that custom.

On a personal note, this whole suggestion developed in me because I wish biblical scholas would see the four Gospels in a similar way - not as simple claims to uphold or dismiss but as authorial representations which point the way to considering various complex possibilities about the real historical past.

A simple story should invite us to ask questions about the more complex reality.

The false binary only empowers those who thrive on such conflict.

Anon...

Go Read Rosson on Staples

2024-01-21T11:27:00.001-06:00

Please direct your attention to Loren Rosson's extensive reviews of two recent books by Jason Staples. If you can read only one review, the second briefly synopsizes the first. Both books regard Paul's sense of what "Israel" meant in the first century. You can search for other positive reception of Jason's work. I recommend Rosson because he writes clearly and offers perspective illuminating for non-specialists.

Go read those reviews to understand why this new work is important. My comments which follow are strictly personal.

It was something like twenty-years ago that Jason made some common sense observations, framed by a genuinely fresh perspective, and it took him this long to contextualize those observations comprehensively and defensibly for academic reception.

After earning his Ph.D, Jason spent years supporting his family with jobs outside academia while doggedly pursuing his goal of completing his grand passion project. It took him two books. Both have been well received. I admire him greatly.

Doing scholarship on one's own time is always costly, often thankless, and completing one's work does not guarantee that anybody will care. Although I cannot yet compare the caliber of my work to Jason's, I must say I find it vicariously thrilling to see his long-term project, triumphantly, finding its audience.

Anon, then...

Eyes and Ears, Stories and Words

2023-11-14T20:41:00.000-06:00

Paul of Tarsus once noted that some Corinthian believers longed to see signs and wonders while others longed to hear wisdom through oratory. Ostensibly, Paul's allegations describe two distinct factions: one being a sub-group of predominantly Jewish Corinthians who liked Peter because he spoke in tongues and healed people, and the other being a sub-group of Greek Corinthinans who liked Apollos because of his scriptural knowledge and rhetorical prowess. Still today, as we all painfully know, some Christians seek miracles while others prefer preaching. To both groups, Paul said that no human mind had conceived the rewards of inclining one's heart towards God.

Feel free to stop reading at this point and incline yourself thusly. The rest of this piece is going to explore the "eyes" and "ears" distinction a bit further. However, instead of miracles and preaching, I'd like you to consider that stories can leave behind, in your mind, both words and images.

If you're sticking around, please bear with me now for a paragraph or two on cognitive technicalities.

In the information processing model of cognitive psychology, scientists distinguish auditory input from visual input in a number of ways. The classic model of "working memory" includes a "phonological loop" (in which songs can 'get stuck' and through which you quickly memorize names or phone numbers) and a "visuo-spatial sketchpad" (where you visualize images, albeit faint, fuzzy, fragmented, and/or distorted images). In this theoretical model, both of these two components feed into the "episodic buffer" where a third component (a theoretical "chief executive") coordinates bits and pieces of previously encoded sights and sounds (a.k.a. "trace memories") and reconstructs as much as possible your memory of the previously lived situation. In this way, psychologists have accounted for separate input (eyes and ears) and separate encoding (images and sounds), but processing and manipulation of information takes various pathways as our future selves continue to store up, re-code, and reconstruct various permutations of combined audio-visual memories.

One curious phenomenon in all this is that WORDS can become informational content in both categories. Historically, most common experiments for memory have involved a collection of words, either in list form or on flash cards. In these studies, participants will usually rehearse the words in some way: seeing them, speaking them, hearing them. The phonological loop can preserve a few seconds of rehearsal and the visuo-spatial sketchpad can preserve a few sketchy images of the word list and/or flash cards. This flexibility illustrates precisely why words are so useful as rhetorical tools and so powerful as conceptual placeholders; it is not merely that words serve as tags for ideas in our minds but that words persist across various "modalities" of sight, sound, and speech. You can even copy a word list repeatedly through writing. Although we should rightly forget about educational theories that some students prefer one modality over all others, the research on learning is at least clear that reviewing the same content in multiple forms does provide an advantage.

This modal advantage also puts words above images in at least one respect: you cannot rehearse mental images through recitation or graphic transcription. You cannot speak pictures. You cannot write pictures. In the case of visual input from unique lived experience then we must admit you cannot even look at such a mental image more than once. Moreover, words provide empirical evidence for laboratory researchers. The established field of cognitive linguistics is widely renowned while the budding field of studies on "event memory" is still struggling to get past reading comprehension. Incidentally, one modestly promising development is the comparison of body-camera footage to self-reporting summaries of personal activity (e.g., walking to the campus library, finding a book, and returning to the psych lab).

Now, here comes the difficult bit. Something occurred to me today which bothers me greatly.

If proficiency depends on repeated practice, our brains have less opportunity to become adept at manipulating visual memories. Even illiterate people learn many different ways of processing verbal information. We all get lots of practice at thinking about words. But images? Although we can strengthen visual memories through repeated viewings of the same photos, same artwork, or the same movie scenes, it seems perhaps that only avid readers receive the opportunity to become adept in the skill of constructing situation models while receiving narrative discourse. Further, it seems that perhaps only avid readers from childhood have a chance to put in the proverbial 10,000 hours of practice required to become experts at visualizing a narrated situation. To speculate even further, it may be specifically that we do not develop this talent to its fullest without being an avid reader from childhood of fiction, specifically.

In reality, of course, almost every human person has some imagination ability, but on that scale we could say everybody has some degree of physical ability as well. Some can run. Some cannot even walk. In my musings above, I am talking about the difference between walking around and becoming an athlete. Some readers naturally build worlds while receiving a discourse. Other readers mainly wait for the speaker to get to a point, and such readers will otherwise struggle when pressed to prioritize their imaginative function. Such readers may even stare in disbelief when one suggests that imaginative function should be a default process when receiving narrative content for general purposes. Particularly savvy operators know that stories are often just vehicles for agendas. They feel justified in looking down at those of us who take stories too seriously.

I now present today's disturbing thought, albeit prefaced with a disclaimer.

It has been said, rather rudely, that sometimes unintelligent persons prefer authoritarian leaders because parrotting such leaders spares trusting dimwits from having to think for themselves. To whatever extent this is sometimes the case I would like to offer as much sympathy for the individuals in question and condemnation for the leaders who abuse their simple trust. In contrast to this sad situation, and the unhelpful mockery and stereotyping of it, I have a more refined hypothesis to suggest.

Specifically, I am wondering today whether some adult persons who are indeed rather intelligent may sometimes develop a cognitive predisposition for processing verbal discourse as predominantly if not strictly semantic information. In other words, I wonder if we might be able to demonstrate that some adult brains have a measurable deficiency in forming mental models of situations being narrated (and/or described) by verbal discourse. If so, then it would seem natural to suppose that such adult persons would be more likely to rely on labels and categories in explaining their views, while adhering rather dogmatically to stock phrases and boilerplate sound bites.

If so, it would seem somewhat futile to urge such people to engage their imagination while reading. One can neither easily nor adeptly perform skills which require muscles atrophied through lack of use.

Getting back to Paul and the Corinthians, I must remind myself that first century Christians as a group were largely ignorant, almost wholly uneducated, and not often blessed with even modest intelligence. To such people, the tentmaker form Tarsus proclaimed optimistically that inclining themselves towards the divine was a worthy activity, one that held promise of rewards that go beyond any kind of familiar human experience.

For the sake of my projects, however, I feel more daunted than ever. It is one thing to urge narratological reconstruction when speaking to those who have been acculturated to avoid thinking imaginatively about the words of the New Testament. It is another thing to promote this procedure when speaking to those (and yes, I mean professional scholars) who may be cognitively disinclined to engage in this kind of imaginative thinking.

Shall I, then, simply continue... Anon?

The Nature of Historical "Knowledge" for Early Gospel Audiences

2023-10-31T18:26:00.007-05:00

As Dunn said with orality decades ago, here is another default setting that we need to reset.

Even if your hermeneutic of the Gospels considers "ideal readers" or "the authorial audience" instead of reconstructing actual first century readers and hearers, we should not assume that early Jewish/Christian knowledge about their own recent history would equate to a list of key facts. Their word of mouth style of posterity was quite unlike a wiki stub cribbed from an old World Book, and I mean different not only in form or format. I mean that ancient historical knowledge was quite different than our modern concept of factual knowledge as something learned from official sources who verified the information before passing it down. The difference is also more complex than simply imagining that ancient people were generally more susceptible to authoritarian pronouncements and biased spin, because that also happens to some degree in officially verified publications. That common danger has never not been part of telling stories about the past.

The difference I am getting at starts with Dunn's notion that we need to reckon with a culture of orality but I believe it goes farther. We need to think about memory and storytelling. Specifically, we need to think about the fact that our limited cognitive capacity means that only simplified explanations had the potential to gain widespread adoption as "common knowledge" about what happened in the past.

For example, consider the contrast between the stories Josephus tells to his audience of upscale Roman elites, on the one hand, and the stories Josephus reports had been told among common folks back in Judea and Galilee.

To explain the fall of Jerusalem to his privileged peers, Josephus offers a complex set of justifications that rely on various factors of culture and politics, ultimately suggesting that the governing class in Jerusalem didn't mean to oppose Rome until they were forced into it by the spontaneous guerilla assault on that insufficiently prepared Legion from Antioch. (Obviously, I compress greatly; but see Mason's History of the Jewish War, 2016.)

To explain the Nabatean conquest of the fortress at Gamala (Gamla), Josephus tells us, folks in Galilee said that God was punishing Herod Antipas for having executed John the Baptist.

Although I feel confident that such extreme superstition did not characterize every single historical explanation which circulated among Jewish and Christian people of the first century, I do mean to suggest that something like that level of simplicity was a prerequisite for a story to gain widespread acceptance, or at least to be recognized as the norm of historical knowledge. Thus, if an savvy author was writing to an audience of common folks and said author wished to refer to historical events, the target knowledge would need to be simple. I mean the FORM of that story would need to be simple.

Briefly, now, here are just a few specific suggestions as to how this might affect our interpretation of some material in the Gospels.

(1) The parable in Luke 19 is less likely a reference to the singular story about Archelaus and more likely a reference to the larger pattern by which that kind of thing happened repeatedly. That is, many rulers of Judea had sailed to Rome to be granted the rule back at home, including Herod the Great, Herod's oldest son Antipater (unsuccessfully), Archelaus, Antipas (twice, both times unsuccessfully), Agrippa I (who successfully gained the rule of Trachonitis from Caligula and later received the re-unified kingdom from Claudius), and more. Thus, it is far more likely that common pattern (and not the one relatable factoid that Lukan scholars picked up while studying Matt 2:22) which provided a targetable bit of historical knowledge for the writer of Luke to expect from their ancient audience.

(2) John 2:20 cannot be a reference to anything which required the audience to get out a reference book and perform careful arithmetic. If the number "forty-six" has any hermeneutic significance, my bet is that it was meant to evoke 'a few less than 49', thereby associating the crucifixion of Jesus with the year of the Jubilee (although whether the author meant that symbolically or literally, or both, would obviously require a whole other discussion). My point is whatever historical idea the author was trying to reference, it needed to be simple, obvious, and immediately retrievable.

(3) Repeated Gospel references to John the Baptist as one who "came before" and "prepared the way" involve a simplified chronological schema which implies a basic sequence no more complicated than 'one before the other'. On this basis, I have previously argued that Bauckham's argument about John 3:24 is misguided to suppose that one allusion in John could prompt a verbatim recall of Mark 1:14 as a specific textual reference.

(4) Even more broadly, the simplified narrative structure of the basic synoptic storyline is largely built upon another simplified schema with embedded chronology. If the audience knows in advance that Jesus became popular in Galilee and got killed in Jerusalem, they would naturally expect the storyline to begin in Galilee and move to Judea only in time for that death. If this was indeed the likely expectation of most audiences, it could help explain why the earliest writers of narrative Gospels chose to simplify the story structure of Jesus's ministry period, in that way.

(5) Finally, the one about which I was previously dissertating: the writer of Matt 2:22 could most reasonably have expected those references ("Herod... Archelaus... Judea... fright... Galilee") to evoke only the most impactful events from that overall time frame. Thus, rather than cherry picking a few details from Josephus's account or finding some criteria for deciding how much of that written history might have also been common knowledge, I reconstruct the matter in multiple stages.

(example 5, continued) FIRST, from a LITERARY perspective, I extrapolate the vision of events which Josephus apparently had in mind and attempted to convey (e.g., the division of Herod's kingdom was Augustus's original idea and it was not even suggested until Herod had been dead for several months). SECOND, from a HISTORICAL-CRITICAL standpoint, I scrutinize the authorial vision of Josephus (e.g., reconsidering causative factors more comprehensively) and reconstruct my own view of KEY EVENTS as they actually unfolded (e.g., the people of Judea and Galilee spent a year living in complete ignorance about who if anyone was going to emerge, from the ongoing chaos and violent upheavals, as the new overlord of the land of the Jews). THIRD, from the standpoint of social and cognitive memory theory, I perform a PSYCHOLOGICAL reconstruction, this time considering which events (from among those which actually transpired) would have been the most likely to leave a mnemonic traces on a cultural level for decades to come (e.g., Passover pilgrims returning to Jerusalem each year, for many years, undoubtedly would have remembered the massacre of Archelaus each time they walked through the streets where the smallest of children were the first ones to be trampled, and each time they walked to the Temple where the protestors were first assaulted by the armed forces of Archelaus, the apparent king-to-be. FOURTH, on the basis of all the above, I can only then find a reasonable basis for reconstructing HERMENEUTICALLY that the writer of Matt 2:22 most likely expected their audience to believe a few key "facts" based on the general P.o.V. of Judean posterity (e.g., it had appeared from all angles that Augustus split the kingdom in response to the upheavals, and that Archelaus deserved his eventual banishment by Augustus, among other reasons, primarily because of the Passover massacre at his accession).

Here endeth my list of examples for today. Feel free to search the blog for previous thoughts on the five topics just reviewed.

Now, let me sum up the overall point and be done with this post.

Altogether, this kind of approach creates a lot of work, and the first reaction of some Gospel scholars may be to scoff dismissively, because what I propose will seem, to them, quite a stretch. Against that likely response, please consider that the popular alternative for centuries has been just to cherry pick a few verbatim factoids as purported by Josphus and then to magically impute those "facts" as the "knowledge" shared by ancient author and audience alike.

Realistically, I'll be doing well if I can even start this conversation, let alone get the last word. But maybe that is enough.

As Dunn said with orality decades ago, here is another default setting that we need to reset.

Anon...

Titus carried Galatians

2023-08-23T12:16:00.006-05:00

I went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking with me also Titus… But not even Titus, who was with me, being Greek, was compelled to be circumcised. - Galatians 2:1,3

To support his bold claim that circumcision is no longer necessary for gentile Christians, Paul further claims that the saints in Jerusalem had met Titus without requiring him to be circumcised. For the second claim to support the larger claim effectively, Paul must have expected the Galatians (1) to know who Titus was, and (2) to believe that Paul's claims about Titus were true. The simplest explanation for Paul's apparent expectation is that Paul sent Titus to carry this letter.

Supposing Titus delivered Galatians can also explain why Paul references Titus without identifying distinctions. That is, neither "who was with me" nor "being Greek" denotes a unique referent. These phrases do not qualify as identifying remarks because many people could have been with Paul and many people were Greek. I return to the possible meaning of these two phrases below.

For context, please observe that Paul has obvious reasons for failing to identify Peter (1:18) and John (2:9), who require no introduction as Jesus's apostles, and also Barnabas (2:1), who requires no introduction because he helped Paul found the Galatian assemblies. As for James, "the Lord's brother" (1:18), Paul's identifying descriptor was undoubtedly mere disambiguation, supposing at least one of the following: e.g., that the Galatians had heard about James the apostle in the same stories they heard about Peter and John, or that James's prominence in Jerusalem was widely known, or that we take Paul to imply that Galatia's other recent visitors from Jerusalem were the same "men from James" who had also disrupted Antioch (2:12). As for Titus, however, we have no cause to suppose that Paul's gentile colleague was himself comparably famous among early Christians in Asia. To the contrary, Paul's acknowledgement that Titus's Gentile status had recently been at issue in Jersualem provides a strong reason to expect the opposite: that Titus was not generally famous among early Christians. This lack of evident fame also refutes the suggestion of F. F. Bruce that Paul was specifically refuting a rumor about Titus previously spread by the 'Judaizers'; if Titus was not famously well known at this point then Bruce's scenario should require Paul to explicitly clarify that he meant the same Titus about whom there were rumors. As noted above, "with me" and "Greek" do not specify one uniquely identifiable person.

Logically, the above considerations leave us with only two possible reasons why Galatians in four different cities might be expected to know who Titus was without requiring an introduction: either Paul knew that Titus had visited previously, or Paul knew that Titus was visiting concurrently. But if Paul believed Titus was not currently present then we would still expect Paul to clarify which "Titus" (of all the Tituses on earth) was the Titus about whom Paul was speaking. Therefore, the most likely reason, by far, for Paul to avoid identifying this Titus, is because Paul had sent this Titus to Galatia with this letter.

If we consider the scenario in depth, we find additional reasons to support not just plausibility but strong likelihood. For one, sending Titus offered Paul the strategic advantage of refuting his troublesome opponents by sending an eyewitness who could testify on at least some of the events being narrated in the letter. Instead of merely writing that Titus had met with the "pillars" in Jerusalem and yet remained uncircumcised, Paul could send the Titus himself to corroborate Paul's account. Beyond that, the Galatians could ask Titus questions -about Paul, about his visit to the holy city, about whom he met there - and if any man in Galatia remained skeptical about Paul's claims, then Titus had the option to reveal physical evidence.

Finally, supposing this strategic scenario provides a practical purpose for Paul's two ancillary descriptions, imbuing them with additional meaning. First, the phrase "who was with me" now conveys an implicit challenge. I'm telling you what happened, and he was there too. If you don't believe me, ask him. Second, the phrase "being Greek" denotes an ethnic origin that is not merely non-Jewish; for instance, a Samaritan who became Christian would not be "compelled to be circumcised" because Samaritans still considered themselves children of Abraham (cf. Acts 8:5-39). In this light, the most specific denotation in Galatians about Titus is the fact that Titus (like all Greeks) had not been circumcised in his life before turning to Christ. Taken thusly, "being Greek" is not merely Paul adding a detail but emphatically suggesting there is further proof here if you absolutely need it.

In conclusion, accepting that Titus carried the letter explains why Paul could expect the Galatians to know very little about Titus while also requiring no description of his identity. By sending and naming his eyewitness, Paul's supporting point about his larger claim becomes far stronger through personal testimony and physical evidence. The phrase "who was with me" no longer underscores a geographical coincidence which should have already been obvious (the guy I'm talking about who was there when I was, Titus, he was also with me) but now serves to qualify the man's testimony and commend his presence in Galatia as a trusted colleague. The phrase "being Greek," which also seemed a bit redundant as mere exposition, now finds a situated rhetorical purpose that serves Paul's strategic goals - not just for the epistle but directly for the mission. Paul does not introduce Titus as a co-worker, a trusted friend, or a traveling companion, but as a supporting witness, uniquely qualified to rebut the accusations of Paul's opponents from Jerusalem.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One final consideration, if Galatians 2:1-10 indeed refers to the conference of Acts 15 (and I agree that it does), is that Titus could have carried TWO LETTERS into Galatia. In other words, if Titus was first present at the council of Jerusalem and then carried Paul's letter to Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch of Pisidia, then Titus could have brought along a copy of Jerusalem’s letter as well. This would then provide one reason why Paul did not mention that letter in the text of his own letter, not that he necessarily carried or cared for that letter at all. Paul and Titus might even have thought it wise strategy to hold something in reserve.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is further likely, in my opinion, that Titus and Luke carried Paul's letter through Galatia together, and then kept going west to their pre-arranged rendezvous point, at a city they could not fail to locate because it stood next to the ruins of the most famous city in Asia Minor ("Troy"), and this would then explain why Paul found Luke in Troas after leaving Galatia and not feeling able to linger near Ephesus.

in Asia. Also, the fact that Acts never mentions Titus is irrelevant but if Titus and Paul were on Crete at some point, years later, then it was most likely Fair Havens, which would mean Luke deliberately left Titus out of Acts, perhaps for abandoning ship after Paul finagled his way into bringing three friends. In other words, if Titus was at Fair Havens with Paul then Titus could have been in other parts of Paul's journeys according to Acts. Also Paul did expect, after Corinth, to see Titus in Troas, and Paul's second journey he left one man in each city where they planted a new church (Luke in Philippi, Timothy in Thessalonica, Silas in Berea, and Paul himself stayed in Athens. Thus, it stands to reason that Titus was the man they left in Troas, which explains why Luke left out the origin of that church.

But now I have reeeealllly digressed.

Anon, then...

Remembering Timelines (ISSN 2023)

2023-04-11T22:07:00.004-05:00

Last month I was able to present some of my research to the annual meeting of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, in a hybrid conference format (online and in-person). The title of my presentation was "Causality, Location, and Disruption as Accommodations for Remembering Sequences."

In the embedded video below (17:51), you may enjoy my enthusiastic discussion and substantive slideshow. The rest of this blogpost, if you keep scrolling, includes my abstract (285 words) and the "party favor" referred to in my talk, a supplemental handout entitled "Review of Cognitive Psychology on 'Construcive Remembering'" (1268 words, plus notes and references).

Video:

Abstract:

In a previous ISSN presentation, “Causality as Mnemonic Accommodation,” I reviewed cognitive science on memory and event sequence to support three nested claims. First, remembering is constructive (Schacter 1996, 2013). Second, remembering temporal sequences is most successful when recalled information happens to convey temporal implications through natural logic or contextual detail (Friedman 1993). Third, memories encoded as cause and effect imply their own sequence and unity, facilitating efficient mnemonic reconstruction. Thus, causality helps us remember event sequences coherently, whether recalling personal experiences, fictional storylines, or historical emplotments.

After reviewing the above, I suggest that physical setting can similarly accommodate the mnemonic reconstruction of temporal sequence because movement between two locations necessarily implies prior and subsequent order. Arbitrary developments distinguishable by location can be mentally truncated as episodic material, and thereby sequenced efficiently. Also, itinerary based storylines (e.g., Homer’s Odyssey or The Wizard of Oz) provide an underlying structure within their larger emplotments.

Finally, I suggest that disruption of any perceived equilibrium creates a mnemonic boundary between time periods “before and after” the disruption. Thus, any contradiction or reversal (e.g., dashed hopes, foiled plans, drastic failure, or tragic irony) creates a powerful mnemonic association between the bygone hopes or expectations and whatever impactful event has destroyed them. Thus, like any trauma, disruption can redefine past and present, encoding the aftermath to evoke what has been lost.

In summary, it seems that memories which incorporate causality, location, and disruption each imply their own temporal sequence in different ways, and these implications accommodate the remembering of timelines and storylines. By enabling our minds to remember whole sequences with less effort and greater efficiency, these cognitive accommodations may help explain why plot, setting, and conflict (respectively) increase narrative coherence.

Supplemental Handout:

Review of Cognitive Psychology on “Constructive Remembering” [1]

In researching “Memory for the Time of Past Events,” William Friedman (1993) determined that successful attempts to remember “when” a personal memory belonged—either with respect to some known event, or else with respect to a recognized pattern of time—require only that recalled information must include some contextual detail that conveys temporal implications. That is, recalling memories which contain temporal information enables us to reconstruct a larger event sequence through the active process of working memory, so long as mnemonic content “connects” in some way with a specific point in time, or a known sequence in one’s personal history. For example, recalling where you were on 9/11, or which presidential candidate you first supported, or the first holiday after a loved one’s death; these kinds of details can help you piece together the historical timing of remembered events. In such cases, the mnemonic content itself indicates whether that content belongs before, during, or after some other remembered event or known time pattern. In other words, “temporal content” implies its own sequence.

The reconstructive aspects of Friedman’s model are functionally aligned with current studies of Reconstructive Memory (or, “constructive remembering”), which began F. C. Bartlett’s Remembering (1932). Narratologists will know Bartlett for his foundational contributions to schema theory but they may not know that Bartlett deliberately gave his subjects confusing and unfamiliar material in order to maximize opportunities for observing schematization (64-5), and that decision produced a few surprising results. Unexpectedly, Bartlett found that his subjects remembered details of the target story “constructively” and that subsequent recollections (for months and years afterward) became increasingly “more connected and coherent” when compared with a subject’s earliest retelling; Bartlett’s subjects also demonstrated substantial instances of (in his terms) invention, condensation, abbreviation, simplification, confusion, rationalization, and other types of “unrealized distortion” (63-94). Because schema theory could explain only some contents of these observed memory distortions, and not the overall process, Bartlett’s experiment raised new questions about the nature of remembering itself.

Early reception of Bartlett’s study was heavily critical, with psychologists failing to replicate his results and challenging his methodology.[2] Fortunately, Ulrich Neisser’s Cognitive Psychology (1967) revitalized the concept of constructive memory, comparing reassembled memories to reconstructed fossils and arguing that “stored fragments are used as information to support a new construction” (272).[3] Daniel Schacter (1996) sums up Neisser’s view by saying, “only bits and pieces of incoming data are stored in memory. These retained fragments of experience in turn provide a basis for reconstructing a past event” (40). Neisser’s functional claims about the fragmentary nature of recall are confirmed easily enough by common experience of general mnemonic limitations: that recognition is easier than recall, that memories are strengthened by repetition and recency, that memorization typically requires study and rehearsal, and that such learning tends to fade unless periodically reinforced. These basic strengths and weaknesses of memory have been repeatedly affirmed by psychological research (e.g., Kahana, 2012). Further, the claim that memory is reconstructive is now widely affirmed as well (see, e.g., Wagoner 2017b), with even prominent critics of Bartlett like Alan Baddeley affirming that “the reconstructive view” is “associated with normal remembering.”[4]

Neisser’s functional distinction between simple recall (the retrieval of semantic information and episodic fragments) on the one hand, and constructive remembering (reassembling a whole from whatever bits and pieces are recalled) on the other, can also facilitate discussion of Friedman’s research about temporal content, considering that details of memory which imply temporality are details which arise during “recall,” and the use of that information in reconstruction thereby rounds out the process of “remembering.” In reality, it may be that these distinct tasks often occur simultaneously or interactively, but for mastering the basic concept it can help to think (as I do in my presentation) of “recall” and “reconstruction” as separate stages of a two step process.

What remains in contention in current psychological research is the extent to which “normal” constructive remembering necessarily results in distortions; on the one hand, extensive research by Daniel Schacter and his associates has demonstrated undeniably that mnemonic distortion is typical, significant, and not infrequently severe.[5] On the other hand, researchers like James Ost & Alan Costall (2002) and Brady Wagoner (2017a, 2017b) have emphasized cases in which mnemonic accuracy does occur, such as the “prodigiously retentive capacity” of Swazi cattle herders for the details of their business, and that particular facets of collaboration can often improve accuracy in remembering.[6] In addition, Wagoner (2017a: 10) points out that construction “does not occur out of nothing” and that “innovation in the present” requires “flexibly engaging with the past.” Even Bartlett himself, in responding to critics, said, “I did not imply that literal retrieval is impossible, but I did imply that it requires special constricting conditions.”[7] Bartlett (93) also confessed, “Detail is outstanding when it fits in with a subject’s pre-formed interests and tendencies” although “it tends to take a progressively earlier place in successive reproductions.”

In a balanced critique of Schacter, Wagoner (2017a: 203-4) suggests that emphasis on distortions and errata is “not in itself wrong but simply one-sided” and “limits the possibilities for exploring the reasons and nature of change in remembering,” adding, “remembering serves many other functions than creating accurate representations of the past.”[8] Bartlett (16) suggested that literal recall might have been evolutionarily “detrimental” when survival depended on “a continuous play of adaptation between changing response and varying environment.” In other words, we need our memories to be useful.[9] We might underscore this point with an even more basic point, that in order to prove useful, information must be remembered. Thus, in the practical sense, distorted memory is far better than no memory at all. As Bartlett (93-94) concluded, “the reduction of material to a form that can be readily and ‘satisfyingly’ dealt with” is essential because it provides some kind of “specific ground, frame, or setting, without which it will not be persistently remembered” (emphasis mine). Constructive distortions enable us to remember something rather than nothing, and researchers should study these actual phenomena.[10]

Without question, we must embrace the fact that literal accuracy appears by far the exception rather than the rule, but in my view we must also realize that “distortion” describes a wide variety of aberrations and alterations, ranging from simple abbreviation and summary to confabulation and outright falsification.[11] Strictly speaking, the concept of an “accurate synopsis” is oxymoronic and yet the practice of providing one another with “accurate” synopses remains an essential requirement of personal and professional communication, allowing for legal testimony, medical status updates, personal accident reports, news articles, plot summaries, and even basic directions. Human memory distorts the true past in all of these cases, but many of these distortions do not significantly inhibit critical thinkers from discerning details and aspects of truth in a given recollection (or extemporaneous narration).[12] In fact, some recalled details can be extremely informative, even without a fully reconstructed context, as the following case illustrates profoundly. When professor of psychology Christine Blasey Ford was called before the U.S. Senate in 2018, she testified that certain details of her assault (some thirty years prior) remained “indelible in the hippocampus” while “other details kind of drift.”[13] As reported, Ford’s memory appears to evidence both fragmentation (bits and pieces) and distortion (the special prominence of “laughter” is effectively caricature), and yet rational observers widely declared that her testimony rang strongly of truth rather than falsehood.[14]

It is within this understanding of memory, with a balanced appreciation of both its limitations and strengths, that I have conducted the research which I present March 3 (5:30-6:45p), on “Causality, Location, and Disruption as Accommodations for Remembering Sequence.”

Notes

[1] Although psychological discourse uses these two words together on occasion, the more common categorical labels are “reconstructive memory” (e.g., Baddeley, Eysenck, & Anderson 2009), or “constructive memory” (e.g., McClelland 1995). For my purposes, I hope that “constructive” will evoke similar concepts already familiar to scholars in the humanities, especially scholars for whom “reconstruction” tends to imply critical judgment without autonomous creativity (whereas mnemonic reconstruction may employ both). I also prefer “remembering” as a verb because it centers the key notion that memory is a dynamic process.

[2] Helpful surveys of the psychological literature and research history appear in Waggoner (2017a, 66-73), Ost & Costall (2002), and Schacter (1995, 8-9). In defense of Bartlett’s method with regard to “the non-ergodic character of psychological phenomena,” see Jaan Valsiner’s Foreword in Wagoner (2017a).

[3] Neisser (1967) also applies the paleontologist analogy to visual perception (90, 92) and recognition (107, 109).

[4] Baddeley, Eysenck, & Anderson (2009, 153; cf. 95, 180-1).

[5] The classic study is Schacter (1995); see also Schacter, Addis, and Buckley (2007) and Schacter (2011).

[6] See Ost & Costall (2002): 248ff and Wagoner (2017a, 72-5).

[7] Unpublished paper, cited by Ost & Costall (2002, 243) and Wagoner (2017a, 72). See also Bartlett (1932, 93-4).

[8] For a promising (albeit indirect and partial) response, see Thakral, Barberio, Devitt, & Schacter (2022).

[9] Bartlett (294-296) discusses Maurice Halbwachs (1925), who pointed out that acts of remembering are influenced by present situations; cf. Wagoner (2017a, 118-9). For more on Halbwachs’s project, see LeDonne (2008, 41-50).

[10] That is, as opposed to lamenting unrealized ideals; see Wagoner (2017a, 75-77); see also LeDonne (2008, 50-64).

[11] See, e.g., Schudson (1995), Moscovitch (1995), and Bartlett (1932, 63-94).

[12] I would here cite historical theorists on methodology, but those references would require an additional paper.

[13] “’Indelible in the Hippocampus is the Laughter.’ The Science Behind Christine Blasey Ford’s Testimony,” Time, September 27, 2018.

[14] I myself remember a moment when Ford’s assigned questioner honed in on a precise date for the alleged incident, which prompted a certain South Carolinian to throw a tantrum, after which the questioner had gone.

References

Baddeley, Alan, Michael W. Eysenck, & Michael C. Anderson. 2009. Memory. East Sussex: Psychology Press.

Bartlett, F. C. 1932. Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Friedman, William J. 1993. Memory for the Time of Past Events. Psychological Bulletin 113(1), 44–66.

Halbwachs, Maurice. 1925. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kahana, Michael. 2012. Foundations of Human Memory. Oxford: Oxford, University Press.

LeDonne, Anthony. 2008. The Historiographical Jesus. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.

McClelland, James L. 1995. Constructive Memory and Memory Distortion: A Parallel-Distributed Processing Approach. In Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel L. Schacter, 69-90. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Moscovitch, Morris. 1995. Confabulation. In Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel L. Schacter, 226-51. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Neisser, Ulrich. 1967. Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Ost, James & Costall, Alan. 2002. Misremembering Bartlett: A Study in Serial Reproduction. British Journal of Psychology, 93, 243-55.

Schacter, Daniel L. 1995. “Memory Distortion: History and Current Status. In Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel L. Schacter, 1-46. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Schacter, Daniel L. 1996. Searching for Memory. New York: Basic Books.

Schacter, Daniel L. & Donna Rose Addis. 2007. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 362, 773-86.

Schacter, Daniel L., Scott A. Guerin, and Peggy L. St. Jacques. “Memory Distortion: an adaptive perspective.” Trends in Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts. October 2011. Vol. 15, No. 10.

Schudson, Michael. 1995. Dynamics of Distortion in Collective Memory. In Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel L. Schacter, 346-64. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Thakral, Preston P., Natasha M. Barberio, Aleea L. Devitt, & Daniel L. Schacter. 2022. Constructive Episodic Retrieval Processes Underlying Memory Distortion Contribute to Creative Thinking and Everyday Problem Solving. Memory & Cognition.

Valsiner, Jaan. 2017. Foreword: Active and Developing Patterns: Remembering into the Future. In Brady Wagoner. The Constructive Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wagoner, Brady. 2017a The Constructive Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wagoner, Brady. 2017b What Makes Memory Constructive? Culture & Psychology. 23(2),

Questions about Learning Timelines

2023-02-23T22:30:00.006-06:00

three aspects of my New Testament research that precipitated my research on Time in Memory

One: In 2012 and 2013, when I went over the road as a rookie trucker, my wife started reading my Year Books to my daughter. (You can still find them in my archives of 2006 & 2007, from 9 BCE to 14 CE). From hearing about their shared experience, it seemed I had succeeded in making each yearbook readable, but it also seemed I had failed to make the content absorb-able. It drove home to me that producing a comprehensive timeline of the New Testament Era might arguably succeed on paper but distributing such a publication might not be the best way to have people retain the material.

This distinction was one major reason why I did not continue writing Year Books into the reign of Tiberius. (My discovery of the biblioblogosphere in early 2008 and my first forays into Biblical Studies proper was the other main reason, but that's beside the point for today.)

Two: At the same time, during my rookie year of trucking, I decided to focus on writing up an academically viable treatment of my opinions about Matthew 2:22, primarily as a foothold for more arguments about the timeline but also as a proving ground for my academic advancement. During that year I began thinking more significantly about literary aspects of the text, such as whether Matthew's audience would have known enough of the Judean political chronology to achieve the same reading as I do, or at least something quite similar. After recognizing that audience knowledge of Archelaus's political future constitutes dramatic irony (because Joseph does not share that knowledge), I began reading Wayne Booth and there begins another new chapter in the story of my research.

What matters for today's post is that this gave me a second reason to think about how people remember chronology. In the first case (above) I wanted *my* readers to learn a collection of timelines. In this second case, I wanted to claim that Matthew's readers could have known one particular timeline.

Three: I was sitting in Odessa, TX, on 3-18-14 (and waiting to deliver pickles to a BBQ joint) when I was startled by Richard Bauckham's suggestion that readers of John 3:24 would have remembered THE COMPLETE TEXT VERBATIM of Mark 1:14. Without a doubt, my reaction was largely due to the previous two years of digging through the memory-based Jesus research of Keith & LeDonne; at any rate, I immediately thought THIS IS NOT HOW WE REMEMBER CHRONOLOGY... but then I was suddenly forced to ask myself WAIT, HOW DO WE REMEMBER CHRONOLOGY?

And that was the big one. The first two developments had primed my thinking to grab hold of this one. By June I had begun writing my blog series on Memory & Narrative and I continued to tug on that thread until early 2017, when I was invited to pursue my project on Joseph and Archelaus during formal graduate studies... at which point, for better and for worse, my forward progress on Time in Memory necessarily halted.

Because I wanted to use the core elements of that research in my thesis on Matt 2:22, I worked up an abstract and a presentation for ISSN 2021 (online only due to covid); a presentation which I posted here, later. And now the ISSN is meeting in Dallas next week. And I will be presenting an upgraded version of my research about how human beings remember timelines and storylines. Watch this space for more on that, soon.

Today's blogpost has itemized some key moments in my own history of questions about how we learn timelines. Although I can easily become engrossed in the cognitive theory I hope it seems clear that my interest continues to be driven by practical goals. First, I would like to improve the way we teach and learn historical eras, so "New Testament Context" might someday convey a fourth-dimensional aspect of development and change, rather than merely a static collection of facts and prevailing concepts. Second, I would like to predict ("retro-dict") what the popular narrative might have been about Archelaus's political career. Third, I would like to enhance our understanding of narrative storytelling as a vehicle for conveying (however distortedly) a series of changes from an author's limited perspective.

I could go on about those goals at length, unpacking and hopefully clarifying a great deal, but that is not the goal of today's blogpost.

In a nutshell, the fragmented chunks of narrative, offered above, comprise the basic gist of my own "whence and whither" regarding next week's presentation.

Just in case anyone finds themselves wondering.

For my regular readers, I will post the abstract soon, and maybe more.

Anon...

Why not Literary AND THEN Historical?

2023-01-19T20:29:00.004-06:00

Literary constructedness is not necessarily synonymous with fabricated or fictional, but literary constructedness in purportedly Non-Fiction writing absolutely does convey aspects of the authorial vision for whatever events they are trying to depict. In other words, when authors attempt to tell truths in ways that are biased, creative, or otherwise slanted, the style of the telling becomes part of the tale being told.

Therefore, one cannot understand the factual claims of an author without interpreting those claims in the light of that author’s overall literary construction. One cannot simply affirm the historicity of basic claims in the text while ignoring that text’s literarily constructed aspects. One cannot affirm differences between Mark’s Jesus and John’s Jesus (say, from the standpoint of theological emphasis) without supposing at least some ways in which Jesus was actually different from the authorial visions which Mark and John respectively (at least ostensibly) purported to be factual.

In sum, literary and theological approaches to the Gospels have absolutely no businesses ignoring historical Jesus scholarship.

Excuse me. I mean, individual scholars have every right (and the understandable need) to focus on some questions at the expense of other questions, but the programmatic and comprehensive division of the entire field according to these questions or those questions, is utterly unjustifiable.

New Testament scholars need to think more about how all these things affect one another. I have offered my opinions here on several occasions. God willing, I will do so again and again.

And again...

Kelber, Bultmann, & Scholarly Games with Words

2022-11-29T03:34:00.004-06:00

Here's a beautiful quote from Werner Kelber's 2002 article, a quote about which I have thoughts:

Bultmann’s model is burdened with significant problems stemming from a lack of understanding of orality, gospel narrativity, and, last but not least, memory. First, there is no such thing as “the original form” in oral speech. When the charismatic speaker pronounced a saying at one place and subsequently chose to deliver it elsewhere, neither he nor his hearers could have understood this other rendition as a secondhand version of the first one. And when the second rendition, delivered before a different audience, was at variance with the first one, neither the speaker nor his audience would have thought of differentiating between the primary, original wording and its secondary, derivative version. Instead, each proclamation was an autonomous speech act.

First and foremost, please observe Kelber's majestic command of disciplined historical imagination, as he logically reconstructs a few basic dynamics of what this experience must have been like for the early days of the Jesus movement. Here Kelber has in focus actual persons, repetitive human behaviors, the lived experience of that era, and a deep respect for the complexity of those processes and the indirect way they contributed to the eventual production of written Gospels. By contrast, Bultmann plays the role of fundamentalist, not only because he privileges the one correct version of Jesus's words (albeit a version he thinks has been lost), but also because he plays games with words, creatively editing texts until they fit with the ideology he deems most like Jesus.

My point is not to bash Bultmann but to demonstrate the contrasting focii: where Bultmann works with words and ideas, Kelber in this passage is thinking about people and events. Even today, when few Biblical Scholars stake any value on Bultmann conclusions, the rhetorical gamesmanship at SBL still depends largely on what kinds of transformations you can justify during an exegetical demonstration. "You have seen where it says XYZ & AOK, but I can draw in this comparative text to suggest that the writer actually meant ABC & PDQ." We have here the text. You think it means one thing. The scholar says it means something else.

Quite often, at SBL, that's pretty much the whole game.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, per se.

It took me several years of going to SBL to realize that the field of Biblical Scholarship, at its core and from its origin, is a guild populated by approved keepers of texts. They are not historians. They are not literature experts. They are curators of the sacred documents (or curators of once-sacred-but-still-culturally-relevant documents) who are trained to know the ancient languages, and they are expected to provide interpretation so that everyone else can be told what means what. Unfortunately, they do so much work on the text that their thinking often becomes fixated within the bounds of the page.

Momigliano said historians of ancient times need to read the text while thinking about the past, and although that advice requires a great deal of unpacking I believe it remains the one central problem in Biblical studies today.

Case in point: the only past Bultmann tried to reconstruct was a hypothetical text. Likewise, the only area of discussion in which Gospels scholars routinely exhibit historical thinking, both defending hypotheses and extrapolating developmental trajectories, is the "synoptic problem," which again involves hypothetical texts. Even historical Jesus scholarship (with few exceptions) did the same thing up until very recently, using historical criticism to determine whether given snippets of text were "authentic" or not, and then providing a summary of the results so that we knew how many bits of the sacred text they could recommend for acceptance. In all this, consider the scope. Original forms. Hypothetical documents. Authentic words. Even those who put "vox" over "verba" remain fixed on the words in the text; extrapolating the gist of a given statement is still games with words.

All these examples show scholars who LITERALLY see nothing in the past but the text.

Perhaps it should not go unsaid that all such endeavors can be strictly controlled, whereas historical imagination cannot be measured or regulated.

The activities of Jesus, including his preaching, generated a living and active experience, for thousands of perceivers. The Jesus movement was a dynamic years-long adventure from whence our sacred texts quite indirectly (and at least somewhat inadvertently) came into being.

Understanding Gospel narratives should require us to think like full-fledged narratologists, a task that even those who employ "narrative approaches" still, by and large, refuse to attempt, probably because studies about plot, setting, and character still fit the old game, letting interpreters declare that this character means X and that character means Y and it all thereby illustrates something theological and/or political about the writer's opinions. And maybe that's all true sometimes. However, the idea that a narrative passage might primarily represent the author's view of past events is STILL not on the table and "narrative critics" of the Gospels NEVER talk about ways that representation might be taken up for consideration by historical Jesus scholars.

Sadly, my complaints would require these curators of texts to think like both narratologists AND historians. And that is probably too much work; truly, I am not without sympathy. My scholar friends study reams of materials that I still won't bother to take on, and I suppose in most cases that somebody must.

However, for the good of humanity, not to mention christendom, this kind of system-wide default obstructionism needs to stop.

We need more Biblical scholars to raise their game off the page, first by learning how to reconstruct a dynamic narratological situation which represents the author's vision of past events, and second by learning how to challenge that authorial vision and investigate possibilities of the actual past.

~~~!~~!~~~

Before I end this post, here is Kelber's promised critique of Bultmann's blind spot on "narrativity":

It is evident that Bultmann cannot attribute constructive powers and narrative creativity to the final gospel productions. As he views them, they are almost entirely the outworkings of tradition. Mark, generally considered the oldest of the canonical gospels, merely brings to fruition what in the tradition had already been well on the way toward the gospel formation. Because the gospels are considered the expected summations of pre-gospel processes, they offer in principle little new information over and above tradition, and are for this reason unworthy of any attentive narrative consideration.

Insofar as this goes, it's correct, and these are solid points, but "narrative critics" generally use these principles to keep playing the same old games. Recognizing narrative constructedness simply allows them to play games with larger passages all at once; but still, X means Y.

There has been some progress on constructive reading in Characterization, but it stops short of inferring things about the represented world as a whole, or the represented Jesus movement across its represented duration. And, as always, what they reconstruct of the story world they do not proceed to reconsider through historical inquiry.

But these are topics I have addressed elsewhere, as I will continue to do.

Anon...

The Place of "Story" in Christian Formation

2022-10-30T15:57:00.004-05:00

Reality is vast and chaotic but consciousness is paltry and linear, so the past through remembering becomes ordered and sequenced. We cannot think about time without imposing this narrative mode. We cannot even keep track of time objectively without selective correlation of unrelated but comparable dynamics. In our daily lives we filter out a multitude of churning incoherence and we fixate on anything constant, which allows our minds comfort and stability. How much more do we fail to grasp, beyond ourselves, the complexities of a passing year or century?

The stories we tell about the past are inevitably distorted, to some degree or another.

Nevertheless, storytelling and ordered remembering are essential cognitive tools, absolutely required for operating in the world. Comprehending the origins and development of things usually helps us to anticipate and prepare for inevitable challenges, not because history repeats (for by and large it does not), but simply because the expertise required for skillful living includes an understanding of how to deal with frequently variable conditions. In sum, it is precisely because of reality’s unceasing cacophony that we must make all efforts to truncate, to compress, to organize, to curate, to narrate, and to process factual and true information.

This miniature treatise sums up all that I’ve learned in my research, except to add that we ought to have regular clinics about how to do all these things more effectively.

To select an example that illustrates the above, let's go back to where I began.

In understanding Pauline eccclesiology, my original impetus was to argue that Christian teaching was too fixated on absolute principles, too willfully ignorant of practical circumstance and actual human experience, and my chosen strategy at that time was to demonstrate that Paul’s approach to ministry and church government (such as it was) was more complicated than our religious principles could allow. Paul's ecclesiology was conditional in each situation. Paul's ideas about elders evolved as he learned more from working with each different church. Paul's efforts to train extra-local itinerant workers also developed over time. He was experimenting and advising up to the level of his growing wisdom with each new set of journeys.

To understand such complexity, however, we begin with a simplified timeline. Paul and Barnabas went to four cities in Galatia BEFORE the circumcision party wreaked havoc on those churches AND THEN Paul found out that brand new baby Christians make terrible elders. AND SO ON. Paul then leaves Titus in Troas and Luke in Philipi and Timothy in Thessalonica and Silas in Berea and Paul himself stays in Corinth AT WHICH POINT he realizes that God's work needs more workers. SO THEN he makes plans for a training in Ephesus and INVITES qualified candidates from various churches to join him in moving to Ephesus so he can teach them, daily, in a rented lecture hall. AND THEN AFTER SOME YEARS OF TRAINING Paul takes them back around the Aegean and appoints elders in all of those churches where he previously left his associates as church planters. AND SO ON. AND SO ON.

The simplified timeline distorts reality in one way, but to avoid thinking about Paul's work in four dimensions distorts history in a way that is far worse. To suppose that "biblical principles" can be extracted and codified as universally applicable would require us to establish an unchanging religious system that forces people to fit into its rigid mold, rather than building a more adaptive method of responding to spiritual need with practical wisdom gained from a variety of hard won experiences.

As I said further up, "the expertise required for skillful living includes an understanding of how to deal with frequently variable conditions." If we wish to live skillfully, we must collect and tell Christian stories that account for differing circumstances, differing personnel, differing social conditions, and differing cultural conflicts. We must collect and tell Christian stories that allow God to remain sovereign rather than placing God in a box of our own principled certainties. If we believe in the biblical stories, then we must observe above all that God's movement is not always predictable.

It is the vanity and fatigue of old authoritarians that insists on crafting an invariable system but a living experience must adapt and allow for adaptation. The choice between these two impulses depends on whether you wish to foster interaction between humans and God, or whether you only wish to get it right on paper.

The way we tell our Christian stories, including our grasp of the New Testament itself, must recognize these undeniable truths.

Anon...

Narratology (bigger than a breadbox) vs Linguistics (smaller than a breadbox)

2022-10-02T15:17:00.002-05:00

Linguistic theory has not yet accounted for the scope of narrative texts, and may not be able to; at least, so says Frank Ankersmit in his 2012 opus, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation. This theoretical divide has practical problems and I have written about those here before. Today's blog post is simply to sum up the difference by way of an interesting comparison.

Way back in the 90's, someone told me a big problem in Physics was that relativity theory dealt with everything "bigger than a bread box" and Quantum theory dealt with everything "smaller than a bread box." Apparently, some physicists were trying to unify the two theories, and I don't know if they ever did, but let's leave that issue apart from this analogy. My point is that one theory dealt well with the micro stuff and a different theory dealt well with the macro stuff.

In a similar way, linguistic theory does a good job observing distinctions between meaning, truth, and reference when linguists examine language on a small scale; that is, when linguists examine particular uses of words and phrases and individual statements, their explanations make a lot of sense. Everything within their purview remains smaller than a breadbox, so to speak. In student textbooks, the examples, illustrations and exercises which populate each chapter and lesson, invariably, focus on making sense of language in bits and chunks, in semiotic and/or propositional units. If at some point the student must analyze an entire paragraph, the exercise only works for one linguistic unit at a time. The summary content of one descriptive paragraph has never been, and of course cannot ever be, diagrammed or dissected as a unit.

By comparison, Ankersmit explains that trying to understand narrative passages **AS A WHOLE** requires us to reconsider our concepts about meaning, truth, and reference. I will not in this space attempt to explain HOW it is that we must begin doing so. I will simply point you back to that 2012 opus. What I will say for now is that extended swaths of narrated content, as a whole, simply cannot be mapped onto reality with the same kind of precision. We can use words with precision when situations are fixed and distinctions are simple, but narration attempts to account for complex dynamics (e.g., human activity over time). This reality implies we need one way of understanding how language works in the small scale and another way of understanding how language can work when amassed altogether in the authorial effort to represent a dramatic or comedic or historical or biographical emplotment.

We can almost dial this back to Thomas Carlyle who said almost 200 years ago that "narrative is linear" whereas "action is solid," but if all this were merely that simple then why are New Testament scholars still hedging their narrative studies for fear of encroaching on "referential" concerns? Why do "narrative critics" and "narrative theologians" *STILL* follow Hans Frei by engaging narrative meaning only when they can insulate themselves from asking questions about historical truth?

Personally, I do not believe that the problem is merely dogmatic concerns and religious commitments. Rather, I actually think there are academic pathways still being followed (like calf-paths through the woods) in which scholars have wrongly attempted to understand, for example, Gospel stories about Jesus returning to his hometown, by using the same tools that linguists use for understanding words and phrases and statements. In my humble opinion, the narrative value of those stories has been summarily overlooked because scholars are accustomed to treating groups of sentences and groups of paragraphs as if the entire narrative passage were the same as one semiotic bit or chunk. Brilliant professional scholars actually talk as if the complex narrative situations being represented in Matthew, Mark, and Luke must be judged as "the same story" or "a different story." They speak as if they must judge the truth value of the passage as a whole, either up or down. These are merely some aspects of the problem.

But enough of my pet peeves. Let's get back to these breadboxes.

A community of language users who share the same conceptual repertoire can agree to delimit only those concepts which can be distinctly and coherently delimited. At some point, we run up against the natural limits of human cognitive function. For example, if American English speakers all decide to use "sign" in one way and "symbol" in another, that convention is cognitively workable. Our brains can successfully keep track of such "one to one correspondences" when the scope remains greatly limited. We can learn to associate thousands of "signifieds" and "signifiers" so long as they all remain distinguishable. What we cannot do, and have never done, is assign a given set of sentences as "THE" corresponding label for a given set of events.

When Tacitus and Josephus wrote about Rome attacking Jerusalem, they each used a very large set of words. The scale of the narration in each case is linguistically massive. That is, the physical volume of each writer's discourse is measurably immense. One wrote in Latin and one in Greek, but that is the least of our problems. Ankersmit's question would be: does either man's extensive collection of narration deserve to be granted the official status of "THE" set of words which precisely accounts for the full range and breadth of events which took place during that ancient conflict?

There is no possible way for scholars to judge, say, that Tacitus's narrative account should be the signifier and the Judean War should be its signified, while Josephus's narrative account comparatively fails to achieve the proper amount of precision required before we can recognize a referential correspondence between that set of words and the true historical events. For a second problem, if the guild of scholars did declare such a thing, not even their own brightest minds could ever hope to retain such a massive (collective) linguistic signifier. Oh, some scholars could go around saying, "Tacitus got it right and Josephus did not," or vice versa in other circles, but they could not actually complete the cognitive task of uploading the one approved set of language into their cultural repertoires as THE understood and agreed-upon way of "referencing" the historical "truth."

In sum, the narrated emplotments of historians are far too voluminous, much too much bigger than a breadbox, for any scholar to approach the analysis of these writings by employing tools which are useful when analyzing linguistic units that are smaller than a breadbox.

This is where I should conclude today's humble blogpost, but please bear with me for a brief application of these thoughts to the study of the Gospels.

Given all I have said above, it therefore follows that we must prioritize the reconstruction of authorial meaning (if and) when we seek to receive narrative texts as (erstwhile) representations of history. Assessments of referential value and questions about possible truth must be dealt with subsequently, rather than prioritized during exegesis. Indeed, no exegete who prioritizes questions about historical accuracy can ever successfully comprehend narrative meaning.

First, we seek to understand what is being claimed by the writer, we seek to grasp the full measure of that writer's purported depiction. Furthermore, this task is not a sidebar pursuit, in the way that "literary" and "historical" studies have been kept ever apart. Rather, the task I describe is priority one.

Narratological comprehension comes first. Historical judgment comes later.

As it does, as it will, as it must.

At any rate, if you want to understand these things more completely, please read Ankersmit's first seven chapters in MTaRiHR.

Anon...

Why the Lukan Census is NOT set in 6 CE

2022-08-28T20:19:00.004-05:00

Today's post is about reading narrative properly when that narrative includes a dubious historical reference. Today's lesson is that figuring out Luke's narrative's temporal setting (aka historical context) requires us to put more weight on that narrative's overall construction of reality, rather than a single detail. Today's key point is that Luke purports and depicts a particular kind of registration event, one which counts heads and affects people living in Galilee, whereas the census of 6 CE was entirely unlike Luke's census on both of these points. Today's conclusion is that Luke's census (whether representing truth or fiction) cannot be mistaken for the census of Quirinius, unless one does not understand how to make sense of Luke's narrative as a representation of reality.

Now, here comes today's blogging.

Think of Luke's reference to Quirinius like the address number on the front of a house. If someone painted your house with your neighbor's address number, would your neighbor come tell you to get out of their home? Think of Luke's reference to Quirinius like the hood ornament of a car. If someone put a little jaguar figurine on the front of their Volkswagen, would you then expect to pay twice as much for the VW? Think of Luke's reference to Quirinius like a name tag on a colleague or co-worker. If you walked up to Mark Goodacre at SBL and you saw that his name tag said "Lou Ferrigno" then you might make a Hulk joke but you would never sincerely mistake the telegenic British Jesus scholar for the arguably less telegenic Italian actor and bodybuilder.

Despite your immediate grasp of these common sense illustrations, I came across the common error yet again tonight. On page 138 of Bruce Chilton's new Herod book, he correctly observes that Matthew's Gospel places Jesus's birth in the days of Herod the Great but then says "Luke's Gospel disagrees, placing the event a decade later. Luke makes Jesus's birth coincide with the Roman intervention that ended Archelaus's tenure in a census under the Roman governor Quirinius."

Ahem. Luke does no such thing.

First, that "Roman intervention that ended Archelaus's tenure in a census" did not include a registration of persons. Josephus (Ant. 17.355) tells us, "Quirinius, a man of consular rank, was sent by Caesar to take a census of property in Syria and to sell the estate of Archelaus." (The Loeb edition unfortunately includes a footnote from Wikgren preceding Chilton in the misguided Lukan conflation.) Let's hone in on that key detail: a census of property. According to our only source on this, Quirinius did not undertake a registration of people, whereas Luke's purported census famously says that every man had to be counted. Note carefully here that Luke's claim does not need to be verified in order to be comprehensible; we clearly have a depiction of something other than what Quirinius is said to have done.

The Augustan age observed two types of taxation: the poll tax (tributum capitis) and the land tax (tributum soli). The land tax was the older custom, practiced widely in antiquity, and historically such "tribute" could often be paid at least partly in kind., which helps explain why Josephus could plausibly claim that Julius Caesar had exempted Judea from taxes "in the seventh year." Ancient wealth was almost exclusively landed, which made the property tax a prudent first step when Augustus exiled Archelaus and annexed his territories. The best way for Rome to begin raising revenues from Judea was to survey the holdings of wealthy landowners. The proconsul's property based survey was also a complimentary activity so that Quirinius could ascertain which holdings were definitely owned by Archelaus, free and clear of other claims, and thus which holdings were immediately and directly forfeit.

For these reasons, there should be no doubt that Quirinius was indeed sent (if he was sent at all) to take a registration of property rather than people.

The second major problem with Chilton and Wikgren's misguided conflation is that Quirinius was explicitly sent to conduct his registration within the bounds of Archelaus's surrendered territories. Obviously this excludes the domains of Antipas and Philip, and yet no one seems to have noticed that Luke's purported census requires at least one resident of Galilee to be counted along with Judeans. \

Now, if someone wants to suggest cleverly that Joseph could have been called to Judea on the basis of property he owned in Judea, then I say do not put the cart of historical hypothesis in front of the horse of narratological interpretation. Even if we set aside the charge of special pleading, this is not the appropriate time to consider whether the historical Joseph might have owned property which was subject to the assigned scope of Quirinius's registration. The question at hand regards Luke's depiction. Nowhere in his narration does Luke suggest anything that might imply Joseph owns property in Judea, let alone whether such an invisible detail might be the sole cause of his needing to join in the census. Quite the contrary, Luke 2:3 explicitly claims that it was not merely Joseph but ἐπορεύοντο πάντες ἀπογράφεσθαι, ἕκαστος εἰς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ πόλιν. Purportedly, "everyone" had to be counted. Purportedly, "everyone" had to travel.

Again, please note the potential veracity of Luke's astonishing claim does not impenge on the question at hand, which remains exclusively focused on whether or not Luke's constructed narrative should be read against the backdrop of the year 6 CE. In sum, the issue is when Luke sets his story. If Luke presents us with a census in which Galilean residents are being counted by Roman administration, then Luke has not presented us with a census that mirrors the known events of Quirinius's census in 6 CE.

Why, then, did Luke mention Quirinius? I return to my three common sense illustrations at top. If you see your neighbor's house number on your house, you have found a mistake. If you see a small jaguar on the hood of a VW, you are looking at a dubiously modified VW. If you see Mark Goodacre wearing the wrong nametag, you are either looking at a jokester or else someone who has been pranked. Along these lines, the most likely explanation has always been and will always be that Luke goofed on a detail. He got the name wrong. An alternative mistake--and this is less likely linguistically but it fits better into Luke's overall narrative--is that Luke got his grammar wrong, using πρώτη to mean "before" rather than "first". Either way, as Mary Smallwood offered decades ago, quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.

Whatever the case with this name dropped in 2:2, my purpose today was to demonstrate that a singular reference should not matter more in our exegetical work than the overall situation being depicted by Luke's narration as a whole. Luke's story world entails activities which imply their own setting within the days of the unified Herodian kingdom.

Thus, you remain free to suppose that Luke made it all up but you should no longer parrot the claim that Luke's text implies Jesus was born in the aftermath of Archelaus's exile. As this humble blogpost amply demonstrates, Luke's text does no such thing. Quite to the contrary, Luke's narration exhibits a profound lack of any possible detail which might cause his story to align recognizably with the census conducted by Quirinius. Rather, Luke has constructed a story which specifically depicts a time and place when the people Galilee and Judea were supposedly being registered by the Romans, at once.

By the way, there's a larger methodological issue behind all of this. I wish more Jesus scholars would ask why it is that scholarship on the Gospels has so willfully disregarded the hermeneutic challenge of receiving narratives as representation. I wish I did not need to inform Gospel scholars that the contextual implications of an overall narrative representation should be weighed more heavily, for the purposes of basic reading comprehension, than a single reference to a person whose claim to fame lies demonstrably outside the given narrative situation.

But I do need to explain this. Apparently.

And so I shall keep explaining it.

Anon...

Hans Frei: The Good and the Bad

2022-08-20T23:50:00.003-05:00

The following 2,091 words excerpts my erstwhile thesis, in which I discuss the following two points: (1) Hans Frei's excellent analysis of a deeply seated problem with critical readings of biblical narrative, and (2) Hans Frei's regrettable (cough Barthian cough) opposition to all aspects of reading and critical thought which had anything at all to do with factual truth and historical thinking.

In my humble opinion, Frei's 1974 analysis of the critical turn is spot on but his anti-historicism, quite sadly, has been incredibly influential among Biblical scholars, including plenty of non-Barthian theologians and some foundational works of the field of NT narrative criticism as well. Alas, however, all that would be two other stories.

The last 45 words of section two, below, sum up three ways in which I differentiate my own approach and outlook against Frei's.

Enjoy.

(1) From Pre–critical to Historical critical Exegesis

Hans Frei’s intellectual history of biblical interpretation, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, helpfully contrasts two ways of dealing with narrative material by surveying the transition from pre–critical exegesis to historical critical exegesis.[1] According to Frei, pre–critical interpreters believed Bible stories were true because the words “meant what they said,” conveying literal meaning and referring to historical events.[2] The realism of narrative depiction invited a literal reading and the assumption of historical truth.[3] Thus, meaning, truth, and reference were hermeneutically united.[4] This naiveté broke down once the new empiricism distinguished literal meaning from “how the facts really occurred.”[5] The world of the bible now diverged from the world of actual history because “historical critical reading” required “matching the written description against the reconstruction of the probable historical sequence to which it referred.”[6] Wherever the biblical text seemed historically questionable, interpreters redefined the “true history” or “true sense” of narrative material, as needed.[7] In this new paradigm, Frei says, the meaning of Bible stories became something other than the depictions themselves.[8]

Effectively, “the realistic or history–like quality of biblical narratives, acknowledged by all… was immediately transposed into the quite different issue of whether or not the realistic narrative was historical.”[9] Prioritizing judgments about historical accuracy requires critics to find textual meaning in ways that accord with those judgments. They engage narrativity only after weighing historicity. To illustrate this dynamic we need only recall the previous chapter, where most interpretations of βασιλεύει in Matt 2:22 are logically oriented around the question of referential accuracy: some find Matthew’s writing “confirmed” by Josephus while others explain Matthew’s “incorrect” usage, or claim the word means something else.[10] Prior historical judgment restricts interpretative possibilities. Where pre–critical meaning once dictated truth, assessing truth would now delimit meaning; the dynamic reversed itself, but truth and meaning stayed unified.[11]

In sum, historical critical exegetes maintained the pre–critical unity of “history–likeness (literal meaning) and history (ostensive reference).”[12] Engaging narrative realism was thought to affirm some degree of historical probability and this correlation was assumed inversely as well.[13]

Those who wanted to affirm their historical factuality used the realistic character or history–likeness as evidence in favor of this claim, while those who denied the factuality also finally denied that the history–likeness was a cutting feature… they thought history–likeness identical with at least potentially true history.[14]

Indeed, this category mistake remains evident when scholars claim that verisimilitude suggests a greater historical likelihood or plausibility,[15] as also when scholars dismiss bits and chunks of material to produce piecemeal readings.[16] That both positive and negative claims demonstrably confuse/conflate narrativity with historicity helps validate these deeper insights of Frei’s unique intellectual history and illustrates the problem with historical critical exegesis.[17]

The prioritization of judgment in reading implies an assumption that narrative should or must depict past events accurately. While distinguishing particular narratives from the actual past, historical critics continued to conflate narrative depiction with referential accuracy in general. This hermeneutic roadblock is what subsequent narrative approaches attempted to bypass.

(2) “Realistic Narrative Reading” (Postliberal Theology)

Frei prescribed his own solution via scattered fragments, which cohere logically as follows.[18] He suggests critical readers may “distinguish sharply between literal sense and historical reference” and “allow the literal sense to stand as the meaning, even if one believed that the story does not refer historically.”[19] Exegesis of story content depends on literary realism rather than factuality or truth because “the peculiar way in which realistic narrative means or makes sense” involves “the cumulative rendering of a temporal framework through realistic depiction and chronological continuity.”[20] Realistic stories “mean what they say” whether or not they report history reliably, and realistic readers understand that the world of the narrative is not necessarily the real world of actual history.[21] There is much to commend in these axiomatic assertions.

Unfortunately, Frei sees little value in going “beyond the narrative text” because historical claims are either modest or incredible, and always based on speculation.[22] Historical questions may be important but that does not make them answerable.[23] The impossibility of historical verification takes us back to “the story simply as a story.”[24] Narrative meaning is best identified when suspending judgment about the “philosophical puzzle” of reference; determining how narratives might “refer” requires a type of judgment that goes beyond hermeneutics, so narrative interpretation should ignore “the relation of the text to reality.”[25]

With these arguments, Frei distinguished his method (“realistic narrative reading” or “narrative interpretation”) from historical critical exegesis, saying the two might both exist “side by side” without disrupting each other.[26] However, when presenting to the Karl Barth Society in 1974, Frei detailed an explicitly subordinate dynamic.[27]

You utilize, on an ad hoc basis, what the historical scholars offer.… Always be a theological exegete and then in particular cases of texts you will find an ad hoc relation [with] the always tentative results of historical criticism.[28] . . . [Barth] felt confident… there was no conflict… provided always that historical critical exegesis was not the governess but was in service of the theological exegete.[29]

Altogether, then, “realistic reading” can utilize and regulate prior judgments, exclude judgment while reading, and suspend future judgment indefinitely. From every angle, Frei’s separation of meaning and truth ensures dominance of theological “truth” over historical facts.[30]

For all his talk of narrative, Frei rarely did exegesis himself.[31] His straightforward approach to “history–like” material is arguably designed to prohibit subjective interpretations.[32] Indeed, Frei’s fellow Barthians and “post–critical” followers typically cite his work to justify reaffirmations of traditional theology.[33] Nothing in Frei’s approach supports narratological reconstruction, let alone historiography. Thus, in contrast to Frei, my proposed method will suspend judgment temporarily (not indefinitely), contextualize the story world historically (not theologically), affirm that context is determined by audience reception (not by previous dogma), and invite critical judgment to have the last word through historical inquiry.

[1] Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 1–16. By “historical critical exegesis,” I indicate readings that emphasize historical judgment. For a nuanced survey of all that “historical criticism” properly entails, see Beth M. Sheppard, The Craft of History and the Study of the New Testament, (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012)., 24–29.

[2] Frei, Eclipse, 1–5.

[3] Frei, Eclipse, 11; Cf. Hans W. Frei, Reading Faithfully, ed. Mike Higton and Mark Alan Bowald, vol. 1 (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2015), 75. According to Frei, Eclipse, 2–7, allegory, figuration, and metaphor constituted a secondary layer of meaning (naturally constrained by the literal meaning) and became “something like the opposite” of literal reading only after the rise of biblical criticism. Cf. Frei, Eclipse, 17–50; Frei, Reading, 1:74–6.

[4] Frei consistently frames his discussion with these three terms.

[5] Frei, Eclipse, 10–11.

[6] Frei, Eclipse, 5–7.

[7] Frei, Eclipse, 8–11; popular interpretative foci included reconstructing events, compositional origin, cultural setting, allegory, myth, and more. See also Frei, Reading Faithfully, vol. 1., 28, 76–7.

[8] Frei, Eclipse, 10–1, 103; cf. Frei, Reading, 31, 100.

[9] Frei, Eclipse, 16; cf. Frei, Eclipse, 51–65; Frei, Reading, 76–7, 100.

[10] See Chapter One, Section 2a & 2b. The exceptions were McNeile and Smallwood, whose assessed narrative meaning contrasted against their own judgments about historical accuracy.

[11] Cf. Frei, Reading, ix–x, xvi.

[12] Frei, Eclipse, 12, decries “the hermeneutical reduction of the former [=meaning] to an aspect of the latter [=reference],” a common refrain throughout Eclipse; see, e.g., 93–104, 138, 141, 160, 220–23, 230, 274–5, 323–4.

[13] Frei, Eclipse, 11–12.

[14] Frei, Eclipse, 12.

[15] R. T. France, “Scripture, Tradition and History in the Infancy Narratives of Matthew,” in Richard T. France and David Wenham, eds., Gospel Perspectives. Vol. 2: Studies of History and Tradition in the Four Gospels (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1981), 255, 59–61, Craig A. Evans, Jesus and His World: The Archaeological Evidence (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 9–10; Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2016), 343–4. Leveraged disclaimers are also common; e.g., “While verisimilitude does not guarantee historicity, it is for historians its sine qua non” (D. Moody Smith, quoted by Robert Kysar in Paul N. Anderson, Felix Just, and Tom Thatcher, eds., John, Jesus, and History, (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2007), 84, cf. 184, 218–9) and “Verisimilitude by itself does not and cannot establish historicity. But it does [make some portrayals] more plausible” (Paula Fredriksen in Anderson, et al, John, Jesus, and History, 269).

[16] Dale C. Allison, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2009), 35–42, 54–8; Nolland, Matthew, 120–1, 121n.151; cf. Brown, Birth, 615. The Jefferson Bible is only rare as a printed publication; by preserving one man’s piecemeal reading, it exemplifies something more typical.

[17] For further validation of Frei’s meta critical claims, see Tom Thatcher, “Anatomies of the Fourth Gospel,” in Tom Thatcher and Stephen D. Moore, eds., Anatomies of Narrative Criticism (Atlanta: SBL, 2008), 2–6.

[18] Hans W. Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975). 60–1, eschewed the word “method” and declared his own theory “minimal… enough to elucidate what is actually being done in exegesis.”

[19] Frei, Eclipse, 11. Elsewhere in Eclipse, Frei’s own vision is conveyed obliquely by repeated laments against what others failed to see or do; e.g., 156, 181–2, 198–9, 217–8, 220, 235, 269–70, 273–4, 277, 280, 322–4.

[20] Frei, Identity, 106, 145; Frei, Eclipse, 150–52.

[21] Frei, Identity, 59–61.

[22] Frei, Identity, 103–4. The full quotation says historical reconstruction “forces us to rely [on] the independent power of our own interpretative devices to unlock the significance of the story,” as if historiography amounts to exegesis.

[23] Frei, Identity, 176.

[24] Frei, Identity, 133, 145–6, 165, 175, 177.

[25] Frei, Reading, 40, 44, takes narrative texts “to refer translinguistically or representationally” (as if representation is a sub–category of reference), and suggests integrating correspondence and coherence theories of truth into a “super–theory.” Cf. Frei, Reading, 99 and 104–5, which goes on about “symbolization,” semiotics, “reality–laden” symbols as “trans–hermeneutical concerns,” and “that representationalism all of us want to avoid,” again conflating reference with representation. Frei, Reading, 40, 44; cf. 99, 103–5; cf. notes 25 & 28, above.

[26] Frei, Eclipse, 135–6.

[27] Hans W. Frei, “Scripture as Realistic Narrative: Karl Barth as Critic of Historical Criticism,” in Thy Word Is Truth: Barth on Scripture, ed. George Hunsinger (Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2012), 54–5. See also the editorial remark by Mike Higton and Mark Alan Bowald in Frei, Reading Faithfully, vol. 1., 49.

[28] Frei, “Scripture as Realistic Narrative,” 55, positing slight nuance between Barth’s early and later work.

[29] Frei, “Scripture as Realistic Narrative,” 59; Cf. Hans W. Frei, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): “depending on what we do, one kind of reading will have priority.” For more confessed religious motivations, see Frei, Reading, 37–9, 106–7.

[30] Frei, Reading, ix–xi, 28, 37–40, 44, 104–5.

[31] The prominent exception being Frei, Identity, 145–83.

[32]Cornel West, “On Frei’s Eclipse of Biblical Narrative,” USQR 37 (1983): 299-302; Stephen Prickett, Words and The Word: Language, poetics and biblical interpretation, Reprinted. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989)., 194–5; Mark I. Wallace, The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology, Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics 6 (Macon, GA: Mercer, 1990), 41–4. These critics, responding to Frei’s standard rhetoric (e.g., Eclipse, 218: meaning = “the realistic, fact–like depictions themselves”), perhaps overlooked rare exceptions e.g., Eclipse 181–2 (meaning = “the event and its interpretation”) and Eclipse 2–3, 6 (typology = “an extension of literal reading”) and Frei’s actual practice of using depiction as a springboard for theological analysis; still, by and large, their criticisms are fair.

[33] On his lifelong engagement with Barthian hermeneutics, see Frei, Eclipse, viii; Lance B. Pape, The Scandal of Having Something to Say (Waco, Tex: Baylor University Press, 2013), 15n35, 18, 41; Frei, Theology and Narrative, 3, 5–7, 9, 256–7 (cf. 186, 208); Cf. David Ford, Barth and God’s Story (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1981). On Frei’s lasting influence, see, e.g., George Hunsinger, “Postliberal theology,” in Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42–57; Jason A. Springs, Toward a Generous Orthodoxy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Prioritizing Representation Despite Fictionalization (Acts)

2022-08-06T14:01:00.010-05:00

Suppose for the sake of this argument that the book of Acts is a forgery, an elaborate fiction, composed decades after the fact by someone who did not actually travel with Paul of Tarsus, as the narrative claims. Obviously, every claim by the narrator is now immediately suspect, but I daresay the guild has been wrong to prioritize questions about historical accuracy. We have other questions that should be prioritized. Please note, I say "prioritized" because the literary approach should not be a silo but a prelude to historical critical examination. How can one determine whether the text conveys truth unless one has first prioritized a determination of meaning? The literary must precede the historical. Observe.

Given the supposition that Acts was not actually written by Paul's friend Luke, the apparent fraud still constructs a particular story world which incorporates specific contextual details, and those details affect our reconstruction of the authorial meaning. This is all the more important if we do suppose fictionalization because the non-fiction writer may occasionally report facts which do not serve their agenda but the fiction writer (of necessity) thinks constantly about whether each detail fits the overall tapestry. Whether or not narrative content is true does not determine whether or how it should affect our understanding of the text.

In this blogpost, I offer two examples.

The more straightforward example is the text's comprehensive avoidance of Nero's popular name. Observing the changeover from Felix to Festus, the narrator provokes a knowing audience to infer (quite easily) that the developing storyline has by now entered the time period of Nero's administration. We then proceed through several chapters of text within which characters continue referring to the ostensibly present-day emperor as "Caesar" (Acts 25-28). As language in dialogue, these perfunctory honorariums are neither telling nor unique because we observed the same verisimilitude in Acts 17, when Thessalonian people referred to "Caesar" while the story world remained explicitly set in the era of Claudius. It was most appropriate for people to call the sitting Emperor by the title (assumed name) of Caesar, and so this itself is a minor instance of maintaining verisimilitude. However, what is striking and unusual about this extended passage in Acts 25-28 is that the narrator has so many opportunities to add a clarifying "Nero" as explanation but avoids doing so throughout. Furthermore, this contrasts sharply with previous references to Augustus (Luke 1), Tiberius (Luke 2), and Claudius (Acts 11, 18). The apparent implication is that the (fraudulent) author would like for the audience to infer that this narrator was speaking (as the author was composing) while also alive during the time of Nero.

Now, I should clarify emphatically that the above point cannot justify anyone's apologetic maneuver to claim that said instance of verisimilitude provides evidence of probable historicity. It does not. As Harry Frankfurt has said, liars are quite careful about presenting ostensible truth. Succeeding in lies, by definition, requires maintaining the believable appearance of truth. Thus, in all sincerity, I maintain this position: verisimilitude is only evidence of verisimilitude. Furthermore, this issue has been contentious among Biblical scholars because they so often prioritize questions about historicity. What SHOULD be prioritized instead, in my humble opinion, is understanding what the text ostensibly seeks to convey.

Thus, we should find it easy to conclude that the author of Acts, whom we for now will continue to assume has committed a fraud, clearly wanted their audience to believe that the text had been written in the days of Paul and Nero. We might also note in passing that, of course, if the text is not a forgery then the same literary conveyance remains apparent. Ostensible composition during the time of Nero, whether true or false, is something the author wished to convey.

My second example is somewhat more involved, but makes exactly the same point.

Let us continue presuming that Acts is a forgery and observe that the fraudulent author has given his fictitious self (through narration) a close affiliation with the church in Caesarea. We know this not only because Caesarea explicitly supports Paul and warns him about danger, and not only because pseudo-Luke (the character) appears to spend two years among them while Paul sits in prison, but also because Caesarea ostensibly provides the narrator with so much of his information about the early days of the church in Jerusalem; or at least, so we may gather via narrative subtext, as follows.

On a first reading, there is no apparent reason why the activities of Philip (a minor character introduced at 6:5) should occupy the bulk of chapter 8, nor why the episode with Cornelius is excessively drawn out when the narrator's immediate rhetorical need (to show Peter being challenged on the issue of circumcision) could have been fulfilled so much more succinctly. Although the randomness of this focus upon Philip and Cornelius can at first be received as the kind of arbitrary occurrences typically proffered by most works of history (i.e., presented as if this is simply what happened), the reader of Acts will eventually learn otherwise. In 21:8-9 we are told Philip is now present in the home town of Cornelius, apparently having settled there long enough to raise four daughters accustomed to speaking up (προφητεύω) in the church meetings. Furthermore, this church in Caesarea supports Paul passionately (21:10-16) whereas James and the elders show indifference and arguably even disdain (21:18-25) for Paul's mission. Even if we cannot quite reinterpret Agabus's warning as a prediction that Paul would receive no help from the church in Jerusalem, we still cannot avoid the strong contrast between these gentile believers in Caesarea (who fear setting foot in Jerusalem), on the one hand, and James and the elders (who not only require Paul to publicly distance himself from gentile believers but also apparently fear no danger from being in Jerusalem themselves), on the other.

In hindsight, these late discoveries should absolutely remove our sense of randomness about those earlier episodes. On a second reading, we can more easily note that the episode about Stephen is bookended by his association with Philip (6:5, 8:4). We can also now observe that Philip's early story is framed by the question Cornelius had not yet answered for Peter: can Gentiles receive the holy spirit without being circumcised? At least, Philip's purported experience shows Samaritans (who as children of Abraham were well known to practice circumcision) receiving the holy spirit and the Ethiopian eunuch (who most audiences would most naturally assume could not have been circumcised, even though it is true that some eunuchs lost only their gonads) being baptized in water only. Ostensibly, as literature, this contrast is quite evidently serving the authorial purpose. Even the early controversy about gentile widows must now be reinterpreted through the Caesarean (and Antiochean) perspective; because we know Peter had not yet met Cornelius, we should assume that Peter would not associate with those gentile women. Their dead husbands could not be circumcised on their behalf.

Remember, none of this is an argument about historicity. All of this is about literary constructedness. My argument above has nothing to do (necessarily) with the historical Peter. It has everything to do with the authorial Peter, as presented in Acts.

As a fraudulent author (which I maintain for the sake of this argument), the writer of Acts has composed a fake history and constructed his own narrative world, carefully orchestrating every detail within it. Among those details, some are more subtle than others, but their implications can be massive. In other words, the forger has left clues to his literary purpose and we must piece together all of those clues if we wish to determine exactly what that forger was trying to convey.

So, to wrap up this second example, here is what I contend. The fraudulent author of Acts, while composing his forgery, has clearly attempted to present himself, both as a character within the story world and as an author, being in political alignment with the Christians in Caesarea, as depicted in Acts 21. Whether or not this literary representation of the past bears any historical accuracy (because the best lies often contain bits of truth), the substance of said representation nevertheless should be taken as context for any interpretations of its literary meaning. That is, the ostensible (albeit implicit) claim that the author aligns himself with the perspective of these gentile Christians in Cesarea is a claim that must contextualize our exegetical analysis of every other passage in Acts 1-28.

By the way, everything I am saying holds true also if you prefer to assume that the author of Acts is actually Luke, Paul's historical traveling companion, but it holds true all the more if the author of Acts is a fraud. What matters is that the author wanted his audience to believe something and he wanted them to understand something and we must examine the overall literary construction in order to us to discern what was being conveyed.

This concludes my second example, about the church in Caesarea.

In conclusion, I repeat most emphatically, if we do not fully entertain the ostensible representation for the purposes of comprehension, then we cannot hope to reconstruct the literary meaning for any first century audience, that is, what all the authorial audience would have taken the text to convey, on every level: from the basic narrative substance to its deeper literary meanings and its apparent rhetorical purpose. In turn, if we do not reconstruct such a comprehensive reception as literature (=ostensible history) then we cannot begin to ask whether the text, in its time, was conveying any aspects of factual truth. A fully robust and historically contextualized literary analysis must precede and inform the historical critical analysis. If one has misunderstood what is being said, how can one determine whether or not it conveys truth?

Altogether, I am trying to establish one single point.

Understanding the basic substance of narrative content is what we must prioritize while reading.

Otherwise, we will not understand...

Receptive Chronologizing (Mark 1-3)

2022-07-04T17:55:00.001-05:00

How did early Gospel audiences recognize the narrative's temporal setting? The way it differs from one Gospel to another probably reflects something about the time of each Gospel's composition.

Luke peppers the opening chapters of his Gospel with explicit historical name dropping and Matthew follows his modified genealogy with a story about Herod to Archelaus but Mark's opening relies entirely on John the Baptist, even narrating John's arrest in the passive voice, with no mention of Antipas. Other than John (and Jesus himself), Mark's first explicit reference to anything specifically indicating that bygone era is "the Herodians" (3:6). The lack of any effort to explain either who they were or why they were so named probably suggests (1) that oral tradition in those days was strongly imbued with these basic elements of historical context, but also (2) that popular memory of the baptizer and his fate was so strongly tied to Antipas that mentioning John was chronologically explicit all by itself. Likewise, Pilate is introduced (15:1) with no explanation whatsoever. The overall pattern probably serves as yet another indication that Mark's Gospel was indeed written earlier than its cannonical siblings.

By the time of the fourth Gospel, the baptizer is chronologized not by his preaching and arrest but by his relationship to the Light. "The word dwelt among us and we have seen him... John bore witness to him and we all received his grace" is obviously rich with theological meaning but as a narrative opening it also reads like "back in the good old days, when our movement was just getting started." Apparently the younger generation of Christians could accept the story of John and Jesus as its own historical epoch, contextualized by itself.

The next chronological reference ("forty-six years" in John 2:20) is probably (per me) an allusion to the coming Jubilee, though whether this means the symbolic Jubilee of Jesus's death and resurrection and/or the literal Jubilee (and that whether per Wacholder or Zuckerman) is debatable. Following that, John's arrest (3:24) is again referenced using a passive verb. That Antipas is never mentioned may largely result from the beloved disciple's well known fixation on Jerusalem, but it also fits the the pattern of focusing on concrete details only when they are deeply meaningful, and preferably obscure (e.g., the wedding at Cana, the pool of Bethesda). But Pilate is identified as Judea's governor only because he is the named person who comes out of the governor's house (18:28-9), apparently indicating that Pilate was already somewhat well known to the earliest audiences of the fourth Gospel. Presuming Antipas was equally familiar to the audience (cf. 3:24 again), the overall pattern of usage probably suggests that christians had grown familiar with the historical contours of Jesus's public era, certainly from oral tradition but probably also from earlier Gospel texts.

All this fascinates me for its own sake, but on the whole it also seems that each era of Gospel writing was conditioned by its own temporal distance from the Jesus movement, resulting in each author sensing the need to engage different levels of awareness when communicating with their audiences.

These are just a few observations and thoughts that I had today while I was writing/editing a passage about audience and chronology.

Anon...

Properly Ordering a Necessarily Layered Hermeneutic

2022-06-19T17:54:00.003-05:00

As a complement to last month's excerpt (from the might-have-been dissertation) regarding Frank Ankersmit's theory on narrative representation, please enjoy the following 2,200 words surveying Steve Mason's methodology of narrative interpretation. It so happens that Mason's work in this area preceded Ankersmit's by almost thirty years, and yet I offer Mason's exegesis as an illustration of how we may apply Ankersmit's insights. A few quick comments precede the excerpt below.

The primary aspect shared by both Mason and Ankersmit, in my own view, is an overriding interest in clarifying the relationship between literary analysis and historical judgment; one cannot determine the accuracy of a text until one first determines what the text actually claims. Meaning does not define truth but we must assess the one before challenging the other. Josephus's Pharisees may not be the historical Pharisees but their literary being sets the terms for the beginning of our historical inquiry. Likewise, Mark's Jesus may not be the historical Jesus, but claiming this or that about Mark's Jesus should not be (as it often seems to be) tantamount to a veiled claim about the historical Jesus. The literary analysis is one layer; it does not have the last word but it should inform the subsequent process. Historical investigation is a separate endeavor, but it should be informed by the previous one.

The second important concern shared by Mason and Ankersmit is prioritizing the layers of one's literary hermeneutic. Ankersmit says "representation precedes interpretation" and Mason talks about the necessity of inference and gap filling, but what both are getting at is the importance of narratologically reconstructing the authorial vision. This is what Seymour Chatman called "the substance of the content," something Chatman's Story and Discourse (p.30-1) acknowledged as a vital foundation of interpretative reasoning, just before declaring it beyond the scope of that particular project. This "substance" of narrative content, along with the inference and gap filling so vital to its discovery (Chatman, 30-1, again), also happens to be (imho) the elephant sized lacuna in so called "narrative criticism" of the Gospels. If you care about such work, please observe that Mason's narratology of Josephus embraces that challenge where others have shied away.

Thirdly, there is also a delightful twist in Mason's argument about Josephus NOT being a Pharisee. His method on that point is important for a host of reasons, related to the second point above, but I have now prefaced more than enough for one excerpt. As always, we hope to say more in the future.

Enjoy.

2.7 Reconstructing the Narrative Situation

In his landmark study of the Pharisees in Josephus,[1] Steve Mason insists on distinguishing contextualized interpretation from historiographical reconstruction, prioritizing the former as preparation for the later.[2] While acknowledging that other sources occasionally confirm particular facts in Josephus’s material, Mason considers it naïve to extract “raw data” from narratives for historical reconstruction without first understanding literary meanings “in their original frameworks.”[3] Adjudicating historicity during interpretation is pointless because “how accurately an author perceived events is not a question that exegesis can answer,” but historical context remains essential for interpreters who wish to discern “how the original readership would plausibly have understood the document.”[4] Thus, historical research should begin with “a purely exegetical phase” of receiving authorial representations as such before formulating one’s own questions and attempting to answer them.[5] “Only when the evidence is thus understood in situ can we reasonably formulate historical hypotheses to explain it.”[6]

Eschewing source–critical theories that had previously denied Josephus “authorial responsibility” for his configuration of material, and paying careful attention to the language use in each relevant passage, Mason primarily aims to understand the ancient Jewish writer’s own deliberate (re)presentation and observable biases.[7] To that end, he details his method:

Our procedure will always be to look first within Josephus’s writings for clues… His general usage and the immediate context will, so far as possible, be the arbiters of meaning. . . . [If this were] a historical investigation, which seeks to circumvent the witness’s intention, incidental notices [would be] the most valuable because they are more likely to yield unintentional evidence. Since our purpose, however, is to grasp Josephus’s intention, we must try to be sensitive to his own emphases; this will require that primary attention be given to his deliberate discussions of the Pharisees. It is in those discussions, if anywhere, that he spells out what he wants the reader to know about the group.[8]

To summarize, in a manner of speaking, Mason will read against the grain (as a historian) only after reading with the grain (as an interpreter) carefully enough to scrutinize all the ways in which that grain actually (arguably) runs. Repeatedly emphasizing that he is reconstructing “the story” and not “the real past,”[9] Mason’s hermeneutic also emphasizes the need for “sensitivity” to “clues” because Josephus’s ideas are not always “spelled out.” The contextual “whole” is therefore something each reader must reconstruct for themselves by filling gaps and drawing inferences.[10] To wit, Mason’s efforts “to construct an adequate synthesis of the Pharisess in Josephus’s narratives” proceed as follows.[11]

Surveying War and Antiquities broadly, Mason establishes Josephus’s perspective as a Jewish and Flavian elite: fronting his priestly aristocratic lineage, admiring the Hasmonean family dynasts, advocating senatorial rule, disdaining the masses who empower tyrants (and thus wary of monarchial succession), but nevertheless deferential to established authority.[12] In contrast to these “principal concerns” (which occupy the bulk of Josephus’s attention), the Pharisees were “more or less irrelevant.”[13] But Josephus also “passes up many opportunities to mention Pharisees, especially in contexts that might have elicited his praise.”[14] Instead, their occasional appearances consistently elicit disdain from Josephus, who repeatedly and explicitly aligns their party with the common folk of Judea, and depicts them in negative ways (as many have noted).[15] Mason summarizes:

In this narrative world, Pharisees appear as an occasional aggravation to the elite. They are a nonaristocratic group with enormous popular support and a perverse willingness to use that support demagogically, even on a whim, to stir up the masses against duly constituted authority.[16]

In sum, Josephus’s Pharisees are “power–hungry opportunists, whose actions undermine their reputation for piety.”[17] The ancient writer has made his views clear through both commentary and depiction. The “what” of story has indeed illustrated the “how” and the “why” of authorial composition. And yet, there is more.

In the process of assembling these narratological inferences, Mason observes an important distinction between the narrated text and the reconstructed story world. In revising War’s episode about Queen Alexandria’s alliance with the Pharisees (Ant. 13), Josephus introduces “a backstory, the preceding interval from Hyrcanus I to Alexandra, as a failed experiment in governance without the popular Pharisaic jurisprudence.”[18] Mason explains: “We must connect some dots if we wish to understand.”[19]

When interpreting a narrative we are entitled to accept conditions of Judean life painstakingly established by the author at one place (Ant. 13) and assumed again later (Ant. 18) as holding in the intervening narrative as well. He need not pause every few pages… to remind us that Pharisees are still influential.[20]

Thus, “Josephus portrays the reestablishment of Pharisaic jurisprudence under Alexandria as a necessary condition of governance, which has persevered until his own time.”[21] The Pharisees therefore “hold complete sway over the masses and therefore over political life” in Josephus’s story world.[22] Through narrative depiction and logical implication, the author has represented an ongoing situation in which higher authority figures respected Pharisees primarily because “their influence” had to be “reckoned with.”[23] Collectively, all this exegetical inference provides Mason with grounds for explaining the odd remark (Ant. 13.297–8, 18.17) that “one who accepts office must listen to ‘what the Pharisees says.’”[24] Lacking power, they exerted influence.

While it should go without saying that Josephus’s depiction may not be historically accurate, even if Mason has read him correctly, what bears mentioning is that Mason is inferentially reconstructing Josephus’s Pharisees, rather than history. Basically, the hermeneutic strategy is that Josephus’s remarks should remain grounded within the context of Josephus’s depictions. We should also observe that, although writing to a Roman audience quite unfamiliar with Pharisees gave Josephus no opportunity to evoke knowledge not explicitly provided by the text, Mason has elsewhere demonstrated that Josephus does exactly this when the narrative regards other topics.[25] The task of literary criticism inevitably requires all sorts of inferences.

The major interpretative payoff from Mason’s representational groundwork regards the Jewish–Flavian’s autobiographical claim at Life 12b about his youth: ἠρξάμην τε πολιτεύεσθαι τῇ Φαρισαίων αἱρέσει κατακολουθῶν.[26] Influential renderings by Thackeray (“I began to govern my life by the rules of the Pharisees”) and Whiston (“…to conduct myself according to the rules…”) suggest a personal commitment to discipline.[27] Perceiving this as a claim (whether sincere or deceptive) to hold membership in the Pharisee party,[28] centuries of interpreters problematized most of Josephus’s material on the Pharisees.[29] Mason reverses this trend by privileging that bulk of material before arguing exegetically about the single remark.[30] Thus, because Josephus’s “overall portrayal” of the Pharisees makes the former reading impossible, Mason argues for a different understanding,[31] translating 12b as, “I began to engage in public life following the school of the Pharisees.”[32] That is, based on Mason’s constructive literary reading (detailed above), we find Life 12b makes the author’s young self politically savvy, prudently “even if unwillingly” recognizing the need to “side with” popular Pharisaic views.[33] By itself, this alternative exegesis might have seemed contentious, but the weight of contextual grounding makes the revisionist reading compelling, and arguably determinative. In Ankersmit’s terms, Mason’s representation of Josephus has preceded his interpretation of Josephus.

Grounding hermeneutics with this kind of narratological inference is both necessary and unavoidable, whether or not such literary reconstructions can ever be verified. Even if Mason has read Josephus incorrectly, he has shown us the proper procedure. Our ancient Jewish writer did not say, “Here’s what I think of the Pharisees.” Rather, he portrayed them episodically, intermittently, with many details offered only in passing, and even the plainest descriptions are framed and lit by his own narrativized configurations. As such, interpreters seeking to determine authorial bias and narrative meaning must engage the full measure of Josephus’s situational grounding. The authorial “hows” and “whys” can become more accessible if we prioritize a careful and deliberate reconstruction of “what” the author was trying to represent. Moreover, we must reconstruct the authorial vision before we can leverage that representation while investigating the actual past. Although we might ultimately disbelieve our reconstructed view of Josephus’s world, the process of interpreting material on its own terms is a necessary first step. Such imaginative exegesis must conclude before historical judgment can effectively begin.

A final observation is required. Mason’s work on the Pharisees contextualized his readings so robustly that some critics mistook his constructive interpretations for historiographical verdicts.[34] This confusion was no doubt exacerbated because Mason’s interpretation logically ruled out several prior interpretations which had wrongly been equated with historical fact.[35] To such critical confusion, Mason replied that historical debates “played no role in my efforts to understand Josephus,” and clarified, “I did not attempt a historical investigation there.”[36] At the other extreme, Mason’s colleagues who correctly grasped his distinction between literary interpretation and historical reconstruction had begun to doubt whether his careful preparatory work would ever give way to the next stage (although eventually it did).[37] To avoid such confusion and doubts about this project, therefore, I will follow my narratological reconstruction (in chapter four) by sketching out three divergent hypotheses (in chapter five) about what might have really happened in the actual past. Because these rough examples of historical reconstruction merely need to illustrate what the process could look like (in order to establish a categorical distinction), the only theoretical and methodological explanation they require at this point is to re-iterate how the previous discussion applies to the question of this dissertation.

[1] Mason, Pharisees; Mason, “Josephus’s Pharisees: The Narratives,” in Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton, eds., In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Waco, Tex: Baylor University Press, 2007), 3–40; Mason, “Josephus’s Pharisees: The Philosophy,” in Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton, eds., In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Waco, Tex: Baylor University Press, 2007), 41–66; Mason and Helfield, Origins, 103–37.

[2] E.g., Mason, Pharisees, 10–7, 43–4, 53

[3] Mason, Pharisees, 10–16; Mason, “Narratives,” 3–4; both citing Neusner.

[4] Mason, Pharisees, 13.

[5] Mason, Pharisees, 12–16. Steve Mason, Orientation to the History of Roman Judaea (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2016), 73–83, prescribes the opposite sequence (forming questions before embarking upon exegesis) but keeps historical reconstruction separate from and subsequent to interpretation.

[6] Mason, “Narratives,” 3. See also Mason and Helfield, Josephus, 7–67.

[7] Mason, Pharisees, 43, 53; 18–53; e.g. 113, 118, 176–7, 207–11, 274–80, 306–7, 327; defending this position against source criticism is a major component of Mason’s original 1986 [1991] monograph, which spends over 25% of its argument on vocabulary and source analysis (e.g., 84–110, 133–52, 231–40). By contrast, authorial autonomy is entirely presumed by Mason, “Narratives,” [2007], with source critics briefly refuted by Mason, “Philosophy,” 41, 60–1 [2007].

[8] Mason, Pharisees, 43–4.

[9] E.g., Mason, “Narratives,” 4, 35, 38; Mason, “Philsophy,” 63.

[10] Mason, “Narratives,” [2007] is more articulate about exercising inference than Mason, Pharisees, [1991 publication; 1986 dissertation].

[11] Mason, “Narratives,” 38.

[12] Mason, “Narratives,” 6–8, 14–6, 20–1; Mason, Pharisees, 50, 59–60, 228, 238, 240, 243–5. See also Tessa Rajak, Josephus: The Historian and His Society, 2. ed. (London: Duckworth, 2004), 8, 21, 42.

[13] Mason, “Narratives,” 4–5, 17, 30–1, 37; Mason, Pharisees, 181–7, 322, 373; Mason, “Philosophy,” 54–5, 64.

[14] Mason, “Narratives,” 11–13, 38.

[15] Mason, “Narratives,”8–11, 17–28; Mason, Pharisees, 18–39, 82–4, 110–23, 173–6, 195, 213–63, cf. 272–308. The most relevant passages include War 1:107–14; 2:162–6; Ant. 13:288–98, 13:400–32; 17:41–5; 18:12–15.

[16] Mason, “Narratives,” 37–8.

[17] Mason, Pharisees, 345.

[18] Mason, Pharisees, 38ff.

[19] Mason, Pharisees, 38.

[20] Mason, “Narratives,” 433n.59; cf. 10–11, 22–3.

[21] Mason, “Narratives,” 39.

[22] Mason, “Narratives,” 32–3.

[23] Mason, “Narratives,” 14.

[24] Mason, “Narratives,” 29–30, 38; Mason, Pharisees, 353–4, cf. 279, 304, 308, 373.

[25] Steve Mason, “Figured Speech and Irony in T. Flavius Josephus,” in J. C. Edmondson, Steve Mason, and J. B. Rives, eds., Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 244–88.

[26] Mason, Pharisees, 374.

[27] Mason, Pharisees, 347; cf. German renderings (348, 54) and discussion there.

[28] Mason, Pharisees, 325–46; cf. 18–39, 55–6, 194; Mason, “Narratives,” 31–2, 38–9.

[29] Mason, Pharisees, 18–39, 46–51, 325–41, 356, discusses source–critical theories; e.g., that Josephus included unflattering material reluctantly, or had sections drafted by compositional assistants.

[30] Mason, Pharisees, 342–56, ; Mason, “Narratives,” 31–3.38–9.

[31] Mason, Pharisees, 342–56.; Mason, “Narratives,” 32–3.

[32] Mason, Pharisees, 351 [347–53].

[33] Mason, Pharisees, 353–6; Mason, “Narratives,” 33. NB: Josephus’s overlapping content allows Mason to build one narratological context from three separate works. Also, Josephus’s self–inclusion as a character allows Mason to combine historical inferences about the author with narrative inferences about the story world. However, despite the advantages of these specialized opportunities, Mason’s inferential hermeneutic remains exemplary.

[34] Mason and Helfield, Josephus, 133–4; Steve Mason, “What is History?” in Mladen Popović, ed., The Jewish Revolt against Rome: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2011), 198–200.

[35] Mason, Pharisees, 373–5; Mason, “Narratives,” 38–9.

[36] Mason and Helfield, Josephus, 133n.137; Mason, “What is History?” 198.

[37] Neusner and Chilton, In Quest of the Historical Pharisees, 423; Mason, Orientation, 66—70; Mason, Pharisees, 375. Cf. Steve Mason, A History of the Jewish War, A.D. 66–74 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Survey of Ankersmit on Reference vs Representation

2022-05-08T15:03:00.002-05:00

Here is another excerpt from the larger project which might eventually have earned me a Ph.D, until I quit the program in March. What follows is approximately 3,000 words surveying the first seven chapters of Ankersmit's 2012 opus. One of many reasons I dropped out is that I cannot stand keeping this to myself any longer. It won't make a huge impact immediately, but I strongly believe it needs to get out of my laptop and onto the internet. Someday, someone important will value this, and explain to the guild of New Testament scholars why it should matter to them. Until then, I hope you all can enjoy it.

2.4 Ankersmit 1 of 3: Representation Governs Interpretation

According to narrative theorist and philosopher of history Frank R. Ankersmit, theoretical approaches to meaning, truth, and reference (“the three pronged issue”) have fixated on the philosophy of language, thereby overlooking the aesthetic nature of historical representation [i.e., narrative].[1] After reviewing prominent approaches to “the relationship between language and the world,” Ankersmit concludes that we need to reframe these issues through the philosophy of history.[2] “At issue is how to account for a complex reality in terms of a complex text—the paradigmatic achievement of the historian.”[3]

To that end, Ankersmit next considers temporality, the narrative construction of “unity and continuity” which defines the scope of the task in historical writing,[4] and demonstrates that change over time is bound to cause “asymmetry” between events and their description.[5] Although unity and continuity is sometimes easier to construct (e.g. biographical storytelling), conceptual periods like the French Revolution or the Renaissance exist only through linguistic reconfigurations of reality.[6] Historical knowledge requires historical language. Paradoxically, however, the historian’s choice of words is not dictated by choice of subject or topic because historical texts do not referentially correspond to their own “exact counterpart in the past itself.”[7] Therefore, the question of whether or not a historical narrative represents past events successfully must be judged by something other than standards of linguistic accuracy.[8]

His challenge thus defined, Ankersmit begins his argument by distinguishing sharply between “historical interpretation” (hermeneutics) and “historical representation” (aesthetics), arguing that one takes logical priority over the other.[9] Art must be examined to be understood. Opinions must be of something. For example, the visual images in portraits and dreamscapes must be seen clearly before one considers their potential for symbolism.[10] Likewise, historians convey their points of view only while projecting a concrete vision.[11] “Representation precedes interpretation.”[12] Even those who twist facts to justify preconceived biases affirm this logical priority: The “aesthetic truth” of the “object” to be interpreted constrains the possibilities for meaning–making, at least initially.[13] Meanings must be grounded in something.

Consider Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. At the climax of the novel, the child protagonist narrates a violent experience while her vision is obstructed. Later, she overhears her father with the sheriff discretely piecing things together. Explicitly denied information, Lee’s audience shares the child’s task of reconstructing what happened based on clues in the dialogue, and the “correct” reading enhances the meaning of the book’s title.[14] Certainly, failed readings and alternate readings might occur at one or both levels of meaning, but in all cases sense–making depends on world building.[15] Literary reconstruction takes precedence over literary interpretation.

Regarding fictional story worlds, Ankersmit says critical interpretations may be rooted in “imaginary facts.”[16] Adapting a phrase well worth borrowing, he says, “We read the novel as if it were true, and the failure to do so will make nonsense of the literary text.”[17]

Not being sufficiently aware of what is shared by history and the novel, literary theorists tended to rely too heavily on interpretation; they then forgot about the representational anchors of the text and started to do things with texts that said more about the interpreters themselves and literary theory than about the text.[18]

Although Ankersmit’s emphasis on the text unreasonably neglects the responsibility of the reader, we can take his point about “representational anchors” as an inadvertent acknowledgement that narrative inference is essential, as I discussed earlier.[19] In the same way, Ankersmit’s “aesthetic truth” is undeniably subjective and his narrative “whole” can only exist if an audience constructs it as such. Granting this perspective, Ankersmit’s “representation” equates to Chatman’s “substance of content,” the important task of reader inference which constitutes a “low level” of interpretation.[20] In turn, this two–level hermeneutic can accommodate Frei’s insistence that the basic meaning of “history–like narrative” is “the events themselves,” while also satisfying the demands of Frei’s critics to support higher levels of meaning.[21] Representations support and accommodate meanings.

One way or another, interpretations tend to find grounding in story worlds. Indeed, Matthean interpreters ignored the plain meaning of “district” in Matt 2:22 precisely because their thoughts were grounded in unexamined contextual assumptions.[22] Thus, my alternate context (chapter X) and alternate reading (chapter Y) for Matt 2:22 is primarily intended to demonstrate that constructing context is not optional; it occurs subconsciously if not deliberately. It therefore seems prudent to evaluate the story world and its context deliberately before making exegetical decisions, especially with narratives set in the recent historical past of their original audience.[23]

2.5 Ankersmit, 2 of 3: Representing is unlike Referring

Having established his central point, Ankersmit proceeds to argue that linguistic theory has failed to differentiate reference from representation.[24] To refer is to “pick out uniquely,” to identify distinguishable objects with descriptive language, using labels and propositions which are subject to verification or falsification.[25] Philosophically, this one–to–one correspondence of words and things is what has typically defined the relationship between truth and reference.[26] However, the semiotic relationship between words or statements and their specific referents is quite unlike the unique relationship between a narrative text and the representation it offers.[27] Certainly, portions of narrative may indeed refer, just as cartographic markings may correspond to specific locations on otherwise roughly drawn maps.[28] Also, the representational text as a whole may in some sense “refer” to its overall topic with a general “aboutness.”[29] However, because representational wholes are aesthetic constructions and past events are not uniquely identifiable referents, there is no direct correspondence between story and history.[30] Narrative does not refer to the past because art does not identify actual objects. Rather, narrative represents the past in the same way that art conveys an artist’s vision.

Therefore, narrative representation is categorically unlike linguistic reference. Descriptions within narrative can be accurate or inaccurate but their overall depictions must be evaluated aesthetically.[31] Facing a dozen portraits of Napoleon, we would not judge any one of them to be true or false.[32] Although Mark 1:1 distinctly refers to the “Jesus” his audience already knows (whose factual existence was a shared concept in the cultural repertoire among early Christians), Mark’s Jesus conveys Mark’s authorial vision of Jesus. Prior to audience reception that authorial vision is not a shared concept, and repeated receptions engage the same vision; thus, there is no shared cultural code for Mark’s representation to reference. At most, we might say the only referent to which Mark’s representation can refer is Mark’s representation itself.[33] Thus, the statement Mark’s Jesus is secretive could be called “self-referentially or recursively true” of Mark’s representation.[34] However, any potential relationship between (1) Mark’s text and (2) Mark’s Jesus and (3) the historical Jesus is more complex than semiotic correspondence.[35] Thus, representation defies standard linguistic conceptions of reference and truth.

Understanding this differentiation explains why previous NT scholars have struggled to engage narrative as representation. Even Frei, who decried the conflation of depiction and reference, could not embrace narrativity without abandoning historical truth.[36] Likewise, Petersen’s attempt to harmonize story worlds with the conceptual plane of “direct reference” revealed his assumption that narrative depictions either do or do not have a counterpart in reality (via “indirect reference”).[37] The pre-enlightenment assumptions that narratives must be referentially true or false left NT narrative critics unable to receive Gospel narratives on a purely aesthetic level as historically contextualized representations (which they obviously are).[38] All this confusion amounts to a glaring category mistake. Narrative constructions do not have exact referents in the actual past. Representing is unlike referring. When Matthew’s Joseph fears the historical Archelaus, that event “refers” only to itself: a narratological occurrence that took place within Matthew’s literary configuration. To uncover possible truths of the actual past would require further investigation, as I explain farther below.

Regarding non-fiction writing in general, Ankersmit says, “reality does not dictate in what style it should be represented.”[39] It is not past events themselves but authorial configurations of the past which require particular linguistic constructions, and this is why the historian’s choice of words is never dictated by choice of topic.[40] Instead, like artists and storytellers, historians determine on a case by case basis “how language and reality are properly related to each other.”[41] Fortunately, representation “can say certain things about the world without actually saying them,” deftly “intimating without asserting,” and thereby enabling truths of the world to become “self–revealing” through a narrative whole and its aspects.[42] In Ankersmit’s project, this quasi–ineffability of representation is precisely what philosophies of language have failed to account for, and why meaning, truth, and reference require redefinition vis–à–vis representation.[43] (From my own hermeneutic perspective, all of this narrative indeterminacy further indicates the inevitability of narrative inference—on which, see above and below.)

What is most important for Ankersmit is that representations construct meaning; that is, they do not merely depict but also “require the viewer to take a certain attitude toward the subject.”[44] Metaphors like “Renaissance” and “Enlightenment” present ideas and perceptions overlaid upon reality, as does the famous sculpture depicting Napoleon as a Roman Emperor.[45] Caricatures (“distorted portraits”) can sometimes provide “a more profound insight into somebody’s personality than a photo.”[46] The fictional Boo Radley was a mysterious recluse made over into a profound symbol of innocence.[47] In all these examples, the joint-construction of temporality and meaning enables representations to support receptions that can be firmly grounded in the text and yet freely interpreted at the same time, allowing exegetes to infer and contextualize about the story world without simultaneously rendering historical judgment. However, as I will demonstrate next, proper engagement of representation also facilitates a smooth transition from narratological analysis into the subsequent task of historical inquiry.

2.6 Ankersmit 3 of 3: Meaning Determines Truth

In culminating his project, Ankersmit finally explores the potential for representation to “reveal reality” in its own unique ways.[48] When language is used referentially the question of truth can be answered by verification, but when language is used representationally there is no such access, no corresponding “objects” or “properties” to pick out or go see.[49] Representations blend meaning and reality into “a seamless whole” (albeit, as often as possible, by leveraging undisputed facts).[50] The projection of meaning onto reality, like the famous sculpture of Napoleon as Caesar, may reveal “representational truths” that provoke complex debates, requiring further examination and discussion of the aesthetic mimesis itself.[51] This dynamic explains why exegesis alone cannot recover reality from narrative, and why even historians themselves “so often mistake disagreements about meaning for disagreements about facts.”[52]

Nevertheless, Ankersmit insists ongoing challenge and debate is precisely what enables historians to “achieve historical truth” without “irresponsible and arbitrary speculation.”[53] That is, discussions of configured reality reframe debates and drive further investigations of historical possibilities. Did Hayden White successfully discern Jules Michelet’s interpretation of the French Revolution or did White merely demonstrate “what meaning(s) the reader of a historical text may discern” in Michelet’s writing?[54] When younger audiences bring in new contexts to reverse previously accepted interpretations, are they simply wrong or do appeals to authorial intention rather beg the question?[55] In such debates, “meaning determines truth and not the other way around.”[56] After receiving a representation, one must seek truth by framing questions in terms of representational meaning. In what ways is Napoleon comparable to Caesar? Did Hayden White assess Ranke’s bias fairly? What aspects of life in 1930’s Alabama are captured by Harper Lee’s novel? Did King Herod intend to break up his own kingdom? In ancient history, for the most part, we must also inquire about the narrative construction of temporality, the dynamic tensions of unity and continuity over time (which can only be represented because they cannot be referenced).[57] Did Galilee become independent before or after the Passover massacre? How did Archelaus’s accession affect Judean families? Seeking answers to all of these questions takes us beyond hermeneutics, beyond exegesis of the text, and exclusively into the domain of investigation and hypothesis, ultimately challenges us to become historiographers and stake our own representational claims about the actual past.

In a concluding argument, Ankersmit expands his central hermeneutic insight (representation governs interpretation) to say that all language usage (even referential usage) within a narrative is subject to the overall representational meaning.[58] The larger whole frames the questions of each detail’s meaning (and possible truth), which makes the complete text (however paradoxically) “more basic” than the individual statement.[59] So, for example, in Matt 2:22, one’s view of the overall situation inevitably governs what βασιλεύει might mean, depending on whether or not we align Matthew’s temporal context with a particular historical time frame (as noted previously).[60] We do not actually build overall comprehension by understanding each word and statement separately. One’s view of the narrative world unavoidably influences one’s view of each particular object within it.

To summarize Ankersmit’s ideas, representation governs interpretation and the meaning(s) thus derived prompt new historical inquiries. The latter procedure must follow the former. Interpretation requires initial credulity, thereby informing a more comprehensive skepticism. Fortunately, these philosophical tenets have been effectively illustrated by the hermeneutic and historiographical approaches of one outstanding historian of Roman Judea.

[1] Ankersmit, Meaning, ix–x., 50–53, 59, 62–3; cf. 34–47 for Ankersmit’s essential identification of historical representation and narrative representation. For relevant portions of Ankersmit’s earlier writing, see F. R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation: Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2002)., 11–21, 29–74, 197–217.

[2] Ankersmit, Meaning, 1–28, (Chapter One: “Historicism”), explains his purpose in writing but the scope is broad and the complexity is dense; e.g., 8–10, 27 explains that because Heidegger “failed to tally with what actually happens in historical writing,” (not unlike Gadamer), Richard Rorty’s “dreams of a new agenda for philosophy of language,” cannot be fulfilled unless we “translate the historicist theory of [Ranke and Humboldt] into a more contemporary philosophical idiom.” Cf. 26, 116ff.

[3] Ankersmit, Meaning, ix; see also 46–7, 62, 152–3.

[4] Ankersmit, Meaning, 29–47, (Chapter Two: “Time”). Among others (below), Hayden White, David Carr, and Paul Ricoeur figure prominently.

[5] Ankersmit, Meaning, 41. Ankersmit (26, 41–6) says Louis O. Mink was uniquely ahead of his time on this point but that was largely thanks to Arthur Danto.

[6] Ankersmit, Meaning, 44–45, crediting this point to H.M. Baumgartner, following Danto.

[7] Ankersmit, Meaning, 45, again following Baumgartner.

[8] Ankersmit, Meaning, 46–7. One might suggest exact correspondence is always a conceptual illusion.

[9] Ankersmit, Meaning, 48–63, (Chapter Three: “Interpretation”).

[10] Ankersmit, Meaning, 49–57.

[11] Ankersmit, Meaning, 59–62.

[12] Ankersmit, Meaning, 53, 63, 119n.22.

[13] Ankersmit, Meaning, 52–53 (quoting Hayden White’s critique of Derrida), 62–3.

[14] SPOILERS: Scout’s mentally challenged neighbor stabbed her attacker to death, but Sheriff Tate and Atticus decide that “Bob Ewell fell on his knife.” Prosecuting Boo Radley would have been like killing a mockingbird.

[15] For example, audiences may reject Lee’s view about the nobility of falsifying a police report, but that alternative interpretation still depends on reconstructing the falsification itself.

[16] Ankersmit, Meaning, 119, 140.

[17] Ankersmit, Meaning, 119n.22, 119–21. Ankersmit has hardly coined the phrase “as if it were true,” but his use of it here with respect to fiction has been particularly influential to my thinking.

[18] Ankersmit, Meaning, 120–1.

[19] Section 2.3, above.

[20] Cf. Chatman, Story and Discourse, 31 (quoted above), the “low level of interpretation” being “representation.”

[21] See 2.2, above, especially n.36.

[22] See chapter–sections 1.4 and 2.3, above.

[23] Ankersmit, Meaning, 62–3.

[24] Ankersmit, Meaning, 64–86, (chapter four: “Representation”), 87–101, (chapter five, “Reference”).

[25] Ankersmit, Meaning, 65, 87, 99.

[26] Ankersmit, Meaning, 66–7.

[27] Ankersmit, Meaning 80–81.

[28] Ankersmit, Meaning, 88n.2, 93.

[29] Ankersmit, Meaning, 79–81.

[30] Ankersmit, Meaning, 87–95, 101 (cf. 79–81). Cf. 13–14 on “reliability” and “the dogma of Universal History.”

[31] Ankersmit, Meaningf, 66–7. On description (depicting details) versus narration (representing temporality), see also Mieke Bal and Christine van Boheemen, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 36ff.

[32] Ankersmit, Meaning, 68–9.

[33] Ankersmit, Meaning, 80–2, 92, 95; cf. 146.

[34] Ankersmit, Meaning, 81.

[35] Ankersmit, Meaning, 72–3. Up to this point in the book, Ankersmit has used “representation” to indicate “(1)” the historical text, or “(2)” the story world, or both at once. After introducing his “three–place” paradigm (72–3), Ankersmit begins to also use “the presented” or “the representation’s presented” when he means to indicate the “whole” or its “aspects” (as envisioned apart from the text). The paradigm itself aims to help us “avoid conflating (2) [the story world] and (3) [the real world].” Cf. 74–5, 80, 103, 105, 150, where terms and numbering vary.

[36] Frei, Reading, 40, 44; cf. 99, 103–5. See also 2.2, above, notes 25 & 28.

[37] See notes 56, 57, and 58 in section 2.3, above.

[38] See conclusion of section 2.3, above.

[39] Ankersmit, Meaning, 77.

[40] Ankersmit, Meaning, 76–9, 86; cf. ix.

[41] Ankersmit, Meaning, 78–9.

[42] Ankersmit, Meaning, 109–10; on aspects, see 68–74,84–5, 103–8.

[43] Ankersmit, Meaning, 86, 153.

[44] Ankersmit, Meaning, 74; the quote is attributed to Arthur Danto without specific citation.

[45] Ankersmit, Meaning, 73–5.

[46] Ankersmit, Meaning, 98.

[47] See 2.4, above.

[48] Ankersmit, Meaning, 102–25, (chapter six: “Truth”), 126–56, (chapter seven: “Meaning”).

[49] Ankersmit, Meaning, 102–8.

[50] Ankersmit, Meaning, 116–7; Ankersmit (114–6) says the linguistic turn (pre–Rorty) originally engaged problems of language in science, focused on facts rather than meaning, which is why the humanities (following Rorty) struggled between empiricism and deconstruction, i.e., whether meaning is bound to reality.

[51] Ankersmit, Meaning, 116–8.

[52] Ankersmit, Meaning, 116, 116n.21; cf. 56–58, saying that when explanations configure reality the mental model threatens to overlay (or merge with) one’s view of reality (e.g., Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons”) but this amounts to undisciplined thinking; ontology and epistemology should be as distinct in literature as in science.

[53] Ankersmit, Meaning, 113–4; cf. 118, 120, in which the historian’s “poetic genius” is also conveniently preserved by Ankersmit’s refusal to detail methodological techniques.

[54] Ankersmit, Meaning, 137–8.

[55] Ankersmit, Meaning, 139–41; cf. 130–6. Despite the extreme example of Tarasov–Rodionov’s Chocolate (139–40), Ankersmit resists giving ironic power of the new context to reader inference, insisting “the text is bound to an imaginary reality represented by it.” I disagree. Representation is necessarily constructed via audience reception.

[56] Ankersmit, Meaning, 116–8, 125; cf. 136–7, 143–5.

[57] Ankersmit, Meaning, 34, 38–9, 43–7; Ankersmit’s chapter 7 synopsis does not explicitly incorporate material from his second chapter on temporality but the concept of representation being temporally constructed has preconditioned the argument of chapters 3–7. E.g., Mink’s view of the “merely preliminary” (39–40) is re–evaluated as Baumgartner’s “transcendental condition” (46–7). Cf. 115–8. That Ankersmit overlooks temporality in these later chapters is explained by his focus on recent centuries and European history, in which the “object level” of truth Is less in question because many more facts are “ordinarily taken for granted” (115–6).

[58] Ankersmit, Meaning, 154, 153–6. Ankersmit (156) considers this single point his “Copernican Revolution,” and the remainder of the book (157–256) applies this to various issues concerning the philosophy of history (cf. 218).

[59] Ankersmit, Meaning, 154.

[60] Chapter One, section 2.

Gospel of Mark: Plot vs Emplotment

2022-01-05T03:42:00.009-06:00

As ancient life stories (bioi), the synoptic Gospels exhibit a narrative structure which is biographical, rather than plot-like. Most of the story content is episodic, arranged more or less into a loosely developmental sequence. Birth stories come at the beginning, death and resurrection bring up the rear, and in between we have the early, middle, and later stages of a public career which goes through its own natural growing pains: Jesus appears after John, Jesus gains a following, Jesus selects his lieutenants, Jesus sends them out in pairs, Jesus expands his territory, and then Jesus finally goes too far in the capitol city, whence he suffers the consequences. Alongside this recognizably developmental progression we also interact with the baptizer's political regression: acclaimed, arrested, beheaded. Alongside these two intertwined event sequences, of course, we also find the episodic stuff that befits any good life story, the various scenes, movements, and encounters which add to the story: healings, teachings, explanations, challenges, controversies, and seemingly random itineraries. All in all, therefore, we find some episodes throughout Mark, Matthew, and Luke which do indeed follow logically after related events which came before (if not immediately before) and we find a massive amount of episodic material whose placement seems largely if not entirely arbitrary.

The fact that most of the logical structure is developmental marks these narratives as biographical, as does the fact that most synoptic episodes bear no causal relationship to any other specific episode before or after. Both trends are typical of life stories. In such stories, the overall lack of narrativized causality stands in stark contrast to the typical falling of dominoes ("after this, therefore because of this") which defines most authorial emplotments, whether fiction or non-fiction. Again, this failure to maintain a coherent causality throughout its event sequence is perfectly appropriate for any biographical narrative. As I have noted before, biographies are notorious for not really having a plot.

None of this, however, means that Gospel writers did not infuse their narratives with some degree of emplotment. For instance, the Gospel of Mark famously incorporates a recurring motif ("the messianic secret") which builds suspense while increasing coherence. Other thematic elements add coherence in abstract ways but the suspenseful recurrence of the requested secret-keeping prompts the reader to anticipate forthcoming activity, which lends coherence on the level of action and narrative structure. Likewise, Mark's choice of beginning and ending are elements of emplotment, not merely because they enhance the drama of the presentation but primarily because the selectivity of a start point and end point amounts to an authorial definition about the order of events. John's preaching (at the start) and the centurion's question (at the end) provide particular boundaries for Mark's narrated event sequence.

Arguably, the most significant aspect of emplotment in Mark's Gospel is the dramatic juxtaposition of Peter's confession that Jesus is Lord, followed closely by Jesus's rebuke of Peter. Because these two events surround the revelation that Jesus intends to go die in Jerusalem, the structure provides Mark's life story with a veritable climax, a pivot point between "rising action" and "falling action" in the classical sense. This bit of causal structure does not by itself constitute a plot, per se. Rather, the most we can reasonably say is that Mark's featured imposition of this narrativized climax constitutes a degree of emplotment.

[**SIDEBAR: Incidentally, that Mark's major authorial emplotment was adopted by Matthew and Luke demonstrates that this "climactic point" was important to the early Christian messaging about Jesus. The earliest Gospel audiences were not kept in suspense about Jesus's ultimate fate. Early Christians listening to an early Gospel performance had been told long ago--certainly preceding any public recitation of published literature--that Jesus's public ministry ended with crucifixion and resurrection. Thus, Mark's purpose in providing this aspect of emplotment is transparent. The surprise (and the sales pitch) is not that Jesus will die but that Jesus predicted his death and embraced it, long in advance. The bit of climactic structure is featured so that you may be persuaded that this explanation is true.**]

Furthermore, scholars are reaching and stretching when they cobble together all these bits of emplotment in order to claim that said bits altogether happen to comprise Mark's overall plot. For instance, another brief causal sequence appears when the death of John causes Herod Antipas to seek Jesus, which in turn prompts Jesus to sail over to Philip's territory. However, the coherence of this short chain-reaction does not expand to encompass the rest of Mark's narrative content. In other words, the chain of events around John's death are not contained within a larger chain of events which provides overall coherence.

The bit about John's death is a bit of emplotment. The bit about Jesus's embracing his fate is another bit of emplotment. The start point and end point and stages of career development provide additional bits of emplotment. What we do not find is any consistent thread or a single unified scheme which might incorporate all these bits into one overall chunk of coherence. Moreover, we clearly find reams of episodic material with no specifically causal connections to any of the above.

In conclusion, the synoptic storyline is biographically oriented, sequencing most of its episodic material in ways which seem largely arbitrary, and yet it contains aspects of authorial emplotment. Recognizing a handful of micro-emplotments in Mark's Gospel does not justify speaking of that Gospel as if it possesses any single overarching plot. Just like most narrated life stories, Mark simply does not have a plot. The action in the Gospels is not driven by a sense of all-sufficient "after this, therefore because of this" causality. Rather, the narrated event sequence is sometimes developmental, sometimes arbitrary, and occasionally features a brief chain of reactions directed by causality.

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey can be summarized by their plots. Most Greek dramas can be summarized by their plots. Shakespeare's famous five-act structure is entirely summarizable in terms of its plot. But biographically oriented storylines simply cannot be said to have plots. We can say they convey an event sequence. We can "plot out" (so to speak) the basic points in their storylines. We can talk about the chronological order of narrated events seeming more or less arbitrary until we come upon one of those major developmental progressions. And yes, we can note that handful of micro-emplotted episodes. But that is about as far as we can stretch our analysis in the direction of anything remotely resembling a classical narrative plot.

For all of these reasons, the extent to which some Gospel scholarship continues to speak about the "plot" of the Gospel (and/or incorrectly equates "plot" with "emplotment") demonstrates a dearth of narratological sophistication which should be amended. Perhaps in more ways than one...

Anon.

The Benefit of Redemption

2021-12-19T00:35:00.001-06:00

Here's a rare post about my personal faith. Feel free to scroll past, if that's not why you're here.

A friend on FB was asking: What do you say to yourself when you remind yourself about the gospel? I am so glad she asked. This was my answer:

It depends what you mean by the gospel. The standard evangelical version is that Christ died to save us from our sins… But redemption was always just the end of a detour. The good news that Jesus came to preach was about the kingdom of God.

So, to answer your question, what I remind myself about the good news is that God has an eternal purpose, which is older than sin. God’s purpose is to make the invisible visible, to make divine life incarnate, to fill the earth up with heaven.

It is in this sense that Christ was second Adam. Jesus living in Nazareth was the first fruits of the good news for the world because Jesus living in Nazareth was like the tree of life growing legs and walking around in the garden of Eden. Jesus did what Adam (if not literally then as a symbol for all humanity since the beginning of time) failed to do.

The Lord spent three decades honoring God and loving his neighbors. Jesus spent 30 years doing all the things did he talks about in the sermon on the mount. Jesus spent 30 years living as the personal fulfillment of everything that we read in the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus spent 30 years living his life in a way that was so perfectly pleasing to God, that the voice of the Almighty could be heard in the sky saying this is the one guy who has made me really happy.

And that is eternal life and that is the kingdom of God.

And the benefit of redemption is not that we are saved from death and hell. And the benefit of redemption is not that we now get a chance to try and live up to his great moral standard. And the benefit of redemption is not that we get a second chance to be good little creatures for once, after all.

The benefit of redemption is that we now have access to the just rewards which Jesus has earned, not only with his death but with his perfectly pleasing life.

And the good news of the kingdom is that God loves Jesus and Jesus loves God and that is the whole party and you are invited.

Now somebody say praise the Lord...

Causality as Mnemonic Accommodation (Video)

2021-12-11T03:05:00.003-06:00

In May of this year I presented some of my research at the annual Narrative Conference (ISSN) with a paper called "Causality as Mnemonic Accommodation." Because the conference was online only, all of the presentations were pre-recorded and uploaded three weeks prior to conference time. When we went live, each panelist offered a 2 minute summary of another panelist's video so the rest of the session could be given to Q&A. I had a great time and got some positive feedback. Because of this unique format, I made the following video.

The video is 10 minutes long and the transcript below is 1385 words. Enjoy.

Emplotment facilitates memory. Aristotle said life stories and histories lack coherence but a unified sequence of causality is easy to remember. It may not always be memorable, but it is altogether rememberable. Homer’s Odyssey has a chronological fabula because our minds can remember that storyline easily. There’s a natural logic that makes the event sequence cohere. Now, contrast that with the events of Joyce’s Ulysses. If the fabula of Ulysses is whatever one happens to remember after reading the novel (which is Mieke Bal’s definition) then the fabula of Ulysses is rarely chronological. Portions of that novel are certainly memorable, but the overall sequence as a whole is not easily rememberable.

Why does causality enable coherence? My answer to that question begins with a brief survey of cognitive science on remembering time and temporal context.

[SLIDE 2] For the purposes of disambiguation, I should clarify that previous research in cognitive narratology, by and large, has focused on mental processes during the reception of a discourse. How do personal memories help readers fill gaps in the narrative and build mental models of story world situations? How do scripts and schemas and predictability (based on familiarity with statistical patterns) enable the reader to participate in co-constructing the story while engaged with the text? In contrast, my presentation today is about how we remember entire storylines coherently, after the fact. How do we reconstruct a temporal sequence from a narrative without consulting the text? How do we remember stories days, weeks, months, or years after reception? In my research so far, I have not found narratologists pursuing questions like this.

[SLIDE 3] Sequences challenge our memory, especially sequences that are unfamiliar and arbitrary. Children sing the alphabet song countless times before they know it. Learning numbers gets easier once the pattern repeats and times tables are also predictable but complete mastery of spelling requires years of familiarity with the patterns of a written language. When older kids need to learn sequenced information, teachers use acronyms like PEMDAS or they set information to music. Professional actors spend weeks of daily rehearsal learning their lines. Homer used rhythm and meter and other techniques to help perform his recitations. At the upper limits of human performance, highly trained “memory athletes” compete to memorize 100 random words or digits or multiple decks of cards. These illustrations prove one simple point. The challenge of remembering information sequentially always stretches our cognitive limits.

[SLIDE 4] The brain’s mnemonic limitations have been scientifically measured. In a famous 1956 paper, “The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” psychologist George A Miller determined that most human subjects could hold approximately six to eight “items” in mind at once in what cognitive scientists refer to as “working memory” (a.k.a. “short term memory”) but that same capacity expands when information is organized in some way. Miller’s subjects could memorize seven two-digit numbers about as easily as seven one-digit numbers, and thus recall fourteen digits. Miller called this “chunking.” Recall seven words and you’ve recalled dozens of letters. Joshua Foer remembers a sixteen-digit string (12/07/1941/09/11/2001) just by thinking “Pearl Harbor and 9/11.” The same kind of chunking (a.k.a. “information compression”) also explains memorized acronyms, familiar spelling patterns, expertise in chess, and even the cognitive schemas we use for gap filling. Unfortunately, none of this helps us remember narrative emplotments. What Miller’s research does helpfully demonstrate is that human remembering capacity is enhanced when mnemonic content happens to be organized.

[SLIDE 5] Cognitive science also tells us that remembering is constructive. According to memory researchers from F. C. Bartlett to Daniel Schacter, the term “constructive remembering” indicates (1) that we typically recall “bits and pieces” of information and (2) that each act of remembering requires us to reassemble those bits and pieces in order to “constructively remember” one coherent whole. So, for example, you might remember Beowulf fought three monsters, but which ones? In which order? And how do you know? Without referring to the text, our minds can only work with whatever pieces we happen to recall. If we need more than the magic number seven, we are pushing the limit… but it does of course help when one bit can remind you of another.

[SLIDE 6] The final obstacle to overcome is time. How do we reconstruct memories chronologically? How does one mentally reconstruct a timeline? According to William Friedman (1993), remembering the time of an event depends upon whether or not recalled information happens to include some aspect of temporal context. If you drove to the airport and met someone at their gate, that memory belongs before 9/11. If a big birthday party took place in your old living room, you can date that event to before you moved out. If you had a big gathering of friends and no one was wearing masks, that was at least a year ago. Even false memories with specific temporal context can be self-sequencing in constructive remembering. But whether true or false, memories which do not imply their own sequence (in relation to some other memory) are extremely unlikely to be sequenced during constructive remembering. At least one recalled event must remind you of what happened before and/or after itself. Otherwise, we are back to rehearsal, memorization, and familiarity, none of which are granted via narrative emplotment.

[SLIDE 7] On that note, we return to causality. Although Friedman’s research did not examine causality, per se, we can demonstrate that a chain of causalities works according to Friedman’s model. Recalling one single cause or effect evokes the rest of the chain, which maximizes recall, and consequences logically imply their own sequence. That facilitates mnemonic reconstruction. Recalling for example that Paris sees Helen in Sparta can remind us that Troy burns to the ground. In our minds, one domino knocks down all the others. It’s not whether Paris arguably *did* cause Troy to burn, but if our minds once encoded that information as such, we can utilize the inherent structure. Thus, causality accommodates our natural cognitive limitations for constructively remembering a storyline.

[SLIDE 8] To examine this more precisely, consider E. M. Forster’s classic formulation, “The king died and then the queen died of grief.” Recalling the queen’s death without recalling her grief provides too little information. Did the king also die? Which one of them died first? The pieces must all be recalled before working memory can rebuild the whole puzzle. Without recalling her grief, we must either recall the words “and then” from the original discourse, or we must recall the fact that we once read about these two deaths in the same sentence. We can labor greatly to sequence these events and not achieve coherence. In contrast, recalling the grief can remind you of the griever, the cause of her grief, and its result. The one bit of recall implies all the others, and causality provides structure—explaining the unity. Aristotle said this is what narrative requires. Bal said it may not always happen. Both are correct.

[SLIDE 9] In summary, emplotments convey coherence because causality optimizes the constructive remembering of chronological sequences. An authorial narrativization organizes information in a way that happens to enable human remembering but causality must be perceived by the reader, encoded into long term memory, and later utilized by working memory. From the author’s vision, to reception, to remembering, this is how emplotment works cognitively. If we consider the days before written literature, when stories without plots were more likely forgotten, stories featuring causality had a survival advantage. In the evolutionary sense, it would seem, storytelling developed by natural selection to favor content which accommodates our cognitive limitations.

[SLIDE 10] Of course, further questions remain. Is Plot unique in this way or do other conventions accommodate chronological remembering as well?? Well, characters demonstrate developmental progress, settings register movement across distance, and conflict indicates a disruption of expectations (the traumatic loss of potential). The memories of such content may therefore imply their own temporal sequence. Further research is pending, but it seems possible that all four of these narrative foci have evolved for the same reason. If so, then perhaps all of storytelling originated as the natural byproduct of attempting to remember actual human events. Perhaps story is, quite simply, what memory makes after paying attention to change.

Mark as Fiction? Mark as History? Mark as Representation!

2021-10-16T02:22:00.003-05:00

Rhoads & Michie’s classic Mark as Story (1982) could not have been called Mark as History without a challenging redesign of the project, but I’ve been wondering for some time whether it could have been called Mark as Fiction. Would such a title have mandated any changes to the contents of Mark as Story, or could it have remained essentially the same?

The contents of both first and second editions were focused on basic elements of fiction and literature: narration, plot, setting, character, and rhetoric, and the fierce avoidance of historicity was less a suspension of judgment than a judgment about relevance. In its own words, Mark as Story aimed to look past the “referential function” of narrative in favor of its “poetic function”. More acutely, Rhoads’s 1982 article in JAAR called for two shifts in thinking about the Gospel narratives “in their final forms”: (1) respecting “the autonomy of the story-world” and (2) adopting tools from the study of fiction. If these two shifts correctly sum up the content of the book, the question remains.

Could Mark as Story be re-titled Mark as Fiction? Or would something need to change?

To answer that question, let’s consider the two shifts in Rhoads’s thinking. The second shift was and remains entirely non-problematic. Examining the Gospels as literature should work in a similar fashion regardless of whether we judge their contents to be fiction or non-fiction, so in this regard Mark as Story holds up very well by today’s standards in its attention to things like emplotment, settings, and characterization. Adapting tools from the study of fiction works well in studying published histories (e.g., Hayden White's tropology), so in this regard Mark as Story probably could have been called Mark as Fiction with slight framing modifications.

The first shift is more interesting to examine. What did Rhoads mean by “the autonomy of the story world”? Primarily, this was a boundary marker. In the early days of the field, New Testament Narrative Criticism needed to distinguish itself from NT Historical Criticism, so the meaning and significance of “autonomy” was especially potent and clear, but the meaning of “story world” (in and of itself) was unintentionally ambiguous. Despite interacting with Seymour Chatman, the first edition of Mark as Story effectively made no distinction between the two major concepts of Story and Discourse. This may also explain why engagement with Chatman was exised from the second edition.

With or without that material, however, both editions equate discourse with story, undoubtedly reflecting the postivistic legacy of NT Historical Criticism, which for so often effectively (still!) equates the text with the past - or at least, has so often equated the unrejected bits of text which survived critique with the critically verified past. (See also the introductory chapter to Hans Frei's The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.)

For historical critics, the acceptable text *is* what happened. Likewise, for Mark as Story, the narrated discourse *is* the complete story world.

Such conflation is problematic, for either history or fiction, but I can illustrate this more sharply if we consider historical fiction.

When Victor Hugo wrote about Jean Val Jean and Cozette in Les Miserables, those characters lived and spoke in a “story world” that was built partly from the referential aspects of Hugo’s textual discourse and partly from the audience recollections (general, fuzzy, or specific) about France in the revolutionary period. Along with Hugo’s Paris we could mention Homer's Troy and Shakespeare’s Rome, and even Joyce’s Dublin. The same point holds for fictional worlds that are serialized, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, or DC Comics’ Gotham City, in which any individual episode evokes situational context established in previous iterations of storytelling. In all of these cases, due to audience knowledge of situational context, the “story world” is much broader than a single text. Whenever Garrison Keilor told yet another tale from Lake Woebegon on his radio show, new listeners could only fill in the blanks with guesswork, hoping for some eventual corroboration about their creative assumptions, but old listeners could represent that fictional town more fully in their imaginations.

Point: because the Gospels are stories set in the recent past of their original audiences, their story worlds involve more than what is on the page. Ergo, reading Mark as Historical Fiction requires us to grant that audience inference played a major role in co-constructing the narrative setting. For knowledgeable audiences Gospel authors could evoke detail not explicitly mentioned.

If you read a biography about Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana, the story world is informed by your knowledge of the actual world in their day. That is more than a “referential effect” or a “poetic effect”. The phenomenon of the story world is not contained by a narrative text. Likewise, when the Gospels’ earliest audiences read or heard about Jesus and John in Galilee or Herod and Pilate in Jerusalem, there was much more being evoked than a few contextual details. Facts and basic knowledge were contributed by the earliest audiences. The “story world” was not merely whatever Mark wrote which referred to people, events and locations. The story world of the Gospels included everything early Christians had ever heard or believed about Jesus and the traditions passed down about what transpired in his brief years of fame.

In that regard, Mark as Story is a pale shadow of what Mark as Fiction could have been, because Mark as Fiction would necessarily become a study of Mark as Historical Fiction. At that point, Rhoads and Michie might have come uncomfortably close to issues of historical representation...

And that, finally, brings me to the larger point of today's post.

Because the fledgling field of "New Testament narrative criticism" needed to bracket out the so-called "historical critical approach," their rhetoric about "the autonomy of the story world" had more to do with methodological and disciplinary boundary-keeping than actually engaging the inferential co-construction of story worlds. Indeed, any efforts to practice narratological gap-filling were consigned to "reader response criticism," effectively quarantining a more robust historical contextualization from informing any approach to the text or its possible meanings. Proper critical interpretation, they all said, required textual discipline without any creative inference. A "representation" of the past was understood to be one of those reconstructions produced by historical Jesus scholars, and that only after the relevant questions of historicity had been thoroughly vetted.

Thus, “representation” was an issue for "historical" approaches, even while “story world” became an issue for NT Narrative Studies. But, of course, there is no difference.

A literary history is the author's representation of the past. A narrative depiction is the author's aesthetic vision of historical truth. In such framing, the Gospels themselves qualify as “historical representations” and we ought to perform readings in this way. That is, we should not approach the interpretation of Gospel narratives any differently because we believe they are fiction or non-fiction. When historicity becomes our secondary concern, rather than governing all other concerns, then narratives about the past can be viewed properly as “historical representation”, before considering how or in what aspects those representations might be “accurate”.

To consider Mark as Narrative is to consider Mark as a Representation of Jesus’ life and public ministry in the historical past.

Mark as Fiction? Mark as History? Mark as Historical Fiction?

Choosing any of these categories should require us to receive the Gospel in the same way: as a representation of past events.

But this receptive posture cannot rule out constructive inference. We cannot overlook the author's subtle evocations of audience knowledge. And we cannot quarantine "narrative studies" away from historical contextualization. Not if we wish to argue substantially that we have understood the text...

Because whether or not we believe it, the text happens to offer a representation.

We should take it as such...