As I am reading through Philip Esler’s Galatians volume, I was pleasantly surprised to find a helpful insight on this topic from someone thoroughly rooted in a social historical analysis of the biblical text (as I try to be). He discusses the “base communities of Latin America and local groups elsewhere” which reveal “a different pattern” of biblical interpretation than is found in the North Atlantic:

. . . one in which the correlation between scriptural interpretation and the scrutiny of the contemporary situation are conducted by the communities themselves, with some help from theologians functioning as consultants rather than creators of the theology. In these contexts the value of non-elite readings of biblical text becomes apparent. For, in the end, although New Testament interpreters may provide exegetical results which can be appropriated by local communities seeking to undertake correlations of the type just mentioned, it is only those congregations who can make the earliest Christian story, critically understood, their story. . . . The only realistic prospects of developing an intercultural understanding of New Testament experience are located in Christian communities. [27, emphases mine]

Just prior to this statement, Esler effectively critiques those who attack historical methods of interpretation. I can resonate with Esler’s perspective here. As scholars of the biblical texts, our interpretation must be rooted in an attempt to understand the social historical environment from which they come. Postmodern criticism does remind us that we are fallible and does warn us against absolute confidence in our own assumed objectivity. But I like the idea that my purpose is to immerse myself in the historical stuff and serve as a “consultant” to the interpretation of my community. My community as a whole takes whatever attempt at objective interpretation I have made and applies it our own subjective situation collectively.

This is not all just an idealistic pipe dream. Just in the past few months, for example, as my congregation (a Mennonite church in southern California) went through a membership discernment process, I taught a Sunday school session on “Boundaries in the Bible: Inclusion and Exclusion among God’s People.” I brought to my fellow congregants what I had learned from an in-depth review of the topic and they got into groups discussing it. They came up with insights of how the historical analysis of the Bible would apply in our own world. The session was part of a much longer process in which we explored membership issues from a variety of angles.

In the end, the community as a whole came up with the wording of the policy and decided together whether the statements accurately reflected our sense of the issue as a community. With the exception of a few, we came to a vast majority approval of our new policy. I played only a small role, but it gives me hope and a vision for finding a place outside the ivory tower of academia. I’d also like to note that I think my social historical approach offered a more transferable and applicable reading of Scripture in the process than might some other methods.

Within the terms of the perspective on communication I will adopt, therefore, the twenty-seven New Testament documents are the evidence for a process whereby, at a particular time and place, certain persons (the authors of the texts) reduced meanings into messages of a particular symbolic form, in this case the written word, for transmission to other persons (the express or implied recipients) and those written messages were in fact transmitted to them by delivery, as with actual letters like Galatians, or by publication, as with the gospels or other documents like the Acts of the Apostles and the Apocalypse, whereupon the recipients perceived and interpreted them, and possibly even acted on the basis of their interpretations.

Oh my. If a student of mine wrote a sentence like this, it could possibly drop his/her grade from A to A-. Several sentences like this: B+. Of course, this particular sentence was authored by a UK author and I understand we have a different appreciation for the efficiency of words across the pond.

Similarly, I once overheard a scholar who emphasized theological approaches bemoaning his task as an outside reader to a New Testament dissertation. This dissertation spent a chapter discussing a particular social theory that she was using to frame her methodology. This scholar/outside-reader saw this sort of discussion as unimportant to what he considered the real work of biblical studies.

From what I gather, there is a significant population of biblical scholars who are entirely disinterested in social theories as applied to biblical texts. As far as I can tell, this stems from a belief that social theories merely dress up what biblical scholars already know in fancy jargon. On the one hand, point taken. If sociology and social psychology is being pillaged by biblicists merely to “sound new” while not really pushing the field any further, then shame shame.

On the other hand, social theory truly has the potential to raise new questions, frame stale discussions in helpful ways, provide new windows for insights, offer an alternative lens for viewing the social world of texts, etc. Social theory cannot be applied lock, stock, and barrel to ancient texts, of course, but rather serve as heuristic tools — incidentally, when I first learned the word “heuristic” as an undergrad, it took me years to understand what it really meant. Further, though, there are deeper issues here related to interdisciplinary fatigue (a nicer word than “laziness”) and ideology.

I’ll give you the difficulty of dealing with social theory on top of everything else that’s out there. Listen, it has taken me a long time even to begin to understand just one little piece of social theory (i.e., social identity theory). When I started reading literature  on the topic, it all seemed like a big confusing cloud of jargon. It’s easy to just toss it aside and not to try to wrestle with it. Heck, New Testament studies may own the widest gap in all of academe between the minute puddle of primary literature and its vast ocean of secondary literature. We have enough to read already.

But to say that there is nothing social theory can tell us feels a bit like the old-fashioned view that “Hey, what’s a shrink going to tell me that I don’t already know?” For years many people wondered (and still do wonder) why talk to a mental health professional [who has spent years studying the intricacies of the human mind and the behaviors associated with it] when my own common sense serves me just fine, thank you very much. Haven’t we figured out yet that these professionals have scientifically-tested ways in which to weed out the crap that we are unable to see and help us through uncharted territory in useful ways? Sociologists and social psychologists are applying scientific techniques to the collective behaviors of groups, communities, ethnicities, societies, etc. These people have years of research and experience to guide them in their conclusions. If there is a way to apply what people are seeing in our own times to the ancient world, making some sense of our texts, then why not give it a chance?

On the one hand, it’s possible (probable?) that a particular author has done a botched up job trying to use social theory with biblical research. On the other hand, it is also possible (probable?) that–speaking of social identity–many outsiders to social scientific methods don’t really make an effort to understand the complexities of the methods. And therefore, they do not really understand how these methods push the field in new directions.

I’ll take on ideology in my next post. Then, on to mistakes made by biblicists using social scientific techniques — even if the mistakes don’t disqualify the techniques themselves.

First, let me point you to the stuff I’ve been hearing. Two of the podcasts I listen to regularly recently discussed the phenomenon of Google’s translator: On The Media’s story “Bridging the Online Language Barrier” and a story from The World in Words podcast. The former story brings an interesting discussion on the history of automatic translators that’s worth sharing here:

PROFESSOR DAVID BELLOS: After the war, just as computers were being invented, the bright idea came that maybe you could use these wonderful new machines to do code cracking and that maybe languages could be looked at as if they were in code, as if the real meaning of the thing was actually the English and the Russian was just, you know, one of these complicated ways of masking what the real meaning was.

MARK PHILLIPS: First you teach the computer vocabulary, apple equals yablaka, and then you teach it all the rules and grammar, do it for every language and, boom, you’ve got a Star Trek-style universal translator.

PROFESSOR DAVID BELLOS: It didn’t produce the results they wanted.

MARK PHILLIPS: David Bellos:

PROFESSOR DAVID BELLOS: The reason it didn’t was that it was based on not a very sophisticated idea of what language actually is. What I am saying isn’t in code for something else, it is what I’m saying. So there are really very strict limits on what you can do with machine translation, based on the idea of code. By the early 1960s, they’d pretty much given up.

MARK PHILLIPS: This rules-based machine translation was a failure, but there was still another method called statistical translation. Think of it as a behavioral approach. The underlying grammar and syntax don’t matter, but repeated exposure to language, as it’s actually used, does. It’s like how babies learn. You don’t diagram sentences for them. They just hear you say stuff and copy you.

The catch is to teach the machine, you have to load huge amounts of text into the computer. Back in the 1960s, they didn’t have enough data to make a statistical machine translation work. Now we do, says Michael Galvez, a project manager at Google Translate.

MICHAEL GALVEZ: What we do is we actually use hundreds of billions of words that Google infrastructure has access to.

MARK PHILLIPS: It’s a two-step process. First, Google’s computers pull it all in, recognize the language and create what they call a language model. There’s one for each of the 52 languages currently on the service. As they get more data for a particular language, the computers get a better feel for it. It knows from a statistical standpoint that in English, the sentence “The boy are sad” is very rare, just as a five-year-old knows that sounds weird.

But the language model only teaches the computer how to speak each language by itself. The next step is to learn how to go between multiple languages. Google’s Michael Galvez says, for that:

MICHAEL GALVEZ: We also build what’s called a translation model, using previous human translation that we have access to, documents from the EU, the United Nations, very high-quality translation corpora.

MARK PHILLIPS: Everything spoken or written at the United Nations is automatically translated into six languages.

[U.N. HUBBUB/MANY LANGUAGES AT ONCE]]

Google uses U.N. and European Union transcripts, along with tons of other professional high-quality translations, to build this translation model, which allows their computers to take a sentence and predict what it would be in another language. Michael Galvez:

MICHAEL GALVEZ: We take the language model and the translation model and we put these two models together, and we basically create the machine translation system out of this.

MARK PHILLIPS: It produces startlingly accurate results. Plug in an article from a Spanish-language newspaper and it reads like an English article that just needs a trip to the copy editor.

So, what if we took Google Translate and plugged in all the hundreds of ancient texts in ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc., along with the best translations of those texts available? Imagine what it might be able to do for previously untranslated ancient texts! Of course, as the reporter notes, it would still “need a trip to the copy editor” or the scholar of ancient texts, in this case. One feature that would be nice would be for Google to offer a few options, so that you could choose the translation that seems to make the most sense in this particular context. This could be amazing for epigraphy: as new inscriptions are found, they can be run through the ancient translator and then just fixed up a bit.

Scholarship has become highly specialized. Imagine the possibilities that might be available if these sorts of resources could be made available to people in different fields. Maybe New Testament scholars would finally start paying attention to inscriptions. I know that a lot of scholars would cry foul about this sort of thing and how you still need human translators. Well, of course we do, but why not enhance accessibility for a greater number of scholars? Or even for our students for that matter? As one person interviewed for the story noted: “The solution isn’t machine translation just getting better or human translators just getting more pervasive. The solution is some combination of the two.”

Now all we need is for Google to get on those ancient texts with their translator. How about it Google? Do you want to take over the ancient world as well?

On the other hand, apparently they also have video bits that are like documentaries. So, you decide to read Sherlock Holmes and you get videos on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his historical situation, as well as some impromtu “on the street” interviews about his fictional characters. This is more like it. Not something that helps me “get in the mood” of the story, per se, but something that is kind of like a commentary… giving me background information or relevant conversation about the topic, story, or author at hand. I think I could get into that. Naturally, if they team up with quality producers of informed video content (BBC, PBS, etc.), they could get something really amazing going on there.

Can’t you see Zondervan getting behind something like this and putting out hosts of different sorts of study Bibles for different audiences? The more academic publishers could try to create one with top scholars being interviewed on particular passages or themes, archaeological issues. Vook Bibles could include sermons appropriate to the audience or something like Rob Bell’s NOOMA videos. Maps included in study Bibles could go beyond mere stagnant arrows, to show sequential movement. Charts and tables of information could be adapted for video format and placed in appropriate locations in the text.

As we move down the road a few years, I can see quite a few people getting access to these sorts of devices. If institutions follow the trend of schools handing out the latest technologies to students, then I could see something like Vook offering a really interesting service for academic works (e.g., textbooks, etc.). I tell you what, though, if they want to make some money, I bet coming out with Zondervan-style plethora of Bibles would do them lots of good. Of course, I would like a couple Vook Bibles to be the New Oxford Annotateds or New Interpreters or HarperCollins Study Bibles of the Vook Bible lineup (a category that I have just made up). So, what do you think, Vook?

It was a three hour seminar that began with a writing exercise (the class fulfills a “Writing II Requirement” or a “W” course at UCLA) on word precision and verb tense–not as dry as it sounds! The students had to have their rough draft of their final paper completed by that class session, so, they had examples to share with their peers.

Then we switched to Ignatius, the students having read his letter to the Ephesians and to the Romans. They had done some background reading from Ehrman and a scholarly article dealing with why Ignatius was arrested (external persecution or internal strife?). We spent some productive time discussing the major themes that Ignatius cares about: martyrdom, bishops, unity, and false teachings. We tried to connect the dots between his concerns regarding bishops, unity, and false teachings (false teachings bring dissension, the bishop dictates the boundaries of unity, etc.).

We tried to discern what those false teachings might have been. They identified “flesh” as an important topic in Ephesians, but weren’t sure what to make of it. One student thought that this could have been something “christological,” but when I explained docetism to them, they didn’t seem convinced that the false teachings were solely docetism. They thought that Ignatius was emphasizing spirit just as much as flesh in his comments, so they thought it could go either way.

When I told them about the old view that there was a singular “docetic Judaizing” group that Ignatius was fighting against in all congregations, just about every student thought this was ridiculous–as they’re faces expressed. This was a group very suspicious of the work of “scholars.” They almost reminded me of the way the sixteenth century Anabaptists talked about “the wicked scribes.” But their distaste was less for religious reasons as it was for logical ones. To paraphrase one student, “It seems like these scholars just decide some things, which have very little evidence, sound like good ideas and everybody just goes along with it and bases more work on it.” Teaching the issues of historical scholarship, particularly in the ancient world, to undergrads often reminds one of the speculative house of cards we academics live in.

For the rest of the class session, we talked about how Ignatius compares and contrasts with Paul (including the theme of Kevin’s own presentation on self-effacement) and the nature of persecution of Christians in the early second century (they had also read the Pliny and Trajan exchange, and a comment from Tertullian on how Christians get blamed for everything).

I love my own classroom, but it was nice to take a step back from seventeenth-century absolute monarchy and teach Christian origins again. And for a great group of students, too. Every student contributed something valuable to the discussion. I could tell that Kevin had been helping these students through some very challenging terrain in a masterful way. In the end, though, it does make me somewhat sad that I will not get to teach next year–even if it means I’ll be more productive in my research. I’ve already been looking for ways to keep a foot in the pedagogical waters next year.

As I reflect upon the LOST depiction of afterlife, I am immediately reminded of at least two cultural references (which is fitting since I taught my students about intertextuality today). My first association after learning that this sideways world in the film is the afterlife was “Defending Your Life.” Remember that one? In the movie, the character played by Albert Brooks discovers that he is on trial for how fearless he was in his life. Now he’s being tested on whether he was brave enough in this first life to “move on” to the next thing, or whether he has to go back and try again. There is something very intriguing in this Purgatory-like/reincarnation idea that one must deal with the meaning of his or her life after death in some way.

Complementing that aspect of accounting for the the life one has lived, the second reference that came to mind is C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce (others elsewhere noticed too). This is an even better parallel and one of my favorite books. In Divorce, Lewis tells the tale of two worlds, that symbolically represent heaven and hell. In a very Plato sort of way, some of the people in the shady, shadowy world of hell take a bus trip up to the very solid and “real” world of heaven. They arrive at the outskirts of heaven and it is so “real” and, thus, more solid, that the blades of grass do not bend under the feet of the shadowy people from the gray world of hell. People in the hell-place are subject to their own personal versions of hell, whatever self-destructive persona that person had before death, but multiplied. The afterlife in LOST obviously is not either hell or heaven, but there is room for both. Reality in the afterlife is not exactly the same as it had been before death, but directly influenced by one’s experience of life.

Like The Great Divorce, there seems to be an element to the afterlife that it is what people imagine it. The best connection I’ve seen between the LOST finale and Divorce comes from Travis Prinzi (who also mixes in some Harry Potter):

The Flash Sideways is a postmodern Graytown (from C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce.) It’s like Lewis’s Graytown, because the people there can stay or leave as they feel ready. . . . But also consider that Christian told Jack that all the castaways “made” the place, because they needed it.

And in that case, it’s like King’s Cross. Harry perceives his meeting place with Dumbledore as King’s Cross, because it’s his own perception. What he believes actually shapes the place. In Lewis’s Graytown, the place is what it is and looks like what it looks like. Graytown’s citizens disagree on the meaning of the place, but not its makeup. At King’s Cross, and in this Sideways world, the place looks like what its inhabitants make it in their own imaginations. But all are able to proceed to love eternal when they are ready.

As the story ended, the people sitting with me immediately began discussing: So is the Sideways real? I just smiled to myself, being too exhausted to formulate an answer. I wanted to say with Dumbledore, “It was in their heads, but why on earth should that make it not real?” What LOST did was make the statement: what is in your head is real. Imagination vindicated. Faith vindicated. Spiritual reality vindicated.

What gets me curious, though, is the fact that in Divorce the shadowy members of Graytown are subject to whatever delusions they have lived and died with. Jack Shepherd, however, seems to have “let go” and found redemption by the time he has died. Why, then, does he revert back to his earlier skeptic ways once he’s in the afterlife scenario? That bit kind of conjures up a Matrix-like scenario, to name a third cultural reference — a need for an awakening. The difference from the Matrix, though, is that this alternate reality does not seem repressive.

It’s also interesting there is apparently a former (kinda) purgatory to the ultimate (kinda) purgatory, while Michael and others with unresolved issues remain on the island whispering to future island visitors. But that will have to wait for further speculation.

In addition to the shallow switcharoo (IMHO) ending, to me the reunion at the interfaith church was just so eerily and obnoxiously warm and fuzzy, that it made me think that the LOST gang was some sort of creepy suicide cult. I liked it better when the show worked in subtle references to various religious symbolism, but this last scene feels like a strange religious cocktail blend that kinda makes me want to vomit. Did you notice the stained glass window? The Taoist yin and yang, Christian cross, Jewish star of David, Muslim crescent moon and star, Hindu aum, and Buddhist dharmacakra wheel (a connection to the frozen wheel I hadn’t considered). Really, did you have to be that blatant about your religious combo meal? What happened to the mystery? It’s as if LOST is taking us aside to tell us, “Hi viewer, in this series we have borrowed from all of these very profound and inspirational religions. Won’t you, like us, respect and value these important religious traditions in your own path to spiritual enlightenment?”

Please permit me a moment of commentary here. Far from respecting all religions, this sort of religious soup is a slap in the face to all communities of faith. This is where Stephen Prothero’s latest book, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World–and Why Their Differences Matter, has tremendous relevance (check out his video interview on PBS’ Religion and Ethics). When we blend all religions together, we create something entirely different from any one religion. We need to consider each religion within its own context if we’re going to respect and study each religion, not “the simple celebration of diversity for diversity’s sake—that is too easy,” as Prof. Boustan likes to say. In his letter from the director on UCLA’s Center for the Study of Religion site, Boustan notes, “We must avoid the temptation to divide the world into the familiar and the exotic.” The LOST finale has not avoided such temptation and rather makes religion into a cheesy, meaningless prop.

Gary Susman at TV Squad interprets the stained glass window thusly: “There’s an afterlife waiting for everyone, as long as they have faith and are willing to let go.” Why on God’s green earth would LOST end its magnificent run with such a hokey message? Commenting on that stained-glass window and the entire interfaith church idea, one blogger complains, “Why not just have Jack ascend to heaven in a Prius with a ‘coexist’ bumper sticker?” Not that I have anything against Priuses (Prii?) or those stickers (if properly conceived), but the point is: Why do the final moments of the LOST finale feel like an after school special on the importance of respecting religious diversity? There we were, wondering about the mythology of LOST, which questions would be answered and how, following the epic story, and then, we were being homilized. And it’s not even a good homily at that.

On the other hand, I did appreciate Kate’s poignant question at the beginning of the episode: “‘Christian Shepherd’? Seriously?”

[continued (with some less negative thoughts) in part 3 . . . ]

So, apparently, they decided to go all Shyamalanian on the series (making this April Fools joke pretty ironic). A Shyamalan film is what it is and ever since the “Sixth Sense,” we’ve known what that is. It’s like the whole movie is building up to this “Oh, I guess I am dead people” moment. With LOST, the Shyamalanian sort of twist on it, revealed in the last fifteen minutes or so, cheapens the entire series for me. I agree with one blogger who compared LOST to Shyamalan’s Signs: “Signs was a 2 hour movie.  Lost was a 6 year series.  With a lot more twists and turns and unanswered questions.  I think in the end, I felt like the first 5 seasons were one show and this one was something that belonged on PAX.” I’m not sure I’d wrap together the whole season that way, because they could have gone another way with the sideways world. But, yeah, the twist explanation ruins it for me.

A lot of people thought the ending was beautiful. I have a hard time seeing the beauty when I feel like the whole “answer” to the big question this season (”What’s the deal with the two parallel worlds?”) was a cop out: the easy, cheesy way to go with it. It reminds me of when I was starting out in my brief high school acting career (you know, a couple musicals, a couple plays) and totally blew an audition to a sought-after play at the school. The audition included an improv game portion, similar to “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” You’d freeze the two people who were performing some scene, and then jump in and replace one of the improvising actors. I had never done anything like this, so I waited until someone was making some really strange pose. I froze them and jumped in to say, “What are you DOING?!” Of course it was lame, everyone groaned, and I didn’t get a part. Instead of trying to come up with some original and creative new narrative, I just put all the responsibility on the other guy, showing I had no improv skills. To me, the last fifteen minutes or so of the finale took a similar “easy way out.” How do we explain this strange alternate world? Afterlife! That solves everything! Yeah, and then we can really ham it up and make people cry about it too.

But maybe you like the Shyamalan thing.

James McGrath mentioned that many people are saying the finale was more emotionally satisfying than intellectually satisfying. After it was over, I suppose my cold and heartless side came out. People were trotted out for the local late night news after the show and asked, “What did you think of the finale?” They were all choked up at how beautiful it was, I just thought, “Are you kidding me?? Those people are going to get mocked at work tomorrow.” I’m not real impressed with the “emotional satisfaction” of an otherwise intellectually satisfying series.

[continued in part two . . .]

The Graduate Research Mentorship (GRM) Program is designed to assist students in acquiring and developing advanced research skills under faculty mentorship. The Program is open to doctoral students in the humanities, social sciences and other disciplines where students have little opportunity for academic apprentice appointments or other University funding relevant to their graduate training. An expected outcome is to increase the number of students who complete the PhD degree and who show promise as candidates for faculty appointments. Faculty mentors are expected to be in the same locale as the student participants and assist them with research leading to the development of a doctoral dissertation.

My project will deal with the social functions of apocalyptic thought in early Christian communities. My mentor will be Ra’anan Boustan. I explained in my proposal, “The topic of apocalyptic thought is a particularly nebulous research area, for which ten-week seminars do not provide ample time for processing. Working closely with Prof. Boustan on the relevant concepts and scholarship for an entire year would offer an invaluable opportunity in terms of my progress in the program and my ability to develop original insights in my field.” For me, this program will come on the heels of my participation in the summer version of this grant (the “Graduate Summer Research Mentorship”) with my advisor, Scott Bartchy, on a related topic this summer.

The downside of taking this grant is that it means I will not teach next year. I love teaching. It is the most fulfilling thing that I do. But being a teacher and a researcher at the same time is like leading a double life (and that’s not even factoring my family life!). The two (teaching and researching) are both academic enterprises, but they often feel so disconnected — especially when I’m teaching Western Civ. (”Circa A.D. 843 to Circa 1715″) and doing research on the Deuteronomistic History, as I’m doing at the moment. How do I find time to immerse myself fully into two completely divergent topics in the span of a ten week quarter? I can’t. So, I come up with a compromise — such is the academic life.

Next year, this fellowship means that I won’t have to compromise on the time I devote to my research, and also that I can complete my Ph.D. earlier and, thus, find a teaching post somewhere sooner. One former UCLA Ph.D. student told me recently that receiving the GRM grant made him feel like he had a two year head start on his dissertation. That’s what I’m hoping for. Also, though, I have a couple language exams yet to take and then my comprehensive exams will be coming by the end of next year. I hope to have all of my exams completed before the 2011-2012 academic year (my fourth year at UCLA) begins. The GRM gives me the space to run with that task.

As my fellow Bruin, Kevin Scull, explains (see this post too), funding for our program is a bit of a buried treasure that you need to seek out. Nobody in my program is offered a guaranteed “funding package.” Hopefully, we can be an encouragement to other Ph.D. students out there to seek out that funding!