When approaching narrative content, New Testament scholars typically put the judgment cart before the interpretative horse. This happens in two ways. Most decide which bits of a passage are credible and then proceed to find meaning in what still remains, while some suspend judgment altogether before taking a “literary” approach to the narrative as a whole. There was hope for a third option when the recent “memory approach” (Dunn, Kirk, LeDonne, Keith) suggested that bias could indicate distortion rather than falsification, while laudably emphasizing a process of inquiry and hypothesis. Unfortunately, that third option neither engaged literary issues nor evaluated narrative passages holistically. Thus, NT scholarship remains bifurcated in two groups. Most remain caught up in the still unfolding reactions to William Wrede (1901) while others embrace cognitive dissonance within the considerable influence of Hans Frei (1974). By and large, currently, the guild offers no scholarship in which a holistic narratological examination precedes and informs critical judgment about what might have occurred in the actual past.
My own
view, following F.R. Ankersmit (historical theorist) and Steve Mason (Josephus
scholar), is that we should properly view constructive interpretation as the
horse, while the cart to be pulled is historical-critical judgment. We
should absolutely apply skepticism to narrative claims, but one cannot assess accuracy
before determining meaning, and one cannot determine meaning of an isolated
reference while ignoring the larger representation in which we find it embedded.
The priority is determination of narrative meaning, which should in all cases
include a contextual reconstruction of the authorial vision and its logical implications.
That narratological reconstruction should precede and inform a later phase of
inquiry and judgment that can lead to historical reconstruction. The authorial representation
is never precisely identical to whatever really occurred in the actual past,
but one should demonstrate understanding of what the author envisioned before
offering their own explanation in replacement. More importantly, one should
demonstrate understanding of the author’s whole vision before finalizing their judgments
about any one part in that whole.
When I began blogging here, I could not have written those two paragraphs, above. While I struggled to communicate with NT scholars, I correctly observed that their thinking was unlike scholars of either history or literature but I could not explain what exactly was wrong. I felt certain that things were being done poorly, but I could not explain why in those years. The posts collected below are snapshots in the history of my struggle, indicating some key points at which I began asking the most helpful questions, consulting the most helpful sources, and improving my efforts to say what I needed to say.
For a more complete view of how my thinking developed, see also my page on Chronology in Memory.