Adventist expectations before reading Tom Shepherd's work: the case of Literary Analysis and Textual Analysis

koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

28 October 2010

Tom Shepherd is a professor in New Testament at Andrews University and has co-authored a book with Geert van Oyen of the Université Catholique de Louvain. Together with other scholars he also presented his own hobby, the analysis of narratives in the book of Mark.

The approach of Shepherd, from a strictly Adventist position, calls for certain parameters to be expressed, since his own view of his method is the following:

"In studying a document that's 2000 years old, how do you come to new insights? You apply common research methods in new ways".

1. In reality, although I love textual analysis [a believers approach to textual criticism] with all my heart and it is also a hobby with me, I have to admit that nowhere in the Scriptures Jesus or the Holy Spirit admonishes us to get new insights by playing around with the color of the book, the cover-design, the paper quality, the xerox problems of the book etc. We are admonish to read it and follow it, and that is what members in the church do when they read the Bible for the 20th time from the back to the front just to go to the back again, year in and year out.

2. God spread His messages all over the Bible and He wants us to read and re-read so that all the doctrines get refined and all data falls into a systematized cluster of concepts under many umbrellas that helps the person to apply it to his daily life regarding his ontology, epistemology, methodology and his teleology. The now and the future is taken care of this way.

3. To come to a new insight in the Bible, you do not "apply common research methods" but read and re-read the Bible.

4. Literary criticism as opposed to Literary analysis

Tom Shepherd seems to favor literary analysis and not literary criticism. Adventist scholarship since its inception did the same. The remnant through the ages did the same. Aesthetic sciences on the Bible really started in Modern Times after the Renaissance when the elites of those days rented their own scholars to hang around them, paid them well, fed them well, and drinking and dining, they concocted all kinds of theories about how the Bible was composed, ending up with all the faithful rejections like summarized in Rudolph Bultmann in the 1960's. As John Hurst in 1864 and Gerhard Hasel in the 1980's warned us in his books on Hermeneutics, the Enlightenment destroyed the Bible with their methods for themselves. True scholars of the remnant presented the alternative in every generation, but they were marginalized increasingly and in the period before the fall of the papacy in 1798, many seminaries fell to Rationalism as a method. This is what we call a method operating with the principles of hermeneutics of suspicion. Adventists and we believe also Tom Shepherd, operates with the hermeneutics of affirmation, as did the remnant through the ages. Therefore, the Source criticism, Redaction criticism, Literary criticism, Narrative criticism, of the 19th and 20th centuries have an alternative: source analysis, redaction analysis, literary analysis, narrative analysis and even textual criticism is for the Seventh Day Adventist: textual analysis.

5. "Common research methods" are the conventional ones and the conventional ones are the ones presented, published and promoted by SBL and their scholars, and they are 95% supporting the hermeneutics of suspicion, not the hermeneutics of affirmation. A Seventh Day Adventist cannot use "common research methods" without critically in an eclectic way, "pick and choose" the truth from the error. This is what is known as hermeneutics of affirmation. The Seventh Day Adventist has to be skeptical of modern scholarship, otherwise he is not a Seventh Day Adventist any longer, but a hybrid, who has fused his Adventist biblical understanding with compromises. This is what we expect Tom Shepherd is not. One has to read his work with a toothpick or his lectures to ascertain that.

6. An abstract of Tom Shepherd published in Journal for the Study of the New Testament Tom Shepherd, "Narrative Analysis as a Textcritical Tool: Mark 16 in Codex W as a Test Case" Shepherd did not use the word Narrative Criticism, but one should read the article to ascertain which he supports, since he is using "common research methods". Nevertheless, he stated as one of his final conclusions after using Codex Washingtonianus dating to the 5th-6th centuries:

"The article correlates the theological tendencies of this passage against the rest of the text of Mark in W with the outcome that there is reasonable evidence for a Tendenz focused on the cosmic power of Christ. This, in turn, correlates well with the triumph of the church over paganism in the fourth to fifth centuries CE when W was copied."

7. Textual Criticism and Textual Analysis

Textual Criticism is classical the tool of the Rationalists operating with a hermeneutics of suspicion. That is why John Hurst was negative about it in 1864 and also Gerhard Hasel in the 1980's was very skeptical about his science. Why? Because this tool destroys the Word of God as from God and furthermore highlights the differences in additions and omissions in the manuscripts and their history in such a way that they, just like in evolution, concocted theories or stories as to how it originated, ending with the intricate human product that resulted. God is outside the picture. Seventh Day Adventists operate with a hermeneutics of affirmation and takes the same tool, and with skepticism, eclectically "pick and choose" the correct way from the tool and analyze scripture with different results, namely that it supports the Bible, supports the standard text and not destroy it. This is what we expect Tom Shepherd is also doing or should do.

8. It appears from the data above in the citation that Shepherd investigated the omissions and additions in Codex Washingtonianus and compared it to the standard Greek text of Mark as we have it as the "Word of God" and normative. He saw comparisons, but also differences. He then asked himself, why there are differences. He analyzed them and came to the conclusion that for ideological reasons, the copyist or xerox worker "added" and "omitted" certain words purposefully to align with the intention of the copyist or "editor" of that century in the fourth or fifth.

Comments:

a. I once took the earliest Shepherd of Hermas in Michigan University and compared it with the fifth century copies and in turn with a copy much later and could clearly see how there were great additions in the fourth-fifth centuries on ideological basis, to harmonize the text with their own views of that century. What Shepherd found in Codex Washingtonianus is probable but there are some dangers we need to guard for. Codex Washingtonianus may be a xerox copy of an earlier copy that had errors.

b. What Shepherd may not be aware of, is that Emperor Constantine in 332 CE ordered Eusebius of Caesarea (De Vita Constantine iv. 36-37) to very speedily "they are prepared as quickly as possible" copy fifty copies of "Holy Sciptures". How do you copy "speedily" without errors? The process demands readers who dictated to listeners who are writing. Errors of this kind that one can find is called "slips of the ear", "slips of the hand", "slips of the tongue", "slips of the mind [memory]" [see koot van wyk, "The Form and Function of 4QJudg(a) as a witness to degenerative scribal and copyist activity" (D. Litt et Phil dissertation at the University of South Africa, 2004), 265ff].

c. What Shepherd need to do is to look at Codex Washingtonianus and asks himself after analysis and comparison of additions and omissions, are these evidence of the one of the five slips? If not, then one can begin to look for intentional changes in the text. But, only after these has been completed. One of Shepherd's readers commented:

"Wieland Willker said... That verse 10:48 is missing in Mark of W is not due to 'Decrease in emphasis on secrecy', but simply omission due to parablepsis. For the date of W confer also to Ulrich Schmid in "The Freer Biblical Manuscripts", 2006. (possibly 6th CE) 7:23 PM, September 08, 2009".

Our comment to Wilker is that he may be right in that particular case in Mark 10:48 but one has to investigate the whole manuscript, at least cursory, to ascertain whether slips of the ear and slips of the eye are mixed. If slips of the eye are a larger percentage than slips of the ear, one has to assume that the reader was copying by himself most of the times. If there are evidence of listening errors, then one can assume that at times or all the time copying was done by dictation. There is also the third option and that is that in the first instance of xerox production in Constantine's day, 332 CE, listening errors abound mostly but that another xerox process of this xerox was made a century or two later by one person reading himself/herself, adding slips of the eye. The possibility is also that the scribe was a scholar in the later century with the second xerox process and that he added his own intentional "paraphrases" in to harmonize with either his own or theological communities' views.

d. The Adventist position will not be that what we call the "Word of God" in Mark is but just a concocting of slips of all kinds and intentional changes of theology by the church to advocate their own positions. Seventh Day Adventist scholars will not superimpose the errors of a fourth or fifth century CE biblical text over that of the normative standard Greek text of Mark and suggest that Peter or Mark or both operated with the same problems in their day, especially redacting the words of Jesus or about Jesus intentionally to fit their own agendas or paradigms. This we do not expect Tom Shepherd did or will do.

e. Different than "common research methods" as a Seventh Day Adventist, we expect from Tom Shepherd that he operates not with the conventional eclectic "Word of God" approach but with a standard normative text from which others deviated by additions, omissions and intentional changes in later centuries. A Seventh Day Adventist is always apologetic towards preserving the standard normative Greek text of Mark and do not wish to view all texts as equally important as conventionalism are doing. They do not accept the popular multiplicity of text theories in modern day textual criticism (contra E. Tov 1992) since it results in many words of God scenarios.

Sources:

1. http://jnt.sagepub.com/content/32/1/77.abstract?etoc

2. http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp. RBL 05/2008

3. "Analyzing Biblical Narrative-applying common research in new ways" Focus volume 1, 2010: unnumbered but under "Research at Andrews".

4. http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2009/09/shepherd-on-narrative-analysis-as-text.html

5. koot van wyk, "The Form and Function of 4QJudg(a) as a witness to degenerative scribal and copyist activity" (D. Litt et Phil dissertation at the University of South Africa, 2004).

6. The following related notes are by Van Wyk on VAN WYK NOTES at http://www.egw.org

207 “Literary Criticism of Van Wyk: Methodological Considerations” kootvanwyk 2009-12-02

191 “New Testament Greek and its characteristics” kootvanwyk 2009-10-21

183 “Short Notes on Greek Linguistics of the New Testament” kootvanwyk 2009-10-11

167 “Influences on Bultmann's Mind” kootvanwyk 2009-08-30

157 “Subjective norms and Objective norms: the big choice for the SDA younger generation” kootvanwyk 2009-08-16

156 “The Aristotelian paradigm shift with the neo-generation SDA's” kootvanwyk 2009-08-15

151 “Daniel 9:27 Textual Affirmation and Versional Criticism” kootvanwyk 2009-08-05

150 “Daniel 9:24-26 Textual Affirmation and Versional Criticism” kootvanwyk 2009-08-05

149 “Daniel 9: 1-3 Textual Affirmation and Versional Criticism” kootvanwyk 2009-08-05

108 “Textual Criticism and its place for Theology” kootvanwyk 2009-04-29

80 “Diagram to see differences of translation methods of free and literal Bibles” kootvanwyk 2009-03-08

61 “Rewriting Textual Criticism Lecture 1”  kootvanwyk 2009-02-09