“The latest scholarship”

One often hears folks in biblical studies refer to “the latest scholarship” on such-and-such topic. Or they will refer to author X or book Y being “out of date.” Or when writing a scholar will refer to “the latest studies” or “the most recent research.”

I’ve poked fun at this tendency before. A few years back I penned “An honest preface to contemporary academic interpretation of the New Testament”:

The figures and authors of the New Testament, especially Jesus and Paul, taught and wrote primarily during the middle half of the first century A.D. Their teachings and texts were not, alas, understood in the 2nd century, nor were they understood in the 3rd century, nor were they understood in the 4th century, nor were they understood in the 5th century, nor were they understood in the 6th century, nor were they understood in the 7th century, nor were they understood in the 8th century, nor were they understood in the 9th century, nor were they understood in the 10th century, nor were they understood in the 11th century, nor were they understood in the 12th century, nor were they understood in the 13th century, nor were they understood in the 14th century, nor were they understood in the 15th century, nor were they understood in the 16th century, nor were they understood in the 17th century, nor were they understood in the 18th century, nor were they understood in the 19th century, nor were they understood in the 20th century. Such periods, unfortunately, were not up to date on the latest scholarship.

I am.

That is the spirit of historical-critical hubris in a nutshell. Less sarcastically, I’ve reflected on what I call “subjunctive scholarship,” or biblical scholarship in the subjunctive mode (or mood, if we want to be strict about it). Here’s the object of critique:

If you read enough biblical scholarship, you come to realize that one of the guild’s endemic features—for at least a century, probably two—is an overweening confidence in its claims. Such claims usually partake of a rhetoric of calm certainty; all too often what are contestable judgments based on slim evidence are instead asserted as facts, or at least as bearing a supreme likelihood of being true. These judgments in turn become the basis for still further judgments, or proposals, that are themselves even flimsier in terms of probability or breadth of justifying reasons. So far as I can tell, this style of scholarship is of a piece with the broader approach not only of history but also the social sciences.

I offer a couple counter-proposals for how to frame a work of historical biblical scholarship:

(1) In what follows I will write as if it were the case that X, though I am by no means certain or even confident that this hypothesis is true…

(2) In this essay/book I will follow lines of speculative reflection regarding a set of issues about which we lack anything close to sufficient evidence to support confident claims; accordingly, my ideas and proposals will follow a certain pattern: “If it is the case that X, then Y might reasonably follow,” allowing that I can make no dispositive arguments in favor of X, and that any number of alternatives to X are plausible; for that reason I will also trace some of those plausible alternatives and see what they might lead.”

Such argumentative frameworks are, granted, not exactly sizzling compared to the sort of rhetoric that attends much “cutting edge” scholarship. But the gains are worth it, gains in both epistemic humility and intellectual curiosity. Also in the honest pursuit of truth, given how little we do or can or will ever know about, in this case, the texts and wider contexts of culture and politics, persons and happenings in the first century.

Here’s one other observation I make in that post:

[To write in the subjunctive would] make clear—with no ifs, ands, or buts—that one or more premises of [a scholarly proposal] are arguable, indeed so arguable that it would be laughable to presume them to be self-evidently true to any reasonable person. Such a proviso would also signal the self-awareness on the part of the scholar that seemingly commonsensical consensus scholarly judgments inevitably come under fire in and by subsequent generations of scholars. What is taken for granted today is up for grabs tomorrow. No reason to act as though that isn’t the case.

Here’s the question I want to ask (one I may have asked elsewhere, though I can’t seem to find it in the following form), a question that might sound pedantic or sardonic but is meant in earnest. What good is being “up to date” on “the latest research” on X when the one thing about which we may claim disciplinary or epistemic certainty is that, whatever “the latest research” says about X today, it will be disputed by whatever “the latest research” says about X tomorrow? Put differently, if the force of academic arguments in the present tense depend upon a rough consensus about intrinsically contestable matters, and if the history of the discipline reliably informs us that every rough scholarly consensus is inevitably heavily revised or jettisoned by subsequent generations of scholars, or at least becomes subject to destabilization and thus no longer remains a consensus, then isn’t the whole towering edifice built on sand? Isn’t every argument built, with full awareness, on a foundation that everyone knows, as a matter of fact, will no longer exist within a matter of decades?—just to the extent that the foundation’s stability depended (at the time of the argument’s being made) upon its being more or less unquestioned, which is to say, a matter of present-day (though not future) consensus?

Note well that I am not calling into question either growth in historical knowledge or the ability to make claims to knowledge in this or adjacent realms of inquiry. Rather, I am calling into question the rhetoric, the confidence, and the rhetoric of confidence that attend such claims to knowledge. At a deeper level I am further calling into question the method of the inquiry, built argumentatively and even logically upon claims to present-day achievements of consensus that everyone knows but chooses to forget will be undone eventually—and often sooner rather than later.

Instead of qualifying historical and textual arguments into oblivion, however, acknowledging and accepting this critique should function to liberate biblical scholarship and historiography more generally. For it entails that works in biblical studies do not expire the year after publication. The value of the car, so to speak, doesn’t plummet once it’s driven off the lot. Sometimes colleagues in biblical studies speak as though, on one hand, they can’t propose ideas in public unless and until they’ve read everything published up to and including today (perhaps also forthcoming works!); and, on the other hand, that the sell-by dates for the very ideas they’d like to elaborate are, sad to say, the day after they propose them.

That sounds at once emotionally grueling, humanly impracticable, intellectually stifling, and epistemically indefensible.

The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is construing biblical scholarship on analogy to the hard sciences, rather than classing it among the hermeneutical arts. To be sure, there is sifting of evidence, and some of that evidence qualifies as “hard.” But the work of making sense of the canonical Jewish and Christian texts, including making historical sense of them, is finally interpretive in character. Not only is interpretation not “scientific” in the colloquial or disciplinary sense. To treat it as such is essentially to distort the task of understanding—in this case, understanding texts in their historical and cultural contexts—as well as the nature of disputation regarding proposals for such understanding. It takes on faith what is unproven, considers evidentially dispositive what is anything but, concedes to consensus what is and shall always be arguable. In short, it artificially constricts both the range and the force of what one may (and must) say as a member of the guild. And it does so for no good reason.

That’s not to say one may or should avoid reading “the latest” in one’s discipline. Staying “up to date” is in general a reasonable expectation for academics. But it is not and cannot be a condition for holding or proposing a plausible opinion on a contested topic, much less for rejecting, out of hand and sight unseen, “old” or “outdated” scholarship on said topic. Nine times out of ten, what makes “new” research new is not an archeological discovery or fresh material evidence. It is an innovative theory, speculative reconstruction, or alternative explanation of preexisting materials (usually just the texts themselves) that is “the latest” on the scene. Such proposals are well worth appraising. But they do not ipso facto rule out antecedent ideas. Even where they attempt to do so, they rarely succeed on the merits; when they do so succeed, often as not the rationale is fashion, an itch for novelty, or social pressure (that latter phrase being a serviceable gloss for “scholarly consensus”).

In any case, what I most want, as an outsider to the field of biblical studies but as one who reads it regularly for pleasure and profit alike, is for members of the discipline to be and to write and to teach free of this tiresome burden imposed upon them. That burden is called “being up to date,” which in turn carries with it a methodological mindset that treats the humanistic arts of interpreting ancient texts as a sort of hard science that accords omniscient experts, and them alone, the authority to make even the most modest suggestions about how to understand the Bible in its original historical contexts. Such a mindset also renders all biblical scholarship negligible or moribund within a decade after its publication. That’s just silly. Moreover, it ends up lowering the quality of such scholarship even on the day of its publication, since it is invariably pitched in such a way both that it must be “cutting edge” (ramp up that PR machine) and aware of its immediately diminishing relevance (grasp for those straws while you can), all the while focusing disproportionately on minute debates from recent years instead of the big questions at the heart of the subject matter. Not to mention the typical unspoken pretense that no one tried to exegete the text in question until the last two centuries.

That’s what I’d call being “up to date.” If you can tell me what the Greek and Latin and Syriac fathers and medievals and reformers all thought about this or that text, then you’ve got my attention. If, by contrast, mostly you know the Anglophone academic “consensus” regarding half a chapter in Philippians circa 1986–2011, though you’re aware that’s been overturned in the last decade, so obviously you need to bone up on the latest articles before you proffer an opinion … you’ve lost me.

To that sort of disciplinary formation, I have a simple message.

Be free!