Category: Speculation

One of the most powerful scenes in Revelation is the moment when the Lamb takes the scroll from the right hand of the one who sits on the throne. His achievement is celebrated by heaven’s citizens like this:

When he took it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each of the elders held a harp and gold bowls filled with incense, which are the prayers of the holy ones. 9 They sang a new hymn: “Worthy are you to receive the scroll and to break open its seals, for you were slain and with your blood you purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue, people and nation. 10 You made them a kingdom and priests for our God, and they will reign on earth.”

Have a a second look at the criteria for priestly status. In Revelation’s world, that status comes as a result of the sacrifice of the Lamb. Note especially the absence of any mention of race and gender.

And have nice MLK Day!

This bit of light writing was composed in response to an email from a friend. I have left it with that content and format except for a postscript added this afternoon. The question posed was the relationship between blasphemy against the Spirit and all that other business about demons and Beelzebul in Mark 3.

How amazing that your question should concern the binding of the strong man passage! That is precisely the passage we are going to cover in GD this week. Last week we did attitudes of a disciple and attitude of Jesus toward disciples. This week we’ll look at attitudes of anti-disciples and the attitude of Jesus toward anti-disciples.

(Anti-disciples should be distinguished from not-disciples. In Mark, the crowd is something of a group character with its own “personality” and theology. They are the not-disciples; people who are listening, thinking, and in some cases reacting but are neither disciples nor hostile.)

Continue reading “The Sin Against the Spirit in Mark 3”

For those who are joining our programming in medias res, this series is looking at the story of the Adulterous Woman in the Fourth Gospel from a narrative-critical standpoint. The first installment dealt with the theory of narrator reliability and the second with various narrative techniques. This one has to do with the challenges inherent in a narrative-critical approach to a story of uncertain authenticity.

The Text-Critical Situation

The story of the Adulterous Woman is now found in Jn 7:53-8:11. But was it always there? Probably not. The traditional exegetical approach divides the pertinent data between the categories of external and internal evidence.

If bizarre manuscript references are not your thing, you can accept my conclusion, that the story of the Adulterous Woman was not originally part of the Fourth Gospel, and move on down to the paragraph heading “Narrative Coherence.”

Continue reading “The Adulterous Woman, Part 3: Textual Criticism and Narrative Theory”

About a year ago I was teaching Genesis 4 in a GD class that included the stake RS president. As we worked through the opening verses, she raised her hand and with some consternation reported that it looked like someone didn’t much care for Cain. Mentally, I gave her high marks for reading but when it came to verbalizing a response, I had to disabuse her of the idea that the Bible is “neutral.” The Bible is a great piece of ideological reading. Good readers are aware of its trick and techniques. Here’s a selection with some applicability to the story of the Adulterous Woman.

Suspense and Surprise

On one level, suspense and surprise are simply no-brainers. Everybody has seen a horror flick. A group of young women short on brassieres, brains, and batteries descend into a basement to investigate a noise. This is suspense. What will happen? And when something happens, you’re surprised. Although you now know what happened, it wasn’t what you expected…

But you would be amazed at how many readers of the Bible are either unaware or unresponsive in their study. It’s one of the reasons why folks sometimes think that Biblical narrative is boring. The absence of suspense and surprise pretty much defines boring.

Continue reading “The Adulterous Woman, Part 2: Suspense, Surprise, Primacy and Recency”

A couple of weeks ago there was a partial reading of the story of the Adulterous Woman over on T&S. In that endeavor, the narrative-critical aspects of the story were not included. Since I have already ascended from dissy-Hell in order to drink gin from the bathtub with my homies, I think I’ll complement the earlier effort before I return. And since I seem to be totally unable to write anything shorter than War and Peace, this is going to have several installments.

Narrative criticism approaches biblical passages as literature, asking how a text communicates its message as a literary artifact. In general, narrative-critics of the Bible use the same methods as those used by those who study fiction. In specific cases, these methods are modified by an awareness of the time and distance that separates modern fiction from the ancient world. Narrative-critical approaches look at characters, rhetoric, style, syntax, plot, imagery, setting, tone, and point of view (focalization), among other things.

Standing above all this, however, is the narrator. Narrative critics look at the narrator as the one who selects the scenes that are shown, decides what characters say, sets the pace of the narration, evaluates characters, chooses how much background the reader knows, and provides the all-important “insider information” that helps us make sense of what we are reading. In the literary world of the Bible, the narrator, implied author, and real author are very closely aligned.

The narrator, then, is normally the reader’s best friend when it comes to understanding a story. The three-way relationship between the reader, the narrator, and the discourse is one of the most important aspects of narrative theory. And it naturally follows that when that relationship is rendered unreliable or otherwise ambiguous, interpretation becomes far more challenging.

Continue reading “The Adulterous Woman, Part 1: The Narrator”