Part 4 of the series Observations from a Linguistic Spectator: An Annual Report

For part 1, see here.
For part 2, see here.
For part 3, see here

Introduction

In the last post, we’ve considered some basics of grammatical aspect and the lexical actional potential of verbs. This part of the series continues this exploration. In particular, we will look at some other dynamics that occur when these two factors interact. Again, I would recommend to you reading Thomson’s essay for a fuller account. We will also address some practical issues that arise when it comes to dealing with aspect and Aktionsart in our daily exegetical work. Note that the categories that were introduced in part 3 of this series will be presupposed here. So if you are new to this subject, I would strongly encourage you to read that post first.

Reinterpretation of situations because of grammatical aspect

The combination of certain actional potentials with a certain aspect results in reinterpretations of the situation type. For example, if an accomplishment like κατασκευάζειν is portrayed through the imperfective aspect, we get an activity. In German, where we don’t have aspect as a grammatical category, we express this different “aspectuality” (it’s the broader category, just like temporality vs. tense) lexically by having an atelic verb (“bauen”) and a telic verb (“erbauen”).

In part  4 of Thomson’s article you can find a systematic account of possible reinterpretations due to aspectual modification. He has produced some very nice illustrations (all following illustrations are taken from that essay) that help a lot in communicating what this is all about. Here’s for example an accomplishment in the imperfective and the perfective aspect. The rising line indicates the movement towards a goal. The shaded area represents the reference time as it is determined by the aspect. (Note that this particular example of an “accomplishment” is called an “active achievement” in more recent literature. It is formed by adding an endpoint to an activity predicate.)

In the same way, you can now see how durativity is of importance. Take for example the semelfactives. A flash of lightning is over so soon that it’s not possible to find a reference time within the event time, or at least not a reference time that excludes the end of the situation. Therefore, for such a statement to be still acceptable, an iterative re-interpretation occurs with the result of a series of flashes being communicated.

Something interesting also happens with achievements that contain a “preface” that leads up to the punctual situation. [Christopher find something] would be an example. Here the moment of finding is preceded by an activity of searching. The perfective aspect simply focuses on that moment of the find itself. However, the imperfective aspect has the same “problem” here as with the semelfactive – with the result that a shift of reference time towards the preface occurs.

I think it’s really valuable to think about the interaction of the actional potential of verb constellations and grammatical aspect in the way I’ve presented it here. It makes a lot of difference at many places of our interpretation – even when without these considerations we so far hadn’t had any problems with the Greek text. In only occurred now to me, for example (a rather embarrassing admission), that the question of whether θριαμβεύειν is a (causative; cf. Mike Aubrey’s chapter in The Greek Verb Revisited) accomplishment or activity decides whether τῷ πάντοτε θριαμβεύοντι ἡμᾶς in 2. Cor 2:14 should be translated as “… who leads us constantly in his triumphal procession” or as “who leads us in all his triumphal processions”! Thus, the decision concerning the actional potential of the verb constellation determines whether we have to think of a single or a multitude of processions when it comes to the metaphor. It’s a quite significant difference, I would say, and even if it doesn’t cause any big changes to our understanding of early Christian literature as a whole at this point, I don’t think we would just shrug this off in other areas. For example, I can’t imagine that we would be comfortable with mistaking plural nouns for singular nouns are the other way around.

Pure aspectual opposition

You will notice that pure aspectual opposition – where there is a difference in conceptualization of the situation without a transformation of the situation – between imperfective and perfective aspect is actually quite rare. Of course, authors often can choose between different aspects with a variety of situation types. For example, assuming that Noah did indeed built the ark, both imperfect and aorist indicative are acceptable (the imperfect does not make the claim that no end-point exists!). But also note that the situations they communicate still differ.

In fact, when it comes to speaking about the past (as we do in prototypical narratives), it’s only with activities that the two aspects express the same situations. Thus, it’s only in the choice between a “linear” ipf. and a “complexive” aor. (cf. AGG 194b and 194h) that the same truth-conditions apply. Only here do we have other conceptual differences, i.e. “emphases” that don’t affect the contexts in which the usages would be acceptable or not. For example, the imperfect can communicate a shorter distance to the events in question. Von Siebenthal speaks about the imperfect tending “to draw the hearer’s/reader’s attention more to the particulars, often describing them in graphic detail” (AGG 198l). He adduces Acts 21:20 as an example: Οἱ δὲ ἀκούσαντες ἐδόξαζον τὸν θεὸν εἶπόν τε αὐτῷ. His paraphrase reads: “When they heard this, they praised God (for some time and in various ways) until they (finally) said …” In a recent article, Bentein has argued that the internal perspective of the imperfective aspect can imply a kind of “virtual character” who witnesses the events. From a narratological perspective I would interpret this similarly: we have a closer narrative distance (i.e. we are encouraged to imagine more details) and this can be interpreted as a potential signal of focalization, specifically as implying in certain text that the text encourages us to imagine that the narrator him- or herself takes part in the events. Here’s a great dissertation topic for you: Analyse the imperfects in the We-passages in the book of Acts in comparison to the rest of the work … You’re welcome!

Working with grammars

I’ve already explained how knowing about aspect and Aktionsart is important for our interpretation of biblical texts. Furthermore, it seems to me that without this framework exegetes are often at a loss when it comes to how exactly reference grammars may help them in their research. Sometimes, we seem to sit before our grammars, choosing an “aspectual nuance” for our passage, as if we had a menu before us. But we fool ourselves if we think that we are mostly dealing with interpretive options that we can choose as soon as they seem contextually plausible. The choices an author has with regard to aspect and the level on which his or her decision has consequences vary enormously depending on other, mostly lexical, choices. Accordingly, our choices in interpreting texts must also be guided by the same principles.

Take for example “inceptive/ingressive” and “effective/resultative” aorists. In some grammars (note however AGG 194i and 194j, with a small but significant addition to the German version) you get the impression that as an exegete your decision of whether or not any aorist verb form is either of the two is almost exclusively dependent on contextual factors – in other words, you can decide for whichever option fits your interpretation best. However, the two categories are actually significantly different things! In (a) the effective aorist, the whole situation is in view, as it is normal for the perfective aspect, but we have a specific emphasis on the telic end point of the situation. That of course assumes that we are dealing with an accomplishment or achievement. On the other hand, we have a case of (b) an inceptive aorist if the perfective aspect is combined with a stative action potential. A state is stative, there is no change within the state. Accordingly, the perfective aspect, in search for beginning and end points, focuses on the change that actually results in the state.

For example, if the state of “having faith” is portrayed through the perfective aspect, the reference time will include precisely the move towards faith. [Subject πιστεύειν ὅτι-clause] in John 20:31a (ταῦτα δὲ γέγραπται ἵνα πιστεύ[σ]ητε ὅτι Ἰησοῦς ἐστιν ὁ χριστὸς ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ) demonstrates how relevant such a shift in reference time can be. In πιστεύ[σ]ητε the text-critical decision makes a big difference in what is meant. The imperfective aspect is a necessary condition for the thesis that the gospel is meant to strengthen faith; the perfective aspect is in fact a sufficient condition for an evangelistic function!

Note that this is not just a shift of reference time with regard to event time. It results in a transformation of the situation type in question. In other words, an inceptive aorist does not portray a state with a focus on its beginning in the way the effective aorist focuses on the inherent end point of a telic situation. Rather, the vertical line in the above figures is now the new situation in question and it is of course telic. Whether or not the state that results from this transformation or not continues is now entirely a contextual matter – just as the successful construction of an ark doesn’t mean that the resulting state in any way continued to the time of speaking.

Thus, to sum up, despite the fact that the two aspectual nuances often appear side by side in reference grammars, does not mean that you as an exegete have to decide in individual cases which of the two the author meant. Unless the verb in question has both state and telic meanings, there’s really no choice at all between the two to be made by you.

Working with lexicons

In closing, let’s return to lexicography. In order to decide how aspect interacts with the actional potential of verb constellations, you first need to know which situation type the verb constellations in your text represent. You’ll find some references to previous work on this question in Thomson’s essay. Unfortunately, Greek lexicons themselves don’t give you the relevant information directly. There are tests for situations types (cf. e.g. here for Van Valin’s tests), but most of them have not taken into account the specifics of Greek. They will mostly help you in getting a clearer picture of the situation type to which the English definitions (or German glosses) belong.

Ideally, the definition will at least specify telicity. The problem with glosses (see part 2 of this series) becomes very obvious here, because they are often misleading or at least ambiguous. To be fair, in the case of κατασκευάζειν we don’t seem to have a problem. The definition in BDAG is ‘to bring a structure into being’ – so that, of course, this task is only accomplished once the structure has come into being. Even the glosses are quite straightforward. Note that in German the verb “bauen” can be an activity (at least with “an”). In English, however, “to build” really seems to be used exclusively as an accomplishment: You can say “I built this in one hour” (which wouldn’t be possible with activities) but you can’t say “I vigorously built this” (which should be possible if the verb had also an activity sense). So if you go with the glosses here you won’t be misled in this particular case.

However, things are not always that easy unfortunately. That’s mainly because lexicons often reflect outdated views of aspect – or even ideas that never had any plausibility. That affects not just verbs. For example, I was surprised to see the entry for ὅτε in BDAG. They say it has the following meanings:

Definition	glosses	role of aspect
‘marker of point in time that coincides with another point in time’	“when”	“Predominantly with the aorist.”
‘marker of a period of time coextensive with another period of time’ as long as, while	“as long as,” “while”	No aorist examples are offered.

They don’t say exactly that this is a distinction is tied to different aspects, but it is certainly a very plausible implication. And that would seem to be very strange against the background of what we’ve discussed so far. If the temporal clause contains a perfective depiction of a situation, we would expect it to express anteriority in comparison to the main clause. If by contrast the temporal clause offers an imperfective perspective, we would expect the main clause to be embedded into this continuing situation (cf. AGG 276 for exactly that tentative association). But instead of differentiating between anteriority and simultaneity, BDAG differentiates between durativity and punctuality of the situations in the temporal clause. I just can’t see any good prima facie reason for doing so. And the examples that are adduced don’t help either! To be sure, in almost all the examples for the first sense a translation with “when” or “als” in German seems possible. But don’t overlook the fact that these words are polysemous in German/English too and can express both simultaneity and anteriority! The Wörterbuch der Deutschen Gegenwartssprache,for example, offers the following two definitions for “als”: ‘verbindet zwei gleichzeitige Vorgänge’ (i.e. ‘combines two simultaneous processes’) and ‘verbindet zwei unmittelbar aufeinanderfolgende Vorgänge’ (i.e. ‘combines two directly sequential processes’). It seems to be the case that both in German and in English past anterior forms are used with these subordinating conjunctions[CF1] if both situations are located in the past in order to clarify the relationship. Just look at the first example adduced by BDAG  [CF2] (Mat 9:25): ὅτε δὲ ἐξεβλήθη ὁ ὄχλος εἰσελθὼν ἐκράτησεν τῆς χειρὸς αὐτῆς, καὶ ἠγέρθη τὸ κοράσιον. The taking of the hand happened “when” (=after) the crowd had left. I don’t know for sure what happened with this BDAG entry, but I can’t avoid the impression that ideas about the “punctular” aorist influenced here a distinction in the senses that seems entirely incorrect. Note also that this confusion seems to have been facilitated by a mistaken focus on glosses, with the authors focusing on one of the senses behind the German/English gloss and constructing their definition on that basis.

The same caveats unfortunately apply when it comes to verbs. The entries in our lexicons don’t really seem to pay any attention to the kinds of problems you as an exegete will have. Let’s return to the illustration of “Bloggs drowned” vs. “Bloggs was drowning” again. Wayne Coppins pointed me to Mark 5:13 for a nice analogy in Greek:  καὶ ἐπνίγοντο ἐν τῇ θαλάσσῃ. Almost universally it’s translated as “and they were drowned in the lake” (the NAS has “were drowning” in a note). Let’s assume for a moment [Subject πνίγω] is indeed telic, just like [Subject drown], with the inherent end point being the killing of the person in question in the prototypical case. If this hypothesis were right, we would not expect it to be used in the aorist stem at places, where this end point isn’t reached. I haven’t looked at all attestations, but I carried out the cross-check. And indeed, in Mt 18:28 we find the imperfective aspect with just such a sense: καὶ κρατήσας αὐτὸν ἔπνιγεν. Owing to the grab the flow of breath was restricted but without fatal result.

So it is at least a very plausible hypothesis that something similar can probably also be said with regard for the pigs – who “were drowning.” Note that it is possible that some of them already had drowned, but they as a group had not done so yet collectively. As Mike Aubrey pointed out to me, we can also see “nominal aspect” at work here:

“Nominal aspect separates out noun types by (1) shape and (2) homogeneity (best illustrated by the distinction between count nouns, non-homogenous, and mass nouns, entirely homogenous). Analogically, the speaker made a choice to use a homogenous singular for ὥρμησεν ἡ ἀγέλη and, after introducing an overt quantity, a less homogenous plural for καὶ ἐπνίγοντο ἐν τῇ θαλάσσῃ.“

Note also that this of course doesn’t mean that some of the pigs survived. Mark probably wants us to imagine that the herdsmen went away while all this was still going on (cf. v. 14). Luke, by contrast, just has the pigs drown in the aorist indicative (8:33: καὶ ἀπεπνίγη) and makes the herdsmen observe the whole scene (v. 34: ἰδόντες δὲ οἱ βόσκοντες τὸ γεγονὸς ἔφυγον). It is beyond the scope of this essay, but perhaps this example also already demonstrates for you that a synoptic comparison cannot just compare lexical and aspectual “choice” but must also close consider how the corresponding situations are perhaps presented differently (and how that might cause other changes in the text).

What you’ve read are at least my first impressions when looking at Mark 5:13. However, if you want to make sure this is correct, you will probably check a dictionary to see whether my assumptions about the actional potential of the verb constellation are correct. I expect that the definitions in BDAG will frustrate you quite a bit when it comes to make this decision:

1. ‘to apply pressure around the neck in order to kill,’ “strangle”

2. ‘to cause someth. to be stifled,’ “choke”

Not being a native speaker, I must confess that I am not entirely sure how to understand “stifled” in that case. To me it also seems to imply death just as the first definition, which clearly contains such a telos (“in order to kill”). But the Cambridge Dictionary says: ‘to prevent, or be prevented, from breathing (easily).’ The “easily” seems to move the goalpost away from ultimate dying. Be that as it may, at least the gloss “choke” seems to be clearly ambiguous. Cambridge Dictionary defines the verb as ‘to (cause to) stop, or partly stop, breathing.’ I guess the entry in BDAG don’t mean “partly” in this context because the gloss “drown” is offered for Mk 5:13 later on and this word seems to go all the way again (‘to (cause to) sink in water and so suffocate and die’). But that of course assumes that when it comes to “drowning” the authors were thinking more than when they adduced “choking”… To me it seems like there are several theoretical possibilities when it comes to πνίγω and it’s frustrating that BDAG doesn’t address them in any systematic manner:

1. Does πνίγω have several senses, at least one of them not being telic but perhaps just constituting an activity of restricting the flow of breath? Then I want a definition that is clearly an activity.
2. Does the verb perhaps have several telic senses, with different goals? Note that “stopping breathing partly” is also telic, it’s just not such an extreme goal. I noticed this before with φεύγω, which is the prime example for a telic verb. After all, it expresses a movement from (dangerous) A to (safe) B, right? When looking at aor. ind. occurrences in the TLG I was wondering: What does it mean that it’s used for flights that don’t reach safe place “B”? Perhaps it’s still not an activity of being “on the flight” (which would be one possible explanation) but “B’” is simply: “not A”, i.e. the goal is reached as soon as the place is left (even though the individuals might of course have other “goals” in mind). Well, if that were the case, I would certainly appreciate a set of different definitions specifying the different goals.
3. Is this a telic verb constellation with a pretty uniform endpoint that implies reaching death of some kind and are the apparent options 1 and 2 perhaps simply the result of coercion/reinterpretation in the imperfective aspect? Note that they offer the gloss “choke” specifically “of weeds in relation to good seed.” They refer to Herm. Sim. 5.2.4. and construct the example ὁ ἀμπελὼν μὴ ἔχων βοτάνας τὰς πνιγούσας αὐτόν based on that text, which they translate progressively as “the vineyard without the weeds that were choking it.” And in fact, the removal of weeds is meant to have the effect that there is more fruit (καὶ βοτάνας μὴ ἔχων δώσει καρπὸν πλείονα), so apparently the weed wouldn’t have choked the vine completely. By contrast, in Mt 13:7, the example from the NT they adduce right next to that, things are different. As in V. 6, the author probably has the complete destruction in mind, whereas it was only on the good soil in V. 8 (ἐδίδου καρπόν) that any fruit appears to have grown. Again, if it’s acpect that determines the kind of situation that is in view, why is aspect not even mentioned in this whole entry?

As you can see, using lexicon articles often requires a lot of effort on the part of the exegete. For the future, let’s hope that new lexicons such as the revision of the Baur-dictionary will do better. In fact, this is the place were you would hear a “call your senator now” in other contexts. And in fact: Yes, it’s up to us as exegetes to make ourselves heard with our needs. So let’s point out the inconsistencies that we face in our daily work and let’s insist on better lexicographical work in the future. We don’t need more dictionaries that don’t pay attention to aspect and Aktionsart.

For the moment, I hope that this blog post offers at least some help. Next time you wonder about what the perfective/imperfective aspects do to the verb you are dealing with, (a) look it up in a dictionary and search for indications concerning stativity, durativity, and telicity. Tests like those by Van Valin might help you. But also remember that the definitions were probably not written with these differentiations consciously in mind and that glosses can be very misleading and you should’t build too much on them So if you want to be sure, (b) do a BibleWorks or TLG search and watch out for how the verb behaves in its different stems. For example, if you want to know whether there is an effective nuance in a certain verb – let’s take κλείω as a random example – the verb must be telic in the aorist and you’ll find the imperfective aspect being used for cases where the potential goal is not reached (e.g. for κλείω you’ll find ὡς δὲ ἡ πύλη ἐκλείετο ἐν τῷ σκότει in Jos 2:5).

Outlook

My plan is to write three more pieces, all focused on text grammar. In the next instalment, I want to introduce Heinrich von Siebenthal’s specific approach and discuss on a very general level how it relates to the interpretation of biblical texts. Then I would like to discuss the issues of information structure and discourse markers in the more contributions to this blog. However, I’ll get the proofs of my big book on narratives in Paul’s letters today or tomorrow and I am not sure how much time I’ll find over the coming weeks. Perhaps these first 4 parts of the series will be shared in the meantime on social media. I also welcome comments directly here on the blog. In any case, seeing that the series is read will certainly contribute to my motivation to find some time in between. In case it will take some time, perhaps you want to track down some of the material that I’ve linked to in these posts. They are all worth being read.

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Christoph Heilig – currently postdoc in Munich, soon in Basel – is the author of Hidden Criticism? (Fortress, 2017) and Paul’s Triumph (Peeters, 2017).
This research has recently received the Mercator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Additionally, he has co-edited (with J. Thomas Hewitt and Michael F. Bird) God and the Faithfulness of Paul: A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N. T. Wright (Fortress, 2017).

In his most recent – and voluminous – project, which has just been completed, he discusses the importance of “stories” and “narrative substructures” for understanding Paul’s letters. It is currently in press with de Gruyter.

Part 3 of the series Observations from a Linguistic Spectator: An Annual Report

For part 1, see here.
For part 2, see here.
For part 4, see here.

From events to verbs

As announced in my last blog post, I want to explore now in more detail the lexical semantics and the lexicography of Greek verbs. Verbs express events or “situations” as we call them on the most general level. We probably all have an intuitive understanding of what events/situations are: something that happens in the real world at a given point in time. We perceive these events and interpret them and give them a specific shape on a conceptual level. For example, we might say that a lightning strike is a “punctual” situation – even though with specific equipment we can of course also perceive several phases. We use verbs to express these concepts – words such as “to flash.” In other words, “the core semantic function of verbs … is to denote different types of changes …, less frequently states” (AGG 22f). By using criteria such as durativity (“punctual” or not?) we can come up with different classifications of Greek verbs according to their semantics. Here’s a table that I made with the different kinds of situations that Heinrich von Siebenthal adduces, into which I inserted the criteria I believe stand behind these distinctions:

Verb constellations

Note that αὐξάνω can also be used transitively (‘to grow sth.’) – and then it is agentive. This already demonstrates that we need to be more precise and say that when we assign situations to different types, we do so with the mental representations of whole verb constellations, i.e. the verb with its arguments. That means with regard to the verb αὐξάνω that we have to differentiate at least between the two verb constellations [Subject αὐξάνω direct object] and [Subject αὐξάνω] because the concepts they represent belong to different situation types – at least if we use the criteria above.

Aktionsarten and actional potentials

To sum up what we’ve said so far: verb constellations express situations that can be classified into different situation types and that refer to events in the real world. The situation type is also called “Aktionsart” in both German and English literature. The designation is based on the recognition that verbs/verb constellations express different “Aktionsarten,” i.e. different “kinds of action.” (Though in my experience many native speakers are not aware of the – actually quite obvious – etymology.) It is important that you are aware that in earlier publications – such as BDF – “Aktionsart” was sometimes used for what we now call aspect (cf. also AGG 192c and 194m). Other publications, such as the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek, speak of “lexical aspect.” In any case, I strongly recommend that you read Bache’s classical essay “Aspect and Aktionsart: Towards a Semantic Distinction” on the whole matter. I found it very helpful when I started to read more on the issue.

You might wonder why we should even care about classifying verbal concepts in such a way. Of course, we can classify all kinds of things. But what is it good for? After all, isn’t the concrete definition we get in dictionaries all that we need?

Well, in any concrete utterance the verb constellation is expressed with other contextual and grammatical features – such as aspect. And these other parameters – most notably grammatical aspect – can influence the way the situation is portrayed in the end to the reader. Perhaps this is a matter of course for you. However, it’s also possible that you are wondering just how far-reaching this influence specifically of aspect is on the situation that is communicated. We will discuss this in some detail below. For the moment let it suffice to say that the very same verb constellation can appear as significantly different situations – belonging to different situation types – in the different aspects.

It’s also for this very reason that some people speak of “Aktionsart” only with regard to the situation as it is actually communicated and use terms like “Aktionsartpotenzial” or “actional potential” with reference to the bare verb constellation. (That’s also why verb constellations are written in square brackets, to indicate that they are adduced without aspectual and tense values.)  Note that in order to know that final product, the thing that is communicated by a speaker/writer, we need to know this input, because grammatical aspect interacts in different ways with different potentials when it comes to situation types that are inherent in verb constellations.

Exegetical significance

As I’ve said, in order to understand what the verb constellation expresses, we need to first know its actional potential – and how aspect interacts with it. It’s difficult to convey just how crucial an awareness of both situation types and grammatical aspect is. Perhaps this consideration helps in making that clear: In order to understand texts, we need to comprehend their propositional structure – and the nucleus of every proposition is usually an “event concept” (AGG 312a). In other words, this blog post doesn’t address just some highly theoretical linguistic discussions – these issues are rather of the uttermost importance for any responsible interpretation of NT texts. You don’t really know what a text is meant to communicate if you don’t really have an idea about which situations are expressed.

This is also one of the reasons why translating NT texts with students can be so deceptive in my opinion. It conveys the impression that you actually understand what is written, simply because you are able to produce a German or English text on the basis of the Greek. Whether or not the concepts in the target language actually reflect the concepts in the original texts, you can’t really know. The coherence of the translation might give you some indication, but that can lull you into a false sense of security too. The fact is that if you are not aware of the problem in theory, you might also not notice that something is seriously flawed with your reading in practice. It’s only when you’ve understood the basic parameters that influence the conceptualization of situations conveyed by Greek verbs that you will see the many places where you did not even notice that a potential for misunderstanding was even there. (I’ll adduce a quite telling example from my own work below.)

In fact, even if your translation is correct because you by chance picked words in the target language whose concepts overlap sufficiently with those in the original, this correct translation is not of much use. For you will have nothing but the translation itself, not being equipped with the categories to explicate what is actually being said in either one of the two texts. How are we supposed to imagine the situation? Who is the agent? Whom is he/she/it affecting? How is the scene construed? Where is our attention directed? What is in view and what isn’t? What are we focusing on first, and how is our attention guided? Etc. If we don’t know that the text comments on these parameters, we will neither be able to comment on them nor be aware of our shortcomings. Perhaps you think I overstate that point. For that reason I want to offer a little test in the next section and I would like to ask you to try to answer it honestly.

A little test

I had always known that aspect was a grammatical category that “has to do with the way the speaker/writer views and presents the ‘action’ of the verb regarding its unfolding in time” (AGG 192c). However, apparently it hadn’t really sunk in because when I read Christopher J. Thomson’s essay “What is Aspect?” in The Greek Verb Revisited it was, I have to admit, eye-opening to me in several respects. I highly encourage you to read that chapter, which the author also uploaded to academia.edu (note that page numbers will refer to the published version). In fact, if you are like I was and you have a deficiency in your understanding of aspect, his article will be much more helpful for you than this post. Note that I will repeat just a few of the insights I gained from that essay, so make sure you read the whole thing.

Here’s what shocked me the most when I read Thomson’s article. In fact, he doesn’t present these observations in this constellation, but what follows is a consideration based on his essay that made the biggest impression me. At one point, he uses the verb constellation [Νῶε κατασκευάζειν κιβωτόν] ([Noah construct an ark]) in Heb 11:7 as an example (pp.55/60). Here’s the question that bothered me: Would the past tenses of both the “present/durative stem” and the “aorist stem” (so my terminology based on AGG 193a) – the imperfect and aorist indicative – form acceptable utterances? Well, I thought yes. After all, it’s only about different portrayals of the same action. Do you agree? Think about it for a second. If you’ve done so, here’s my next question for you: Imagine Noah had begun the construction of the ark but somehow never finished it. Would both verb forms still be acceptable? Take a second to think about the right answer – and about how sure you are. The first time I asked a colleague about this, he said that he was pretty sure that the ind. aor. would be fine, but not so sure about the imperfect. What’s your take?

Now compare this to the following minimal pair of two English statements, both differing only in aspect: “Bloggs was drowning” and “Bloggs drowned.” Imagine Bloggs struggles to stay on top of the water but ultimately reaches the land. Are both utterances acceptable? Even as a non-native speaker it was immediately clear to me that…

“… there is nothing contradictory about the sentence ‘Bloggs was drowning, but the lifeguard rescued him.’ On the other hand, it would be contradictory to say ‘Bloggs drowned, but the lifeguard rescued him.’”

Thomson, p. 63

Now, I can’t know your answers – but I know how hesitant I would have been to commit myself to a verdict with regard to the Greek that would have been as strong as it was in the case of the English analogy. That’s of course quite embarrassing for someone who had worked with Greek texts for years. Perhaps for some of you this little riddle doesn’t pose any problems at all and you are just amazed at my ignorance. Understandable. Still, I am quite confident that I am not completely alone in my original uncertainty. For those of you the rest of the post might hold some insights. Also, I think that by now my point about how important this whole nexus of questions is, should have become apparent to everyone. Certainly, you would agree that someone who is not able to differentiate between “Bloggs was drowning” and “Bloggs drowned” appropriately will have a hard time understanding English texts, right? Well, if we are honest, the same applies to Greek …

The markedness of the aorist aspect for boundedness

I thought a lot about why my understanding of the different aspects wasn’t clear enough to make me certain. Here’s how von Siebenthal defines the aorist aspect:

“Speakers/writers typically choose aorist forms when they present the ‘action’/’situation’ as a complete whole (viewed as it were from the outside), as something that is done or takes place without reference to continuation or result.”

AGG 194e

To me, the talk about the dichotomy of a “Binnenperspektive” and an “Außenperspektive” (so the German of AGG 192c, which is now expanded in the English translation) never was really meaningful. What I got was that we need to be careful with statements about the alleged peculiarity of verbs in the aorist, e.g. statements that the aorist “always refers to something necessarily taking place only once” (AGG 194e). I assume that it is against the background of these kinds of misunderstandings that are very common in German exegetical literature that von Siebenthal stresses how “normal” the aorist is. I know from my own experience how the aorist, due to its strangeness, leads to overinterpretations among students (and sometimes even language teachers). But I also wonder now whether Heinrich von Siebenthal’s understandable concern sometimes leads to problematic formulations, such as in the introduction to AGG 194:

“The aorist is the most frequent of the three aspects in Ancient Greek. For this reason alone it will have to be regarded as the basically inconspicuous or ‘unmarked’ aspect; this also ties in with its use. The durative and the resultative, on the other hand, occur not only much less frequently, but they are usually also more specific regarding the way the speaker/writer may view and present the ‘action’/‘situation’; they are usually more conspicuous or ‘marked’ and thus especially relevant to text interpretation.”

AGG 194

I highly recommend to you the chapter on “Language Universals, Typology, and Markedness” by Daniel Wilson and Michael Aubrey in Linguistics and Biblical Exegesis. It helped me understand my own uncomfortableness with this kind of talk. It’s fine to observe that the aorist (indicative) is apparently the default choice in narrative texts, etc. It’s something different to assume that it is not marked with regard to specific semantic features that need to be taken into account in text interpretation just as the features of the other aspects are in need of consideration. In any case, I noticed that it’s against this background that I ignored other things that von Siebenthal says about the aorist aspect in AGG 192c (again, it’s now a bit expanded in the English version, but the German also was pretty clear as I now recognise):

“[The speaker/writer] may present [the ‘action’ of the verb with reference to its unfolding in time] in its totality, viewed as a complete whole, so to speak, from the outside, without highlighting  any of the phases of its unfolding (‘perfective’ aspect). Or they do not present it in its totality, viewed as it were, from within, with certain characteristics of its unfolding such as its progression or continuation being highlighted (‘imperfective’ aspect).”

AGG 192c

In other words: The aorist aspect is marked for boundedness in comparison with the imperfective aspect. Apparently, what was in the forefront of my mind were the statements about the things the aorist did not communicate. AGG 194e even speaks of the aorist indicative as being the “indefinite” tense form – with regard to “continuation and result.” Bornemann-Risch 77, to whom von Siebenthal refers here, say (emphasis mine) that the aspects “kennzeichnen [den Verbinhalt] als etwas Andauerndes oder als etwas im Ergebnis Vorliegendes oder als etwas lediglich (d. h. ohne Rücksicht auf Dauer oder Ergebnis) zum Vollzug Kommendes“ (i.e., that they “characterize [the verb content] as something that is continuing or as something available in the result or as something that merely (i.e. without attention to duration or result) comes to realization”).

Of course, in all these statements, the aorist is compared to the other two aspects. Accordingly, I think it’s most plausible that the terms “Ergebnis” and “result” refer specifically to what the perfect/resultative aspect conveys. All this, of course, is not meant to say that the end-point of a situation (its successful completion, its “result” in some sense) is not included in the portrayal through the aorist. In other publications, it seems possible to me that the authors assume a truly “unmarked” understanding of the aorist, even when it comes to the inclusion of the boundaries of a situation. Mounce for example (until the 3^rd edition) said that the aorist was the “undefined” aspect (with the “action of the verb [being] thought of as a simple event, without commenting on whether or not it is a process”; note that there seems also to be some confusion between Aktionsart and aspect). As I now realize, the whole point of the metaphor of the perspective from outside (Außenperspektive) is that you see the situation with both beginning and end. Therefore, I really like the way the new Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek defines the aspect values of present and aorist stems, because they make this very explicit:

“The present stem presents an action as incomplete, focusing on one or more of its intermediate stages, but leaving its boundaries (beginning and end) out of focus. It thus normally signifies that an action is ongoing or repeated. This is called imperfective aspect. The aorist stems (aorist stem, aorist passive stem) present an action as complete, as a single (uninterruptable) whole: it ignores any component parts by looking only at the boundaries of the action, rolling beginning, middle and end into one. This is called perfective aspect.”

CGCG 33.6; I’ve removed any highlighting.

Defining aspect with a view to the temporal structure of situations

In his own attempt to define the Greek aspects, Thomson builds on the work of the linguists Klein and Johnson. Basically, his argument is that tense has to do with time in that it relates the event/situation time to the speech/orientation time and that aspect is also a temporal category in that it has to do with the internal temporal structure of the situation. More specifically, we can understand the aspects as different relations between the reference/topic time – that is basically the time that the speaker is referring to – and the event/situation time. Here’s a graphic (from p. 37) that illustrates this.

E is the event time, R the reference time. The perfective aspect (here: completive aspect) is defined as R=E. As you can see, the reference time covers the whole event time in this aspect. By contrast, in the imperfective aspect, some part of the event time is after the reference time, i.e. the end point of the situation is excluded from the reference time.

Note that the CGCG goes further by also postulating a part of the event time before reference time. My guess is that these different definitions have to do with whether or not you think there is an “inchoative/ingressive/inceptive” imperfect (cf. AGG 198e). For it to be possible, the beginning of a situation must be included in the reference time so that it can be emphasised.

In the perfect/resultative aspect, the whole event time is located before the reference time, i.e. the speaker talks about a time when the content of the verb has already been realised. (I’ll only address the perfective/imperfective opposition in this essay because the resultative aspect has its own problems.)

Note also that this graphic of course does not include a speaking/orientation time. It’s only in the indicative that the location of the speaker on the horizontal line is specified in relation to the event time. So, for example, both ind. pres. and perf. will usually be embedded into E. (But see part 1 of this series for apparent exceptions!)

Defining aspect in this way is not without controversies either, but it at least helps to avoid a misunderstanding that is so easily possible with the metaphor of looking on the situation “from outside” in the aorist. When we say that you have a bird’s eye view on a parade, that you are looking down on it like from a helicopter (e.g. Mounce), you see the “whole parade” in the sense that you see all the persons, from the first to the last. What we mean in terms of the aorist aspect, however, is that you see the “whole parade” as a singular event in time, i.e. from its start to its official end. It’s less about your position then about what you do, how much of the parade’s duration you record, for example, sitting there in the helicopter. Do you record the whole thing with your smartphone camera or do you exclude official start and end of the event?  (Note that with certain kinds of events, there also seems to be a difference in how close you “zoom in.”  “Distance” in that sense might come into play when we have true aspectual opposition, on which see below.) To be sure, if it’s clear to you that we talk about a temporal structure that is “in view,” you can of course continue to use the metaphor of different perspectives.

Returning to situation types

We are now in the position to return to Noah’s incomplete construction of the ark. If your hunch was that the ind. aor. would be unacceptable as a way of communicating this actual event of an incomplete construction – congratulations, you were right! κατασκευάζειν is a verb that seems to imply the complete production of the thing that is referred to in the direct object. This means that if we look from outside at this situation, in a way that includes the end-point, i.e. the goal of the construction process, we can’t use this portrayal for an actual situation that does not contain the reaching of that goal. By contrast, the imperfective aspect excludes the end-point from its reference time so that we can say Νῶε κατεσκεύαζε κιβωτόν in order to express the situation of an incomplete construction process.

Of course, this presupposes that we have correctly identified the situation type/actional potential of the verb constellation. Only if κατασκευάζειν contains such an inherent goal as its end point is what we’ve just said true. If it expresses only an activity of building without saying anything about completion then you can of course look at this whole situation and communicate it as such truthfully even if in a next step the construction isn’t finalized. Now at last I think it has become absolutely clear why this classification of a verb constellation into different situation types is so crucially important for correctly reconstructing the situation that is meant by the author. To use the illustration yet again: If you don’t know what the actional potential of “to drown” is, you have no idea of whether “Bloggs drowned” implies his death or not!

That being said, note also that not all possible classifications are equally useful. The table I produced above, for example, does not help us a lot with our question concerning κατασκευάζειν. It clearly is an action – but so what? The attempts to define the aspects above don’t touch on agentivity. Rather, what we need is the inclusion of the criterion “telicity.” It will tell us whether a situation contains an inherent goal that could be excluded in the imperfective aspect and would be included necessarily in the perfective aspect.

One system that includes telicity goes back to Zeno Vendler’s classic “Verbs and Times.” It has been used by Fanning and is still being used in The Greek Verb Revisited by many authors, though with some modification. (Check out in particular Mike Aubrey’s chapter for causative variants of these situation types.) Here’s the variant that Thomson uses:

That might look complicated at first look but is actually pretty simple. States and activities are both durative (they don’t last for just one moment) and they both don’t run towards a goal. But activities are not stative. By contrast to both states and activities, there are many situations that contain a goal, i.e. which are “telic.” Some of them take some time (accomplishments), others happen within a moment (achievements). And then there are semelfactives (not in Vendler’s original piece), which do not fulfil any of these requirements. [The lightning flash] is a very common example.

Outlook

There is certainly more to be said on this issue and my initial draft for this post included a more detailed exploration of how the imperfective and perfective aspect each interact with the different actional potentials that we have just explored. We have already seen what happens to an accomplishment like [Νῶε κατασκευάζειν κιβωτόν] in the imperfective aspect. It gets reinterpreted and appears in the shape of an activity. There are many similar dynamics that we need to be aware of. But if some of this stuff is new to you, this might already be quite a bit to take in. So perhaps it’s best to make a break at this point so that you can think about the issues we’ve touched upon here on your own. Perhaps you can already develop a certain sense for how some of the situation types above might appear when looked upon in the various aspects. In part 4 of this series we will then continue were we’ve left and discuss how aspect influences the communicated situations. Also, we’ll consider shortly what all this means for our daily use of grammars and dictionaries. So stay tuned.

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Christoph Heilig – currently postdoc in Munich, soon in Basel – is the author of Hidden Criticism? (Fortress, 2017) and Paul’s Triumph (Peeters, 2017).
This research has recently received the Mercator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Additionally, he has co-edited (with J. Thomas Hewitt and Michael F. Bird) God and the Faithfulness of Paul: A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N. T. Wright (Fortress, 2017).

In his most recent – and voluminous – project, which has just been completed, he discusses the importance of “stories” and “narrative substructures” for understanding Paul’s letters. It is currently in press with de Gruyter.

Part 2 of the series Observations from a Linguistic Spectator: An Annual Report.

For part 1, see here.
For part 3, see here.
For part 4, see here.

A Semiotic Framework

I’m going to cheat right away in this first post in this series that discusses an actual linguistic subject – quite a bit of what I discuss here isn’t that new to me. So it’s not really part of the honest annual report of new insights that I promised. Still, I feel like I have to include these considerations because in my experience this is perhaps the single issue where publications in biblical studies fail most often. I say this as someone who has done quite a bit of research on the meaning of some Greek words – even a whole monograph on θριαβεύειν – but who is at the same time very aware of the fact that he’s working within a quite simplistic framework. (If I’ve made a somehow innovative contribution it’s on the question of how we are supposed to choose between several available meanings in a dictionary in concrete occurrences of a word – a task where biblical scholars often make mistakes in my opinion.)

In fact, most basically, I’ve just tried in my own work simply to explicate the semiotic triangle that probably most of you know:

The symbol, the Greek word in question, stands for a concrete thing in the real world. But it does so only in a mediated way, namely by symbolizing/expressing a concept, a mental category, which is in turn represented by the symbol. It’s the concept that refers to the actual referent, which in turn is reflected in the concept.

This is certainly not advanced semiotics. And still, it’s astonishing how often studies on the NT fail to do justice to this simple scheme. And let’s be totally clear: A mistake with respect to differentiating properly between these levels is a fundamental category mistake that will render the whole work completely wrong at worst and almost not usable (because in need of constant reinterpretation) at best. Regardless of how keen you are on incorporating linguistic tools in your research, I hope we can agree that this is not some unnecessary abstract hair-splitting but something that is of the uttermost importance for sound exegetical work.

Explicating Barr’s Criticism

Many of James Barr’s criticisms in The Sementics of Biblical Language – arguably the most important book on the subject in the last century – can be reformulated in these terms:

• Perhaps his most important point (though this is seldomly reflected in works that paraphrase him) was his rebuttal of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that had been common among biblical scholars, who claimed that the languages Hebrew and Greek were determinative for different world views. Barr argued forcefully not only that every language is capable of expressing the same thoughts but even that concepts like ‘truth’ were universal, regardless of how that was reflected on the level of the language.
• He accused Kittel’s T(h)WNT/TDNT of constantly confusing the levels of words and concepts. While the editors claimed to produce a “Wörterbuch,” they were actually discussing concepts – which were far more complex than the lexical meaning of the words in question. He spent a lot of energy showing how this confusion was at least facilitated by an inconsequent usage of the word “Begriff” – ranging from everything between it being an equivalent to “word” on the one hand and to “concept” on the other hand (or both at the same time at some places).
• Barr showed that often the authors succeeded in sketching these far-reaching concepts by actually discussing referents – and confusing these with words. So, for example, the way the love of a specific entity manifested – e.g. ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ – was read into every occurrence of the word ἀγάπη (the well-known “illegitimate totality transfer”), even though many of these features had nothing to do with the lexical meaning. In a further step, this enriched account of the “meaning” of ἀγάπη was then presented as an exhaustive account of the concept of ‘love’ (see #2).

Continuing Category Mistakes and Problematic Nomenclature

At least in English-speaking scholarship these criticisms are well-known, at least in the form of the summaries that appear in Carson’s Exegetical Fallacies and Silva’s Biblical Words and Their Meaning. In German publications, however, there still is at times an astonishing ignorance when it comes to these points. Some scholars still talk about words as if they were concepts and about concepts as if they were words.

Take, for example, the impressive volume Glaube: Das Verständnis des Glaubens im frühen Christentum und in seiner jüdischen und hellenistisch-römischen Umwelt. It contains a wide array of well-researched pieces and is very valuable in bringing together experts from different fields and an incredible number of references to primary sources (I know because I prepared the index). Judging from the title and the subtitle, it’s a conceptual study, i.e. just what Barr had encouraged – especially since it seems to be marked specifically as such, i.e. insofar as apparently no Greek word is needed to describe the task on the cover. That being said, some (!) of the essays seem to explore rather “das Verständnis von πίστις,“ i.e. the question of which meaning can be ascertained for a specific lexeme in a given corpus. Of course there is nothing wrong about that question in itself. And to be sure, any exploration of the concept of ‘faith’ will take into account the noun πίστις – or rather, the passages that contain it. But while this is a necessary condition for a faithful account, it certainly isn’t a sufficient one. As Barr emphasised over and over again: the meaning of whole paragraphs (I would say: texts) is relevant for such an endeavour and they might not contain a single one of these words. I want to reiterate that just a few of the authors are guilty of apparently not being aware of this. We should also note that the editors Jörg Frey and Benjamin Schliesser both explicitly quote James Barr (on illegitimate totality transfer and the distinction between a Hebrew and a Greek mindset). At the same time but Barr’s urgent plea to end the confusing usage of the word “Begriff” is certainly not implemented enthusiastically by many of the authors, with the word family appearing over 600 times… And you still read about “Begriff” in the sense of ‘concept’ along with talk like this (to adduce just one entirely random example):

“Die hebräische Sprache kennt eine Reihe von Begriffen für das Vertrauen des Menschen auf Gott als den Schöpfer, Erhalter und Retter in der Not… ”

Apparently, here the author suddenly switches to the meaning ‘word’ for “Begriff.” To be fair, some authors in this volume (for example Stefan Krauter) seem to use this word exclusively with this meaning. That’s certainly less confusing. Still, we should note that the Wörterbuch der deutschen Gegenwartssprache lists only meanings that are clearly located on the conceptual level. That was 1967. Admittedly, the Duden now also lists the meanings ‘Ausdruck, Wort.’ Bute note that it’s still marked specifically as being colloquial!

But beyond that, I am not even sure whether this is a case of real polysemy or whether a single understanding of the word is presupposed that is so undifferentiated that it does not even make a distinction between a dyadic semiotic demarcation between sign and content. For in this specific case the author immediately goes on to say:

“Davon noch einmal zu unterscheiden ist der spezifische Gottesglaube, der im Sinne eines grundsätzlichen Trauens bzw. Für-Wahr-Haltens auf Gott als Gegenstand gerichtet ist und in der Forschung mit der Wurzel אמן hif. in Verbindung gebracht wird. Die Bedeutung dieser Wurzel für das Glaubensverständnis wird auch daran ersichtlich, dass sie über das griechische Verb πιστεύω in der Septuaginta auf den neutestamentlichen Glaubensbegriff fuhrt.”

While the formulation that a specific lexeme is “connected” with a certain conception of ‘faith’ might perhaps be interpreted as reporting an opinion that is not shared, I don’t know what to do with the move from the certainly conceptual “Glaubensverstänis” in the OT to the (I guess equally conceptual?) “Glaubensbegriff” in the NT, as it is mediated through nothing but a specific translation equivalent in the LXX. That’s not only inconsequent or confusing usage of terminology, it’s presupposing a concept of the word “Begriff” that is not tenable against the background of the semiotic framework sketched above. It’s exactly the kind of thing that would make Barr turn in his grave. And it’s no exception. At many places, you’ll find “Begriffsgeschichte” in the sense of a conceptual history directly and without any explanation connected with an overview over diachronic lexical developments. I was especially surprised to at times notice a direct inference from lexical realization to the shape of concepts even if the author apparently made a distinction between the levels of words and concepts:

“Allein schon die Zahl weiterer, dem Glaubensverständnis bei Philo im weiteren Sinn zuzuordnenden – von Paulus aber nicht, nicht in dieser Weise oder selten verwendeten – Begriffe und Syntagmen deutet an, dass wir es bei Philos Glaubensverständnis nicht nur mit einem komplexen und auf vielerlei Weise ausgedruckten Sachverhalt zu tun haben, sondern auch im Ganzen mit einem Paulus nicht einfach vergleichbaren theologischen Konzept.”

In my mind these cases constitute a serious failure to take into account Barr’s criticism. At least at times it renders whole contributions totally questionable, because as a reader you are not able to translate the claims into a linguistically sounder framework. If you think that assessment is too harsh, I encourage you to try translating such a piece into English yourself. Translators of works in biblical studies will tell you, that “Begriff” is the single most annoying term they encounter. (In fact, I just checked and Wayne Coppins calls it indeed his (probably) “least favorite German word.”) Just look at what happened to the German Theologische Begriffslexikon zum Neuen Testament: It was mistaken even by the editors of the English translation to be a concept-lexicon and has been in use as such for decades, as a kind of implementation of Barr’s suggestion, while it is demonstrably none of that! (If that sounds just too unbelievable to you, check out my detailed analysis here.)

Another problematic tendency in German-speaking scholarship is to still use specific Greek terms when one is referring to concepts much larger than the semantic content of that single lexeme. To give one example, Manuel Nägele is currently doing a doctoral thesis with Jörg Frey with the title “Paulus und der νοῦς: Eine Untersuchung zur paulinischen Anthropologie auf dem Hintergrund hellenistischer und hellenistisch-jüdischer Konzeptionen.“ The subtitle is pretty clear when it comes to what the researcher wants to do: he’s interested in “anthropology” and different ancient “conceptions.” (Cf. also the conference associated with the project with the title “Der νοῦς bei Paulus im Horizont griechischer und hellenistischjüdischer Anthropologie.”) However, when I first heard a presentation of this project, I had the following criticism (note that it might no longer apply, since this was a presentation at a very initial stage – and in fact I think it’s great if such a setting of the course can be corrected early on): Why is there mention of νοῦς in the title? It’s a noun that occurs over 65.000 times in the TLG corpus but just 21 times in the Pauline letters. Thus, it can hardly be the goal to assess the meaning of the lexeme in a lexicographical way on the basis of this small corpus. Assuming that it’s a polysemous word, one could of course try to find out, which of the meanings are adopted at the 21 places. That’s perhaps a a good research topic in itself, but it contributes almost nothing to what subtitle implies. So, one wonders, perhaps the Greek word νοῦς is simply used instead of the German word “Verstand”? It seems so. The author is interested in how Paul’s conception of the mind differs from other thinkers of his time. An interesting question indeed. But why then not just say so? One could add a clarifying “Konzept des Verstandes” – even though I think it’s not necessary because it’s clear that Paul didn’t write in German. In any case that would be better than muddling the water by using a Greek expression. I assume the word made its way into the title, because the author selects those passages for his analysis where the word occurs. That is of course totally fine as a way of making the first step towards a full conceptual study feasible. But note that the author is then analysing what the passages that contain νοῦς say about the concept of the mind – neither what they contribute to Paul’s understanding of the word νοῦς nor what the word νοῦς contributes to the larger concept. In Barr’s critique, these are totally different things and they need to be kept separate. To be sure, such a problem in the label doesn’t have to have detrimental effects on the project – but at the same time we have to maintain, that of course it’s only a full conceptual study if it does not focus exclusively on the passages that contain νοῦς, even less so of course on what the lexeme itself “means” in these passages.

There is one tendency in NT publications that I find even more problematic – the transcription of Greek words in project titles, such as “Pneuma/Pistis bei Paulus.” Every time I read something like that, I am at a loss. Sometimes the cover text helps in explaining the general goal of the study, sometimes even reading the whole book doesn’t help, because the title is symptomatic of a lack of necessary differentiation. In my opinion, the use of Greek words in order to refer to a concept is strange enough (if you aren’t writing in Greek) and requires efforts of interpretation on behalf of the reader. But this is even worse: Perhaps the author wants to indicate that the concept diverges so much from anything our world view contains that it’s necessary to find a label that symbolizes this remoteness? Or is it just the case that the publisher’s font doesn’t allow for Greek characters on the book cover? Not too seldom, you then even encounter “Begriff” in the subtitle… Eckstein even manages to put both in the main title: “Der Begriff Syneidesis bei Paulus.” And just when you begin to think that perhaps you are holding a lexical-semantic work in your hands, the subtitle sends you on a longer journey of figuring out what the book is about: “Eine neutestamentlich-exegetische Untersuchung zum ‘Gewissensbegriff.’”

The Prospects and Limits of a Sound Theoretical and Methodological Framework

Keeping distinct referents, concepts, and words and having this reflected in the terminology of one’s writing not only makes sure that other scholars are able to interact with the work constructively, it also helps to stay on top of things during the research itself. For example, I’m currently looking into the semantics of μονή, given that N. T. Wright and Markus Bockmuehl have clashed over the question of whether it implies an only temporary resting place in John 14. I’m looking into different things here: I want to know a lot about ancient institutions of temporary and permanent dwelling. That’s the kind of information an encyclopaedia like the Pauly offers. Such entries are relevant for but will be more exhaustive (or at least have different emphases) than the concepts that constitute lexical meanings. And of course I’m also interested in how these concepts are expressed lexically. If I didn’t differentiate sufficiently between the different semiotic categories, I might easily fall prey to mistaking my description of an ancient inn as the lexical meaning of μονή (or κατάλυμα for example).

So keeping apart word, concept, and referent – and having this reflected in a consistent terminology – really goes far in making the actual research output linguistically sound and accessible to others in the field. It is not, to be sure, a guarantee that the results will be correct. For example, Breytenbach in an article argued that transitive θριαμβεύειν only implies the celebration of a triumphal procession over the person referred to in the direct object. The presence of that person in the procession – as a captive who is represented to the crowd – is said to be “a matter of reference, and reference, as we all know, has to do with language use and should not be confused with lexical sense” (p. 262). The problem is that the “language use” demonstrates that authors regularly assumed the verb to express the causation of movement of another entity in the triumphal procession by the triumphator (see more here). Still, the fact that Breytenbach makes his claim in a way that keeps basic distinctions clear allows for his study to be reproduced and his results to be tested without first having to translate his whole analysis in a sound framework in order to decide which parts are actually relevant. And this is far from being a matter of course! Most other proposals for the lexical meaning of θριαμβεύειν are actually discussing concrete ancient rituals and other realities of life without even touching on the question of whether the verb is ever used as a “symbol” for these referents, let alone whether it is also a plausible lexical choice.

Problems with Barr’s Concept of Concept

So far, I’ve mostly repeated what I’ve also already written in some form in other places and what I know is frustrating to many colleagues, some of whom know much more than I do about lexical semantics and lexicography. In fact, if you have read Barr’s book from 1961 (or the German translation from 1965) almost nothing will probably sound new to you. But I hope that my illustrations have at least proven the point that these distinctions are still not a matter of course in biblical scholarship and that it is thus appropriate to repeat them from time to time.

Now I’ll turn to something that was indeed new to me and that I only learnt recently. Or at least it was only recently that I realized the full implication of this insight. As I will explain in what follows, there are good reasons to believe that Barr was mistaken in quite a few of his basic assumptions – and that complicates some of the matters that we’ve just discussed immensely!

There’s one tension in Barr’s work that I had noticed even when reading it for the first time. On the one hand, he insists that, regardless of lexical options in a language, in the mind of its user concepts such as ‘truth’ will be the same as in other speech communities. On the other hand, he’s actually supportive of the implicit goal of the TDNT of producing a “concept history” – he just doesn’t want it to come together through the misuse of word studies. He even writes his own “Begriffsgeschichte” of the word “Begriff,” demonstrating that not everybody shares his understanding of the term, given that the meaning ‘concept’ presupposes that it’s even possible to make such a distinction. To me, it has always been difficult to see how the two positions relate to each other. Clearly, if you think that it’s worthwhile to analyse whole passages to see what they have to contribute to a specific concept and if you do so with texts of a specific corpus such as the New Testament or early Christian literature, you presuppose that there is variation on the conceptual level. Only because of this variation does it make sense to incorporate different voices from the same tradition (unless you use them only to supplement gaps in other accounts) and specifically to be interested in the specific shape of concepts in a particular tradition in contrast to other traditions. Barr does not do a good job in my opinion in explaining what he regards to be the constant core of a given concept and how and to what degree variations of it can exist. In my opinion, John Barclay’s work on different “perfections” of the concept of ‘grace’ is by contrast a step in the right direction.

But there are other problems in Barr’s work that go beyond the lack of explication. They also, however, have to do with Barr’s problematic view of what concepts are. I first realized that something was wrong with Barr’s account, when I read more cognitive linguistic literature. The way we conceptualize things has a lot do with how we experience them. By expressing these concepts in language, our experience becomes manifest on a lexical and grammatical level. For example, prepositions can be understood to a large degree with reference to our embodied experience that we have in physical space. Prepositions are not determined by our experience, but they are also not arbitrary. Now, in some sense this supports what Barr had written about the universal nature of concepts: we all share the experience of the same physical laws and we will thus have similar concepts of ‘above’ and ‘below’ and will have developed strategies of expressing these relations in our languages. On the other hand, experience varies not only individually to some degree but also collectively between times and cultures. If experience is so important on the conceptual level and if language is (amongst others) a tool of expressing these thoughts, language will have different shapes due to different conceptions and be ultimately influenced by experience. Note that this does not vindicate the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But it shows that there is an organic relationship between the three corners of the semiotic triangle. In other words, the conceptual level does not float around in lofty heights above the level of expressions.

The Structuralist Heritage of Barr’s Critique

To put it differently, words “have a nontrivial relationship with the external world and human knowledge.” That’s how Mike Aubrey (follow his blog here) puts it in his piece “Linguistic Issues in Biblical Greek” in Linguistics and Biblical Exegesis (p. 182; I would strongly encourage you to read at least pp. 173-183 on semantics and lexicography; he had posted a portion of it on his blog). This misconception of Barr has to do with his structuralist presuppositions. In structuralism, the meaning of words is determined by their relationship to other words – everything gains relevance from its place within a network of signs of the same code. Only after having read Aubrey’s piece did I realize how much I had been influenced myself by the structuralism of Louw and Nida and how much I had supposed that definitions are meanings.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I still believe definitions are crucially important. As John Lee has shown in his History of New Testament Lexicography, the use of glosses instead of more elaborate definitions (and their uncritical handing-down through generations of lexicons) has had a horrible impact on how the meaning of Greek words in the NT is presented to exegetes. Of course, it’s often unproblematic to work with glosses if the Greek and German/English/French/etc. words express concepts that overlap significantly. Almost always, however, their boundaries don’t fall together and if you use a gloss for a Greek word you basically assign the boundaries of the gloss in the target language to that word – causing incredible confusion at many places.

That being said, the insights of cognitive linguistics also show that the meaning of words is much more than just what we manage to capture in definitions. This also means that componential analyses are only part of the story. I myself had quite heavily relied on this framework, which assumes that you can determine the meaning of a word by comparing it to how it relates to other words in the same semantic domain with reference to a set of features. I used this illustration from Cotterell and Turner in Paul’s Triumph (p. 14):

	Seating for one person, vs. more than one person	With back	With legs	With arms	With hard frame	With full, versus minimal or no cushioning
chair	+	+	+	–	+	–
sofa	–	+	+/-	+	+	+
armchair	+	+	(-)	+	+	+
stool	+	–	+	–	+	–
bench	–	(-)	+	(-)	+	–
pew	–	+	+	(-)	+	–
pouffe	+	–	–	–	–	+

But does this overview really encapsulate the concepts you associate with the words on the left? I should have known better. For as a non-native speaker who hadn’t known the word “pouffe,” I should have concluded that this is obviously not the case. Even though I know the furniture in question, I could not imagine what the word was referring to just from looking at this table. At the same time, you can probably have a pretty good idea about what a “sofa” is, simply from lying on a sofa – you don’t need to know the other words in order to figure out the paradigmatic relations of “sofa” in order to finally have a pretty specific mental representation of “sofa” in your head. Aubrey summarizes this point as follows (p. 179):

“If the failure of theological dictionaries was the assumption that words and concepts are identical, then the failure of the structuralist semantics that dominated the field when James Barr wrote his critique was the assumption that words and concepts are dramatically different. If words mean anything at all, there must be a substantive relationship between them and the concepts (both associative and denotative) they evoke mentally.”

Was Barr wrong and Kittel right?

In other words, a dictionary entry that takes serious the insights from cognitive linguistics would actually look pretty much like an article in an encyclopaedia again, describing the “frame” of a word, as it is rooted in the social realities of the time. The hard task then is to decide which of the domains that make up the frame are evoked in any occasion. The famous example for “mother” has, for example the genetic, birth, nurturance, genealogical, and marital domains – and not all of them are usually activated together in a specific context.

All this leads us to raise the question, which must be quite shocking after what we’ve said above: So was Kittel right after all? Aubrey indeed cautiously remarks in a footnote (p. 179):

“[I]t is not entirely clear whether the theological dictionary actually confused words and concepts in the manner that they are accused or whether they were simply misunderstood by proponents of structuralist semantics. It is entirely possible that the accusation itself was a result of the great theoretical and methodological chasm that existed between historical-philological semantics and structuralist semantics.”

Where Do We Go from here?

In some sense, this is a vindication of the tradition of the TDNT, even though Aubrey also states that many authors clearly moved too quickly from psychological analysis to theological speculation in relation to words. But still, the picture just sketched might come as a relief to those who were uncomfortable with my reiteration of Barr’s criticism above. Are the suggestions above all irrelevant as a consequence? Can we just continue with our undifferentiated talk about words and concepts (and referents)? I think the contrary is the case. Sure, the just-mentioned observations point to a potential in works that explore matters of conceptuality and reference. However, most NT scholars are not well-acquainted with cognitive linguistics. (I’m certainly not.) That’s why I think we should be all the more careful when we immerse ourselves too deep in associative meanings. In any case, we should be very precise in explaining what we are talking about at any given moment. It’s fine to explore the “psychological dimension” of words as it was of interest before the raise of structuralism. But we should be very clear in indicating where we make that move. Doing that, our work will have validity even if at points we don’t capture all the relevant nuances. Others will still be able to interact with our work and build on the semantic observations that are sound.

Thus, I will close with some very practical suggestions. They don’t contain a whole lot of wisdom, mostly because I am myself an amateur when it comes to these issues of lexical semantics and lexicography. But if you are like me and from time to time in your work you make claims about the meaning of this or that Greek word, then perhaps you would also like to know some simple steps that would help a lot in increasing the transparency of your account:

1. Read James Barr if you haven’t yet and repent of the sins of the TDNT. Then read Nida and Louw, Lexical Semantics of the Greek New Testament. Then read Mike Aubrey’s piece.
2. Perhaps so far you have used the term “Begriff“ consistently for the ‘wesentliche Merkmale einer Sache oder einer Gruppe von Erscheinungen, die zu einer gedanklichen Einheit zusammengefasst sind’ (eWDG; emphasis mine). Well done! But other haven’t. So help us doing away with this bad habit by just no longer using this word at all. It will help a lot. Really. English-speaking colleagues will write you thank-you cards! (If you are an English-speaking scholar and that’s exactly your position, please feel free to indicate so in a comment below – it is not easy to break with bad habits and we need encouragement.)
3. Differentiate in your terminology. First, if you are discussing a concept, say so. E.g. “das Konzept der Liebe“/“the concept of love.“ In any case, don’t use Greek words. There’s just no good reason to do so. None. We all know that you are working with Greek texts. If the concept needs specification because it is apparently so foreign to everything we know, just use adjectives. Please, in any case, don’t use transcriptions. Even if there’s a good rationale in your case, there are too many bad ones. Second, if you are discussing words, say so: “das Lexem πίστις.” (Or just the Greek word, see under #5.) To me, it doesn’t really matter whether you say “word” or “expression” or “lexeme” on the one hand and “content” or “sense” or “meaning” on the other (though they are not all the same). I am absolutely convinced that it’s better to use a slightly odd designation instead of using the entirely wrong category.
4. To the best of your ability, avoid glosses when you try to communicate the meaning of a Greek word. Use definitions instead. That means: Louw-Nida and BDAG/Danker’s concise lexicon for those who know English. Don’t use Baur, if you are a German speaker. If you rely heavily on dictionaries, read Lee’s History. In fact, I correct myself: Do read Baur! Side by side to BDAG. It will help you recognize when their definitions are nothing but elaborations of the German glosses. Did I mention that you should read Lee’s History? (Furthermore, I know it’s a long shot but speaking of lexicons I just have to mention that it wouldn’t hurt if you learnt/deepened your knowledge of Modern Greek… there are quite a few very interesting definitions out there in Greek, if you can find and read them.)
5. Indicate through your formatting when you are talking about concepts and when you are talking about words. In linguistics, expressions are usually adduced in italics (as in: Narrative is used for the concept ‘narrative’). That can be confusing when you use this also for emphasis. However, in philosophy and everyday usage, we tend to use double quotation marks for expressions (as in: “Narrative” is used for the concept ‘narrative’). I’d suggest that you do so when you talk about expressions in your target language. If you talk about Greek, it’s status as object language is clear anyway. You don’t have to mark it. Marking meanings typographically is a bit more difficult. In linguistics, capitals are used most often (as in: Narrative and story both mean NARRATIVE). Sometimes we even find double quotation marks, especially if the object language is different from the meta language (as in: Διήγησης “Narrative” never occurs in Paul’s letters). But that’s only a gloss anyway. I would recommend (as for example Nida/Louw do) to use single quotation marks (‘…’) whenever you talk about a concept (and you don’t actually say “concept”) or whenever you offer a definition – as in: Διήγησης can be defined as ‘discourse consisting of an orderly exposition or narration,’ which overlaps with the German expression “Erzählung,” which means ‘a text with at least two temporally joined events that are also connected in at least one further meaningful way.’
6. Try to be as clear as possible about the “associative meanings” that you identify in a specific place and that go beyond your definition. Why do you think they are there? What does it mean for them to be “there”? Do you think it’s part of the frame of a first-century reader that would be activated in this specific context? If so, why?

Next, I would like to talk specifically about the lexical semantics of Greek verbs . Before we can do so, however, we’ll have to address the issue of aspect. We’ll tackle both in the next post!

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Christoph Heilig – currently postdoc in Munich, soon in Basel – is the author of Hidden Criticism? (Fortress, 2017) and Paul’s Triumph (Peeters, 2017).
This research has recently received the Mercator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Additionally, he has co-edited (with J. Thomas Hewitt and Michael F. Bird) God and the Faithfulness of Paul: A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N. T. Wright (Fortress, 2017).

In his most recent – and voluminous – project, which has just been completed, he discusses the importance of “stories” and “narrative substructures” for understanding Paul’s letters. It is currently in press with de Gruyter.

Part 1: Introduction

For part 2, see here.
For part 3, see here.
For part 4, see here.

Why this blog post series?

Beginning this April, I will work as an assistant at the University of Basel at the chair of Prof. Moisés Mayordomo. Already on my second work day, I was going to give a presentation in the research seminar in Zurich – an event which now has of course been cancelled due to the Corona virus situation. Since I had already begun making some mental notes for this presentation, I thought it might be wise to instead make a series of blogposts about the subject that I was going to talk about. Here, I’ll make some introductory remarks and I hope I’ll be able to find the time over the coming weeks for the other instalments.

First, I should note that the topic of this presentation was intentionally different from a usual paper that one often presents in research seminars. We’ve probably all been in the situation that a scholar gives a paper on details of his or her current research, almost no one has read the previously circulated draft, and during the presentation everybody is searching through BibleWorks in order to make a clever observation as a launch pad for the discussion. My intention this time was to do something totally different. I wanted to talk about issues to which I had not paid sufficient attention but which had become important to me during the time of the revision of my doctoral dissertation on Paul as narrator for publication with BZNW (and my subsequent postdoctoral research) had become important to me. More specifically, it was my plan to talk about linguistic insights that I had only recently acquired during this period. That’s why it’s (roughly) an “annual report.”

Of course, such a presentation has the potential of being embarrassing (or even discrediting for earlier research) by laying bare the previous ignorance of the presenter. This is a consideration that I had to take into account to an even greater extent for this more public venue. However, it was my hope – and is now – that listeners/readers would appreciate that I put my cards on the table. After all, I am confident that if some of these things had been new discoveries to me – even though they probably shouldn’t have been – they might also hold, in part at least, the potential of expanding someone else’s horizon. So I count on your graciousness…

Also, I would like you to keep in mind the original setting of what follows. Please be tolerant concerning the style of these posts. They are not verbatim protocols of what I would have said, but they are certainly influenced by my mental simulations. Note also that I had planned at points to refer to the work of other people in the original audience to illustrate the relevance of the points I was making, to drive home the idea that these are not theoretical meanderings without any bearing on the work with actual biblical texts. I have not made the attempt to replace all these illustrations for the present purpose of this blog post. So please don’t take these references as major criticisms, but rather keep in mind that they were meant to induce lively discussion after the presentation (and perhaps we can have some of this here in the comments). In the published monograph, you will recognise many of the subjects I talk about here and in many cases the context there is a different one and the literature I interact with is more diverse. I will also point to some pieces of literature that I found especially helpful and that I recommend for others who are just as ignorant as I was about certain aspects of linguistic research, but this is by no means meant to offer an exhaustive bibliography. Again, in the published book on narratives in Paul you’ll find the references for the work I am most relying on.

On being a linguistic spectator

I’ve already explained the subtitle of the presentation/this series. I now need to address the actual substance as it is incapsulated by the title. Quite obviously, I plan to write about aspects of linguistic research. But I do so specifically as someone who has not received formal training in this area. I’ve got a BA in theology with an emphasis on biblical studies, an MLitt in Biblical Languages and Literature and I read a lot of linguistic literature for my dissertation (see above). But I don’t think I am a “linguist” – simply, because I haven’t received any formal training in this area. In online discussions, I’ve noticed that other scholars who work on aspects related to the language of the New Testament are sometimes less reluctant with that self-designation. But it seems important to me to be realistic about my limits. In fact, I do think that at certain points due to my familiarity with the NT texts I can actually contribute to linguistic discussions. But this is mostly by way of applying principles and clarifying distinctions. Only very rarely when reading the linguistic literature do I have the impression that I am actually in the position to correct something. This is of course not the place to judge whether other NT scholars might or might not be more qualified to call themselves linguists. To be sure, some of them have certainly read much more linguistic literature than I have. Still, I would at least like to observe here that when I am in conversation with trained linguists, they themselves often seem to be quite keen to emphasise their distinctiveness. Thus, I have the tendency to believe that one’s  actual training is indeed important in whether or not one  should call him or herself a linguist. In fact, I’ve noticed in many areas that there is something peculiar about “career jumpers” who discover a new subject of academic interest relatively late in their education. I am not entirely sure why this is, but I assume that the way you learn basic tools during your undergraduate studies has an important influence on the way you go about your work later – for better and for worse (on which see more below) – and that this helps create at least apparent boundaries between the disciplines.

Learning from linguists – remaining exegetes

So again, I observe linguistic discussions only as a bystander. The wonderful German term Zaungast implies not only that the person doesn’t really belong. It also has a quite voyeuristic ring. And indeed, despite the fact that I want to be clear about the limitations of the authority with which I can speak on these issues, I nevertheless want to emphasise my interest in the linguistic research – and my conviction that as NT scholars we should at least try to incorporate linguistic insights to the best of our abilities into our exegetical work. Heinrich von Siebenthal often says that he is “a linguist with interests in biblical texts” and I would analogically say that I am “an exegete with interests in linguistic results.”

That linguistics is somehow relevant for biblical interpretation is probably not a controversial statement for most. It is quite obvious that the study of language per se might have important things to say regarding the study of texts written in a specific language. However, in my attempts to take into account the relevant research as well as I can, I’ve sometimes still encountered a certain kind of scepticism – which I think is directed specifically at the claims of superiority attached to the use of certain linguistic methods. Some scholars are very skeptical about the value of NT scholarship when it is presented as the discovery of the philosopher’s stone – and rightly so. Too often, NT scholars fixate on a specific aspect or school of linguistic research and use the question of whether or not it is applied in a certain piece of secondary literature as a test of whether or not it can be taken seriously at all. Again, some of this irritation might have to do with an unrealistic perception of one’s own place in relation to the linguistic community.

Therefore, what I want to say at the outset is that I totally understand, if you as a non-linguist are not very interested in learning from another non-linguist about why this or that concept is absolutely crucial for your work. In fact, I would go even further and confirm your suspicion that not only are linguistic amateurs just that – but that linguistics itself certainly has its blind spots. I just don’t think that we should use these blind spots as excuses for not immersing ourselves into the concepts and tools of this field that are actually valuable. Of course, we could use our specialisation in historical research in order to point out limitations within some discussions in the linguistic community. I actually think that’s totally fine if indeed our grasp of these discussions is sound enough. I just happen to think that my own personal set of qualifications and skills is better suited for taking the other route, i.e., looking into linguistic research to shed light on the aspects of the texts that remain dark to us due to the blind spots inherent in our historical-critical education.

Of course, behind all this stands the much more general debate between philologists and linguists about who is the worse reader of texts, i.e. whether ignorance of historical circumstances or the basic structures of language have a more detrimental effect on the task of interpretation. We don’t have to make a judgment about this question here, nor do we have to decide which discipline, if properly understood, actually incorporates the other. It suffices for this context to recognise our limitations as exegetes of the historical-critical tradition and to develop a genuine interest in learning from linguists, without claiming in self-chastisement that they don’t have limitations of their own. In doing so, I think we can have a very fruitful dialogue.

A perfect illustration

Let me close by recounting a short anecdote, that I think perfectly illustrates that point. As part of my analysis of narratives in Paul’s letters I was systematically going through all perfect indicative forms in his letters. Perfect verb forms had never posed any real problem for me as a student, when my main task was to translate Koine texts. (By the way, I think it’s one of the biggest problems in the current way we teach Greek that we train students to translate, and that not even properly, instead of to read – two totally different things.) From my Greek education with Heinrich von Siebenthal I had remembered that the indicative perfect was a tense referring to the time of speaking and that it communicated the “resultative” aspect (cf. AGG 200). But I don’t think I activated that knowledge a lot during translation. I think I didn’t experience many problems simply because I just managed to figure out which verb form was needed in the German. I don’t think I really thought a lot about aspect and temporality. The only confusion I remember is when I did my master’s degree in the English speaking world and N. T. Wright insisted in our Galatians class that Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι should be translated “I have been crucified with Christ” (instead of “I was”) because of the “perfect.”

Now, at the time of  the revision of my doctoral dissertation, I had already learnt more about Greek aspect, but I have to admit that a lot of what I read in The Greek Verb Revisited was new to me and sensitised me to pay more attention to issues of verbal grammar.

So when I now returned again to perfect verb forms in the Pauline letters, the things that had formerly seemed perhaps mildly odd to me now appeared to be outright strange. In particular, in Second Corinthians (and in John and Revelation) I found a lot of perfect forms that just seemed “wrong” to me. A famous example of such a problematic verb form is of course 2. Cor 1:9a: ἀλλὰ αὐτοὶ ἐν ἑαυτοῖς τὸ ἀπόκριμα τοῦ θανάτου ἐσχήκαμεν. Many reference grammars note that the perfect form seems to be used here either in place of the ind. aor. or the pluperfect (cf. AGG 200e). To be sure, the former requires a quite early dating of the merging between ind. aor. and ind. perf. and has to deal with the fact that Paul uses the aorist stem of ἔχω at several places. The latter option, which receives a lot of discussion in Robertson’s grammar (and is forcefully rejected by Caragounis), faces the problem that in John you also find many regular pluperfect forms. Also, while the “historic (indicative) present” is indeed used to refer to a situation in the past, Robertson’s own characterization of the “historic perfect” emphasizes the difference between this usage and the pluperfect: “The experience may have seemed too vivid to Paul for the past perfect.” In other words: the perfect is used quite regularly after all, namely because it talks about a situation that is indeed still in place at the time of speaking/writing.

Whether or not one of these two explanations is valid despite the mentioned problems or not, it seems clear that this is indeed a difficult verse – and as I said it’s far from being exceptional in the NT. What’s interesting to me is that discussions in NT commentaries usually don’t reflect this situation at all. There, the focus is usually primarily on the question of what the talk about a “death sentence” might mean: Imprisonment? Sickness? What happened in Asia (V. 8)? How does it relate to the – certainly also figurative – fight with wild animals in 1. Cor 15,32? What’s the relationship to Acts 19,23-40? We can see here that the historical matters and the way the figurative language of the death sentence is to be understood – i.e. how it relates to Paul’s biography – is usually central to the discussion. The verb form is usually simply said to be aoristic in a footnote. (Some commentators maintain that it’s a normal perfect and recognise correctly what this implies for the time of writing, thus concluding that the imagery of the death sentence must have to do with a sickness that is still not over – an interpretation that seems to be problematic in light of verse 10, where the end of the dangerous situation seems to be stated explicitly.)

Now, here’s what happened when I talked to a linguist about the passage and the fact that it causes me trouble. He just commented: “It seems to me that it’s entirely possible that they are still living under a death sentence in 1.9. Perhaps there are cities that Paul cannot return to.” Of course, for an NT exegete trained in the historical-critical tradition, such a statement sets off whole fireworks of questions surrounding jurisprudence in Roman provinces and death penalties in antiquity. But that’s exactly what I meant, when I said we could have a fruitful dialogue if we remained aware of our own blind spots and became interested in the “macula” of our conversation partner (it works much better in German, where the designation for the area of the retina that provides high-quality focused vision is “gelber Fleck” as opposed to the “blinde Fleck”). We can have it both ways – we can insist that it’s perfectly legitimate to emphasize the importance of historical reconstructions of Paul’s experience of legal systems, while we at the same time recognize that we need indeed a very good explanation for Paul’s use of the ind. perf. in 2. Cor 1:9 (if we believe he meant what we always say he meant) in light of the fact that a linguistically trained person at first sight thinks it is perfectly regular.

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Christoph Heilig – currently postdoc in Munich, soon in Basel – is the author of Hidden Criticism? (Fortress, 2017) and Paul’s Triumph (Peeters, 2017).
This research has recently received the Mercator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Additionally, he has co-edited (with J. Thomas Hewitt and Michael F. Bird) God and the Faithfulness of Paul: A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N. T. Wright (Fortress, 2017).

In his most recent – and voluminous – project, which has just been completed, he discusses the importance of “stories” and “narrative substructures” for understanding Paul’s letters. It is currently in press with de Gruyter.

There is no doubt that 2019 will be known for decades as the “Year of Greek Grammars” in the English-speaking world. In March, the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek by Evert van Emde Boas, Albert Rijksbaron, Luuk Huitink, and Mathieu de Bakker appeared. In the preface, the authors make it quite clear that they regard this publication to be quite a major achievement, with Smyth’s (a century old, even in its latest revision having appeared over seventy years ago) grammar being “the last good full-scale reference grammar in English” (CGCG  p. xxxi): “[It] stemmed from a time long before such [linguistic] advances had even been possible, and more recent grammar books had done nothing to bridge the gap.” 

Then, in April, Cambridge University Press published yet another very much anticipated grammar, the Cambridge Grammar of Medieval and Early Modern Greek by David Holton, Geoffrey Horrocks, Marjolijne Janssen, Tina Lendari, Io Manolessou, Notis Toufexis – a work that is unfortunately as expensive as it is massive.

Some readers have expressed disappointment that the authors of both grammars decided not to discuss developments of (early and late) Koine Greek developments.  

However, a new grammar – this time published in Oxford (by Peter Lang) – that has just been released now covers some of this ground.

There is also a “new edition” of Moulton’s Grammar of New Testament Greek with updates by Stanley E. Porter for each volume. I haven’t had a chance to take a look at it yet and don’t know whether this publication has the potential to join the ranks of this list …

I am talking about the Ancient Greek Grammar for the Study of the New Testament by Heinrich von Siebenthal. The AGG is the translation of the German Griechische Grammatik zum Neuen Testament (GGNT) that appeared in 2011 (and is itself a thorough revision of the 1985 grammar co-written by Hoffmann and von Siebenthal).

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While in the English-speaking world, BDF (Blass-Debrunner-Funk) now has been the standard reference grammar for NT scholars, their German colleagues have long had in GGNT a work that was linguistically clearly superior to BDR (Blass-Debrunner-Rehkopf). Personally – having studied Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic under von Siebenthal and having benefitted immensely from GGNT – I am very excited that this work is now also available in English. To be sure, BDF/BDR still has its value, not least (together with the linguistic key produced by von Siebenthal and Haubeck) as a scriptural index, that gives a first clue about which grammatical topic is of relevance for the passage in question (and offers some explanations for why interpretations in commentaries might differ). There is however no doubt in my mind that von Siebenthal’s AGG is the best place to go to get an up-to-date and reliable assessment (that is presented in still rather traditional – and thus also for students accessible – grammatical categories). If you do any work on NT texts (or any other texts written in Koine for that matter; it’s not a “NT grammar”), you need to get this book!

To give you some idea about the scope and shape of this project, I asked Heinrich von Siebenthal to answer some questions that I thought some of you might have:

Students and scholars of the NT already have a variety of grammars to choose from – how is your grammar different from the existing ones? How does it fit into this spectrum?
HvS: I think, there are three major distinctives that set the “Ancient Greek Grammar for the Study of the New Testament” apart more or less clearly from other grammars:
1) It is not a text-book, but a reference grammar that systematically covers all areas relevant to well-founded text interpretation including textgrammar and word formation.
2) The information it provides is based on the best of traditional and more recent research in the study of Ancient Greek and linguistic communication.
3) The mode of presentation is largely shaped by the needs of prospective users, typically unacquainted with the details of linguistic research or with classical philology:
(a) Every Greek, Latin or other non-English expression is translated into English.
(b) Knowledge of Classical Greek is not presupposed (as it is in Blass-Debrunner-Funk); differences between classical and non-classical usage, however, are regularly indicated.
(c) It is primarily about the grammatical phenomena of Ancient Greek (mainly those of New Testament Greek, but also about many of the ones attested in the Septuagint and extra-biblical texts, especially classical ones). At the same time great care has been taken to point out what linguistic phenomena of English correspond to these phenomena functionally and what may be considered adequate translational equivalents.
In summary, this grammar is meant to be 1) more comprehensive, 2) more up-to-date, 3) more accessible than some, perhaps than most of its alternatives.
Aiming at both professional quality of content and user-friendly presentation a tool was produced that would hopefully be of service to beginning students and more experienced exegetes alike.

Can you tell us a little bit about how your own education and previous research forms the background of this publication?
HvS: Motivated by a special interest in the mechanics of linguistic communication and in a truly scholarly approach to ancient texts, especially biblical ones, I studied Ancient Greek, Hebrew, and English linguistics at the Universities of Zürich and Liverpool. My time in Zürich was a major contributing factor to me eventually producing this grammar, due mainly to the profound influence two of my teachers have had on me: 1) Ernst Risch, an Indo-European scholar of international renown (with a special emphasis on Ancient Greek linguistics): He helped me find a truly scholarly approach to Ancient Greek grammar and texts. He also kindly critiqued the earliest (German) version of the grammar co-authored with Ernst Hoffmann resulting in a considerable number of improvements, not least in the core parts of syntax. 2) Ernst Leisi, a leading authority in the study of English linguistics (known especially for his pioneering work in lexical semantics): He greatly impressed me with the professional way he handled the complexities of linguistic communication and the straightforward and accessible way he talked about these.
These scholars, especially Leisi, have been a constant source of inspiration to me over the years as I worked as a lecturer on Biblical languages, particularly so in my research, which began with my doctoral work on Hebrew synonymics to be followed by research and publication activities focused on applying solid findings of modern English and German as well as general (typologically based) linguistics to Ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, with an increasing interest in text-level phenomena, always keeping in view the needs of non-specialists. It was basically in this context that I came to produce both the German and the English versions of “my” grammar.

In preparing the English version of your grammar, which areas required the most modification due to the new target language?
HvS: Case forms and their syntax so prominent in Ancient Greek (and German) called for special attention, of course, as in Modern English case forms hardly occur at all. Dealing with grammatical genders required special care, too, as Ancient Greek and German, unlike English, do not connect these with natural genders in any systematic way. Another area, as you would expect, was the syntax of verbs forms; this proved to be the most important and the most challenging one calling for extensive modifications, as this is an area marked by significant differences, in many cases very subtle ones, between Ancient Greek and English, differences that are not the same as those between Ancient Greek and German. The use of the perfect (indicative) is a case in point: There is some overlap with the English present perfect, but only in cases where the “action” does not continue into the present (“non-continuative perfect”), but where a continuing result is indicated (“resultative perfect”), e.g. in Acts 21:28 κεκοίνωκεν τὸν ἅγιον τόπον τοῦτον He has defiled this holy place (the defiling activity does not continue, but a continuing result is indicated). In other cases, the Ancient Greek perfect (indicative) does not agree in use with the English present perfect. Interestingly, the English (continuative) present perfect is sometimes an adequate translation of the Ancient Greek present indicative (e.g. John 14:9). Other subtle, but important differences are about the use of aspects and moods. 

Were there any areas where you felt compelled to make changes to the substance of your analysis due to more recent research into Greek grammar? 
HvS: The changes I felt compelled to make did not really affect my work in any substantial way. However, I tried to offer a more consistent and thus more helpful analysis of syntactical matters inter alia by 1) adopting a phrase-based approach to the syntax of words, 2) more carefully defining the aspects (the volume by Runge-Fresch proving to be important), and 3) introducing the concept of modality (important for building a meaningful bridge between Ancient Greek moods and the use of English modal verbs). 

Morphology and syntax make up for the biggest part of your book. However, you’ve also added a quite substantial discussion of “textgrammar.” Could you explain in a few sentences why you did this and what it is all about?
HvS: “My” grammar is to help theologians and others interested in text interpretation explain in a reasoned way what Ancient Greek texts, especially those of the New Testament, communicate linguistically. Now, as is widely believed among today’s linguists, linguistic communication operates by means of texts of diverse types (invitations, requests, inquiries, offers, complaints, protests, appeals, birth and marriage announcements, death notices, anecdotes etc.). And a text is more than the sum of its sentences or clauses. These must be connected in a particular way, having both a formal and content structure that enables hearers or readers to understand what the producer of the text intends to communicate, i.e. what content he or she means to convey and what objectives he or she is trying to achieve. The textgrammar section is to show 1) ways in which a text is different from the sum of its sentences or clauses and 2) ways in which the distinctive features of the formal and the content structures of texts relate to the communicative force (coherence) of texts contained in the Greek New Testament.

When reading exegetical works by NT scholars, which areas of inquiry or specific question seem to be in most need of an updated grammatical state of knowledge? What do you miss the most? What would you wish NT scholars would take more into account?
HvS: I think, the text level matters I have just hinted at should definitely be taken more seriously. Words, phrases and sentences shouldn’t be looked at in isolation, but first of all as part of the text they belong to. Our primary concern should be to determine in a reasoned way what function these most likely have within the text itself, what they contribute informationally to the overall message of the text. This will necessarily lead us to that continual change between the two processes, termed “bottom-up” and “top-down”. To my mind this concern should have priority over other concerns such as the ones for connections with other texts (contemporary or non-contemporary in Greek or in other languages), though this, too, has a legitimate, but definitely secondary role to play in the process of text interpretation. Finally, let me mention one personal wish I have concerning New Testament text interpretation: Not only should we interpret these texts in a solidly reasoned way, it would be good if we were also as committed to taking their message seriously.    

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Christoph Heilig is the author of Hidden Criticism? (Fortress, 2017) and Paul’s Triumph (Peeters, 2017).
This research has recently received the Mercator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Additionally, he has co-edited (with J. Thomas Hewitt and Michael F. Bird) God and the Faithfulness of Paul: A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N. T. Wright (Fortress, 2017). 

In his most recent – and voluminous – project, which has just been completed, he discusses the importance of “stories” and “narrative substructures” for understanding Paul’s letters. It is currently in press with de Gruyter.

1. Introduction to Given’s Review and Bayes’s Theorem

Mark D. Given has recently reviewed my book Hidden Criticism? The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul for RBL. In this monograph, which was published as part of the WUNT II series by Mohr Siebeck in 2015 and in 2nd edition by Fortress in 2017, deals with the question of whether we can discern anti-imperial echoes in the letters of Paul.  Obviously, I like the conclusion of Given’s review very much:

“… chapters 3–6 brim with more critical insights than I could possibly mention. The author is to be highly praised for his mastery of relevant research displayed throughout this book and the incisive and judicious commentary he provides on it. Hidden Criticism is an important contribution to scholarship on the subject of Paul and empire and a must read for anyone seriously interested in the topic.”

Given also identifies one area, where he is not that happy with my book and I think his criticism is worth being quoted in detail here. Since James McGrath has also posted about this on his blog (with several insightful comments under the original post), I’d like to take the opportunity here of deepening the conversation on this subject by on the one hand reflecting critically on some of the things I wrote in Hidden Criticismand by also, on the other hand, re-emphasising some aspects that have been important all along to me but which I probably did not formulate clearly enough in the past.

Here’s how Given introduces his complaint:

“I only have one major criticism of the book: the use of Bayes’s theorem. …  Whether or not the theory is necessary, Heilig does not explain it well. I found myself consulting additional resources that did explain it well, and only afterward could I better evaluate what Heilig is trying to do with it.”

First of all, I am very grateful to Given that he actually went the extra mile and did additional research, something that certainly not every reviewer would have done. Accordingly, this blogpost is meant as an attempt to do justice to his effort and is not to be understood as the unsatisfied reaction by the author. Moreover, I think Given is entirely right in his criticism. I tried to keep the introduction to Bayes’s theorem as short as possible in order to avoid the impression that it might be a more central aspect than it actually was for my work – with the result that the introduction to the concept is probably way too dense. If you want to know what Bayes’s theorem is and how it might affect the way we construct arguments, I would strongly encourage you to simply watch this 10-minute-video. If you have never heard of Bayes, trust me, it is an excellent investment of your time!

2. Bayesian Reasoning Can Help Evaluate “Criteria” in Biblical Scholarship

Assuming that you’ve watched the video (or are already familiar with Bayes’s theorem anyway), I will now continue by considering Given’s conclusion about the potential benefits and limitations of Bayesian reasoning for biblical studies:

“To be sure, Heilig is explicitly clear that he is not claiming Bayes’s theorem is a methodological key that can open the door to assured results regarding the subtext hypothesis. However, implicitly he often argues as if it can, or at least that it can rule out some proposals … “

Given here touches on a very important point, namely the actual relevance of Bayes’s theorem for my book Hidden Criticism? In retrospect, I think that I might not have been clear enough on the question of why I even refer to the concept in chapter 2, which deals with the (in my view) dominant approach established by Neil Elliott and N. T. Wright of identifying a counter-imperial subtext in Paul by means of Richard B. Hays’s echo-criteria. The sole purpose of sketching the Bayesian principles was to evaluate this set of criteria. (I think that in my earlier essay-length summary of my argument this role might have been more obvious. You can access it here.)

Biblical studies is obsessed with criteria: we use them in textual criticism, life-of-Jesus-research, and intertextuality discourses, to name just a few influential areas. Criteria are meant to make the scholar’s life easier. In my experience, however, they often complicate discussions unnecessarily – sometimes even becoming the object of scholarly debate to an astonishing extent. Every year, dozens of dissertations are written that all compare different sets of criteria which have been suggested by more senior scholars to solve a specific problem, then selecting one of the sets or modifying it, and then applying it to some texts. Biographically, it made a big impression on me when during iSBL 2013 in St Andrews a doctoral student’s presentation on intertextuality basically consisted of a listing of different sets of criteria that had been suggested. When asked in the end, which one he would be choosing for his own textual analysis, he basically threw his hands up in the air, saying: “Well, if only there were a meta-criterion for assessing the validity of criteria…!”

Bayes’s theorem rather obviously offers just such a grid – and that is why it had become important for my research on counter-imperial echoes in Paul’s letters. I wanted to know: “In order to answer the question of whether there is such a subtext in Paul’s letters, can I simply – with Elliott and Wright but also Barclay – apply Hays’s criteria to these texts?”

As it turns out, considered against the background of Bayes’s theorem, Hays’s set of criteria is deeply problematic. Don’t get me wrong:  It raises some really important questions. But some of these questions overlap. So we can’t just count answers. Moreover, half of the evidential weight that should influence the scale of our decision making with regard to whether the hypothesis of an echo is more probable than the alternative is actually contributed by one of the questions! That’s why I conclude:

“In light of all of this, it does not seem advisable to use Hays’s criteria as a methodologically sound way to identify echoes. To be sure, it is possible to come to well-founded conclusions on their basis … but in these cases it is not the set of criteria itself which guarantees the success, but their wise use, which attributes the correct significance to each of them.”

Hidden Criticism, pp. 42-43

(You can see read a shorter version of my assessment of the criteria here fore free.)

One is certainly free to judge this to be a rather modest insight. However, in light of the many “applications” of Hays’s criteria it still seems quite significant to me and I am glad to see that Joel White has recently also made an effort to do justice to it in the realm of identifying scriptural allusions (see his chapter in this volume).

So, to come to an interim conclusion, one of the two ways in that Bayes’s theorem can be important for biblical studies and in that it also plays a role in my argument in Hidden Criticism is the following:

Awareness of Bayes’s theorem can prevent us from using unsuitable sets of criteria when dealing with texts or at least tell us how the different criteria are to be assessed in relation to each other.

You might not be in need of such a framework because you are an excellent thinker anyway. Personally, it helped me immensely to have a tool at hand that helps me connect the dots between the individual criteria that are brought to a text by colleagues and myself. And when I think about the confusion of students, when they have to deal with “conflicting” criteria for establishing the relationship among textual variants and when I remember the confusion and sometimes even desperation of junior researchers in trying to navigate through the literature of those who came before them, I am tempted to believe that I am not alone in that situation.

3. Bayesian Reasoning Can Help to Prevent Argumentative Fallacies

To be sure, for the rest of Hidden Criticism the theorem isn’t that important. In fact, its only significance for the remainder of the book is that it offers a certain context for understanding what chapters 3-5 are doing, namely that they are scrutinizing the “prior-probability” (or, as I called it in order to sound less mathematic: “background plausibility”) of the counter-imperial echo-hypothesis. By contrast, chapter 6 is only offering some guidance for how to evaluate likelihoods (or: “explanatory potentials”). It was important to me back then to emphasise that I was not answering the question of “how probable is the hypothesis that Paul criticised the Roman empire in coded form?” From a Bayesian perspective it can’t be any different, of course, because an assessment of the posterior-probability would presuppose an assessment of likelihoods, which, in turn, would necessitate the analysis of specific texts in the framework of the discussed hypothesis and its alternatives. I didn’t see how I could do such an analysis as part of the book, which is why I wrote a second monograph that deals with a single text (2 Cor 2:14) to fill this gap. So I do think that Bayes’s theorem is important for Hidden Criticism as a whole in that it offers a context for understanding what the book aims (and does not aim) to achieve. Unfortunately, I had been convinced to put the word “plausibility” in the subtitle of the book, which I regret. Also, the description I provided the publisher with is indeed a bit misleading (“On the basis of insights from the philosophy of science, Christoph Heilig suggests several analytical steps for examining this paradigm.”)

To come back to the more general question behind this blog post, let me summarise this aspect of the value of Bayesian reasoning for biblical studies (and in a limited extent also for Hidden Criticism) as follows:

If we keep an eye on Bayes’s theorem, it can help us to gain a realistic perception of what we are actually contributing to a research question: Are we dealing with its background plausibility? Are we assessing its explanatory potential? Are we doing both and are we doing it also for competing hypotheses so that we can actually make statements about which hypothesis is most probably true?

Given also seems to recognise the value of this second aspect for he ends his criticism by saying:

“I [would not] dissuade historians from reflecting on Bayesian reasoning in a loosely analogical way while doing their work. It can and should make us more circumspect in our use of ‘intuitions’ (34).”

The most basic disagreement (perhaps the only real disagreement) between Given and me might be the value of this contribution of Bayesian reasoning. Part of the reason for why I wrote “Paul’s Triumph” was to show that the vast majority of the different proposals for Paul’s use of θριαμβεύειν in 2 Cor 2:14 did not only miss some evidence but systematically failed to incorporate huge areas of evidence. The authors of these articles and monographs usually picked either prior-probability or likelihood as their point of departure – without ever coming full-circle. There is of course nothing to be said against such contributions to scholarship – as long as they are not associated with claims about an overall-plausibility of the thesis under discussion (which then by definition renders the contribution incomplete).

Almost every journal issue has an article on a new suggested “background” for a biblical passage. (See, for example, here on “neglected points of background.”) Mostly, the argument runs like this:

“There is some archaeological or literary evidence from other sources that indicate that the author might have been in contact with a certain cultural phenomenon. Now that we know that the author was aware of that ritual or concept, it of course becomes much more plausible to assume that he also talked about it. And that’s why we should assume that an until now mysterious text actually is to be understood against that background.”

To me it is mind-blowing to observe how often such articles do not even mention the question of whether the actual wording of the text is indeed what we would expect if this background was indeed the one on the author’s mind. Without answer the following question that encapsulates the aspect of likelihood/explanatory potential no statement about whether or not the new proposal actually offers a better explanation for the text than previous alternatives makes any sense: “would we expect the specific wording if we presupposed a proposition with counter-imperial intent?” (Hidden Criticism, p. 140). Given has some very insightful comments on precisely this issue:

“I have used a similar test with students over the years that I call the rhetorical criterion. When a student proposes an interpretation of a contested passage, I ask if these are the words we would have expected to be used to convey that meaning. Asking this question often heads off eisegesis because the student immediately sees that if the author meant what the student proposed, the wording would likely be different. Heilig uses this sort of logic to great effect while reflecting on various proposed anti-imperial passages. Whether one agrees with his specific conclusions or not, the way he reasons about these passages is worthy of emulation.”

If you think this problem is only prevalent among students, I’d refer you again to my analysis in Paul’s Triumph. I have to insist: it is not.

And for that reason, Bayes’s theorem is indeed important for biblical studies. It is of course possible to take into account the evidence relevant for prior-probability and likelihood without knowing these categories. Indeed, many good historians do so all the time (as I also clearly say in Hidden Criticism, p. 27: “Every good historical enquiry will always pay attention to both factors.”). The problem is that I’ve come to the conclusion that more often than not we (and I certainly include myself here) as biblical scholars are not actually following this example well enough.

Note also that Bayes’s theorem tells us two things about Given’s “rhetorical criterion” that one might easily overlook (i.e. I assume Given is aware of these aspects of his criterion, but I don’t think it’s so far-fetched to imagine that someone might miss them):

First, it’s possible indeed that the rhetorical criterion might “favour” (the technical term for this constellation) a specific meaning but that a different interpretation is still more probable. The reason for this is that people sometimes indeed do what is unexpected. For example, let’s take the hypothesis that in the very last paragraph of Hidden Criticism I intended to encourage research on the question of whether Paul criticised the Roman Empire in the subtext of his letters. Would you have expected me to have written “we should…  avoid this complex of questions (Hidden Criticism, p. 160)? Certainly not. But that’s exactly what I submitted to the publisher. Still, if you had read the book up to this point, your assessment of the semantics/pragmatics of this sentence wouldn’t be difficult at all, because you would already have a very clear idea about the background plausibilities of different interpretations of this sentence. (For more on this, see here.)

In other words: Given’s “rhetorical criterion” is a really helpful pedagogical tool but it offers a guide to plausible interpretations only in conjunctions with considering the aspect of background plausibility, i.e. the aspect that the aforementioned “background-studies” focus on exclusively (and unjustifiably so). If explanatory potential/likelihood is considered in isolation, there is a permanent danger of coming up with “false positives.”

You can find this kind of fallacy often associated with theses on matters of historical reconstruction that have defied an easy solution for a long time. For example, in the literature on the synoptic problem (or on problems of source criticism) you will find ever more complex solutions that aim at integrating the multitude of textual phenomena. Often, these proposals start with a rather simple core hypothesis that is over time supplemented with very many auxiliary hypotheses which need to be postulated to save the research program from the complexity of the empirical data. In the end of such a process you will necessarily have a hypothesis that will be capable of explaining each and every tiny detail of the textual tradition. However, the assertion “My theory explains all the evidence perfectly!” in itself is of little use, if this enormous explanatory potential is bought at the cost of an acceptable background plausibility.

Second, there is yet another danger for “false positives” associated with the rhetorical criterion. We’ve already discussed the possibility that the parameter of background plausibility is neglected. Another common mistake is to emphasise the good explanatory potential of a hypothesis but to overlook that there are alternative explanations, which also perform quite well with regard to the likelihood-aspect.

For example, I sometimes think that political pundits on TV also would profit a lot from some familiarity with Bayesian reasoning. Just in the last couple of days, I’ve heard so many comedians and commentators wonder why many people in the Trump orbit lied about contacts to the Russians if there was no collusion (and apparently there wasn’t). For two years, these people seem to have concentrated only on the explanatory potential of the collusion hypothesis: if the Trump team had colluded with the Russians, it is indeed quite probable that they would have lied about contacts with Russian officials (because people often attempt to cover-up criminal activities when confronted with them). However, apparently, it never crossed the mind of these individuals that (leaving aside prior-probabilities for the moment entirely) there might also be other scenarios in which lying about such contacts might be quite predictable (e.g. taking into account the human tendency to lie, private business dealings, and – last but not least – avoiding the appearance of collusion).

Third, the rhetorical criterion – the focus on likelihood/explanatory potential – can also lead to “false negatives” if used improperly. Again the problem might be the lack of comparison – which in this can lead to the false assumption that the only partial fulfilment of the rhetorical criterion could imply something negative for the overall probability of the hypothesis. That’s very problematic: Sometimes we should indeed accept a meaning even though there might have been much more common ways to express this thought. So the “rhetorical criterion” only works well if we apply it not just to a single possible meaning but to all the competing semantic hypotheses. For example, the word “ninnyhammer” might not exactly be our first prediction for how a speaker might introduce the concept of ‘idiot’ into a discourse – but it seems to me that it would be an even more awkward choice for communicating a compliment.

Thus, it seems to me that Given’s own “rhetorical criterion” powerfully demonstrates the usefulness of Bayes’s theorem for biblical studies. Sometimes, it completely suffices to ask the student whether the actual text in front of us is what “we would have expected to be used to convey that meaning.” Under different circumstances, such a shift of the perspective can, however, lead to wrong results, at least if the procedure is not specified by means of further guidelines. The art of good exegesis is to know, when this criterion in its simple form (i.e. when the focus on the explanatory potential of a single hypothesis) is actually productive. Being aware of Bayes’s theorem is one way of mastering this art.

Again, let me be very clear about these: the above considerations might be very intuitive to you. If so, congratulations. You obviously don’t need to print out Bayes’s theorem and attach it next to your monitor (plus, you’ve successfully beaten some very nasty tendencies of human reasoning, the prevalence of which has been well-established through psychological research). Others, like myself, might however benefit indeed from drawing more consciously on Bayes’s theorem when developing our arguments (at least for ourselves, whether it is productive to do so in writing is a different question, to be sure) because mistakes in these areas automatically imply rather fundamental problems for our conclusions.

So I think I largely agree with the rather limited role Given wants to assign to Bayes’s theorem for the process of biblical research. My point simply is that it comes into play at a very foundational level of the construction of exegetical arguments – and that disregard for the methodological principles as they can be developed on the basis of Bayes’s theorem are more often neglected by exegetes that we might want to assume.

4. Bayesian Reasoning Does Not Offer “Objective Numbers” as Opposed to “Subjective Opinions”

After having addressed the potential benefits from familiarising oneself with Bayesian reasoning for biblical studies, let’s now turn to some limitations that Given correctly identifies:

“It must be acknowledged that the vast majority of historians do not employ Bayesian probability theory, and for good reason. Bayesian theory works best with large and well circumscribed data sets of various kinds, such as doctors evaluating test results on the basis of copious previous patient statistics—and I would much rather be diagnosed by a doctor who understands Bayesian probability theory than one who does not! Further, I can certainly see how Bayesian theory could be useful in sociological research where large amounts of statistical data are available. However, even though Heilig acknowledges the problem (e.g., 34–35), I do not think he really takes seriously enough how little data we are actually working with when trying to determine Paul’s intentions regarding Rome. One has only to observe how the same small handful of relevant texts from the letters keep coming up again and again in the course of the book to be reminded of this. These letters are an incredibly small sampling of the life of Paul of Tarsus, and when one considers the rhetorical and situational nature of every one of them, the confidence that probability theory can contribute substantially to this sort of historical problem seems misplaced. Heilig says, ‘There is no result that is better than the best, and Bayes’s theorem is a valuable guideline in reaching it’ (35). When dealing with fragmentary data from two millennia ago, almost always open to multiple interpretations, this sort of scientistic reasoning is problematic. The best result is the most accurate result, and Bayesian reasoning based on limited data might actually undermine it.”

I fully agree with almost everything Given says here. In fact, I still believe that I’ve said some of these things myself in Hidden Criticism?, though probably not clearly enough. For example, I write:

“[I]t is clear that often we will not be able to give precise absolute numbers. However, this is not a problem, as long as we can compare different hypotheses relatively to each other.”

Hidden Criticism, p. 34

I should have said: “It is clear that we will almost never be able to give precise absolute numbers” for prior-probabilities or likelihoods! In fact, I never do so in Hidden Criticism. Not even in Paul’s Triumph do I offer likelihoods in relation to the use of θριαμβεύειν for the different suggested senses, even though we have more statistical data in the area of lexicography than almost anywhere else in the realm of historical studies. I would indeed strongly discourage anyone from such attempts. The few I’ve seen are rather embarrassing.

The point about Bayes’s theorem offering access to the “best” possible result should not be mistaken as a reference to precision but to completeness of evidence taken into account. To formulate it more clearly this time: if we are comparing two hypotheses in light of some new evidence and we can’t tell which of the two had been more plausible before the new evidence emerged (prior-probability) and if we can’t tell which of the two hypothesis makes the evidence more predictable (likelihood), we simply can’t say anything about which of the two hypotheses is more probable (“probable” refers here to the subjective “confidence in the truth of  [the hypothesis] H. How much would you be willing to bet on the truth of H?”, Hidden Criticism, p. 28).

In such a situation, we shouldn’t complain that Bayes’s theorem somehow is unhelpful nor should we elevate the one aspect that we perhaps can evaluate to the status of being the decisive factor in deciding which hypothesis is more probably true. Intuitively we might know that this is not a good procedure, Bayes’s theorem even tells us that this is outright impossible.

This does not mean, by the way, that we can’t “do” anything with a hypothesis unless we can make assessments of likelihoods and prior-probabilities in comparison to alternative hypotheses. We can, for a start, still do research on the two aspects and work towards that goal. Also, even if that goal is unattainable, this does not mean that we are not allowed to “accept” one of the hypotheses. Bayes’s theorem needs to be consulted in order to determine which hypothesis is most probable in light of certain evidence. Whether you should accept the hypothesis that is more probable in light of the current evidence and whether you can only accept hypotheses that can be designated as probable is an entirely different (research-pragmatical and even “ethical”) question. I didn’t write a lot about this in Hidden Criticism, mostly, I have to admit, because my wife Theresa had not yet helped me to understand this difference between probability assessment and hypothesis choice sufficiently. You can now read more on this in our chapter on “Historical Methodology,” which is available for free here.

5. Outlook: How I Teach Bayesian Reasoning in the Context of Biblical Studies

In closing, I would like to point out how I’ve come to introduce the concept of Bayesian reasoning to my students recently. It develops the basic thought of the video that I linked to above but makes use of actual events in the recent past. Perhaps it’s also useful for you:

Imagine that it’s Election Night 2016. Assuming that you trust mainstream media, you are quite certain that Hilary Clinton is going to win. If you’d be forced to attach a number to your certainty, you might perhaps refer to various predictions, ranging from a 71% to a 98% chance for Hilary’s win (with Trump’s chances being somewhere between 2 and 29%). The quite influential number by the New York Times suggested an 80% chance of winning at election day.

This kind of expectation is called “prior-probability” in Bayesian terminology.

So now imagine you were hit by a truck before the results were coming in. You wake up several weeks later in the hospital, with the first words you are hearing on TV being that the president just issued a “travel ban” for Muslims. You don’t know yet what the name of the new president is but you will immediately begin to adjust your expectation for who probably won the election. How do you do that? You assess what is called the “likelihoods” of hypotheses (i.e., confusingly, the probability of the evidence dependent on the hypothesis) in Bayesian terminology, i.e. you try to answer the question of how predictable the observed event (“travel ban”) would be if Trump or Clinton had won the election.

Now, we haven’t witnessed several presidencies by these two persons, so we don’t have a statistical value we can use to say how frequently in hundred presidencies they would do such a thing. Our situation is quite similar to the historian of the more distant past. It’s arguably not impossible that given certain events Clinton might have done something similar. So P („travel ban“ │Clinton) – the probability of a travel ban if Clinton were president – is certainly not zero, even though probably close to it. On the other hand, Trump had promised so much on the campaign trail that one might deem it unreasonable to expect that he would be implementing every bit of his agenda once elected. So on the other hand P („travel ban“ │Trump) is also not unity, even though it will probably be much higher than the Clinton-value.

Thus, in any case, these likelihoods seem to “favour” a Trump-presidency. In other words: the prior-probabilities from election night (i.e. your expectations before you heard of the travel ban) need to be adjusted – and a shift of some degree towards the hypothesis of a Trump-victory will occur.

Now, Bayes’s theorem tells us exactly how we are supposed to do that. Our final verdict, the “posterior-probability” will vary, to be sure, depending on how we answer certain questions:

• Which one of the prior-probabilities do we choose? Which poll do we rely on? Perhaps we’ve been convinced of the existence of the “hidden Trump voter” all along?
• How probable is it that Clinton would do something that would be described as a “Muslim travel ban” on TV?
• Again, we might ask more specifically: how reliable is TV coverage anyway? Perhaps they are largely overstating what Clinton might have intended?
• Also, how unprecedented would such a move actually be for a democratic president?
• And anyway: politicians change their position all the time, right? Like Angela Merkel’s energy policy changed  180° immediately after the Fukushima catastrophe. Perhaps there was a new terrorist attack, which influenced public opinion? 
• Also, how certain is it in any case that Trump would carry through a conservative agenda after being elected president? Hasn’t he been a democrat for quite some time?

So the combination of traits of a fervent Hilary supporter with little trust in the media (“They are the ones who created Trump!”) might, for example, result in the situation that he or she would still believe that Hilary probably won the election. In other words: the posterior-probability of Hilary’s victory might still be greater than 0.5 from the perspective of such a person.

Note that this posterior-probability can then be treated as the prior-probability of a renewed updating cycle, once new information becomes available (e.g. the phrase “president Trump”). (This is why some Bayesianists will tell you that the initial priors actually don’t matter at all.)

It’s actually quite fun playing with the numbers in the classroom and fascinating to see how different combinations of answers result in very different results. But of course, I won’t do so (here). Because the whole point of this post is, after all, that it’s not primarily about the numbers.

Rather, in the context of the potential use for biblical studies, it is all about, for example becoming aware of the fact that we often come to a hypothesis with some prior notion about its plausibility in comparison to alternatives. Even if we didn’t trust polling data at all (or somehow had been blissfully unaware of it on election eve), we would probably still have expected one candidate to be the more plausible winner. Or we might have actually thought that the chances were 50:50. In this case, the new evidence, the talk about a travel ban for Muslims, will necessarily tip the scale, i.e. the hypothesis favoured by the comparison of likelihoods will be the one with the greater posterior probability.

Also, it’s about recognising how new evidence alters our prior notions of plausibility – and that this new plausibility is not (!) simply identical with how well the new evidence can be explained … for the old prior-probability gets updated – but not simply discarded. If we tried to convince our roommate that Trump “has” to be the new president because it’s more probable that he and not Hilary would have signed such a declaration, we could only hope that he or she had never heard of Bayes’s theorem before. (Again, does this not sound familiar at all to you?)

So that’s the take-away from this post: Bayes’s theorem offers a wonderful opportunity for dissecting political discourse in the classroom – and it might also improve our perception of scholarly discourses on the biblical texts and the way we construe our own exegetical arguments.

6. For Further Reading:

• On historical methodology and the use and misuse of confirmation theory (Bayesian reasoning) and abduction (inference to the best explanation) see this essay that I wrote together with Theresa Heilig.
• For a demonstration that we more often disregard the methodological principles that can be developed on the basis of Bayes’s theorem (but no doubt also accepted without ever consulting mathematical expressions), see my book Paul’s Triumph. For more information, see here. For a recent review in RBL, see here.
• My very first attempt of dealing with Hays’s criteria from a Bayesian perspective can be read here fore free.
• For an example on how exegetical arguments follow Bayesian lines of thought – and diverge from it sometimes – see my recent article (also available for free here) on the Antioch incident and the NPP (even though I have to add that I would put some things differently now; the article was in the editorial process for several years).
• Some years ago I also wrote an article for the Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie, in which I demonstrate that a variation of the Intelligent Design-argument as it is common in the German sphere has to be judged incomplete against the backdrop of Bayes’s theorem. You can read the article (in German) for free here. Some of the considerations can also be applied to the analysis of discourse among biblical scholars.

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Christoph Heilig is the author of Hidden Criticism? (Fortress, 2017) and Paul’s Triumph (Peeters, 2017).

This research has recently received the Mercator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Additionally, he has co-edited (with J. Thomas Hewitt and Michael F. Bird) God and the Faithfulness of Paul: A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N. T. Wright (Fortress, 2017). 

In his most recent – and voluminous – project, which has just been completed, he discusses the importance of “stories” and “narrative substructures” for understanding Paul’s letters.

Two years ago I wrote a little note on the occasion of the super bowl in order to promote a book of mine. It begins with the sentence:
“I have never seen a Super Bowl game in my whole life.” This statement is still true today – and probably very shocking for my American friends. With this effect in mind and still some copies of my book available, I decided to repost the text here on this blog.

I have never seen a Super Bowl game in my whole life. I have only a vague idea what kind of sport it involves and what the players have to do in order to win. Moreover, I had never heard of the “Super Bowl parade” until I read about it in George Guthrie’s Commentary on Second Corinthians in his analysis of Paul’s use of the verb θριαμβεύω in 2 Cor 2:14:

Writers of ancient Greco-Roman literature record over three hundred such processions, and depictions occur in paintings and plays and on coins, cups, arches, statues, medaillons, and columns of the era …, demonstrating that the pompa triumphalis was part of the cultural fabric of the time. This was, to draw an analogy from the American context, the Super Bowl parade of the Greco-Roman world. Thus the imagery as used by Paul was widely recognized in first-century Corinth and serves as a potent word picture.

If I – not an American to be sure, but still quite close to American culture due to social media – had no familiarity with this parade, can we really assume that, as Scott Hafemann puts it with regard to the Roman counterpart “everybody in the Roman empire knew about these parades”? We guys in the east are sometimes slow to learn new things …

To be fair, Plutarch also speaks of “one triumph meeting the other” (Mor. 323F). And the 320 triumphs Orosius (Hist. 7.9.8) mentions constitute an impressive number indeed.

However, the distribution over time is by no means equal: In the decade between 260 and 251 BCE twelve (!) triumphal processions took place in Rome … in 71 BCE even four in a single year! By contrast, from 19 BCE onwards, only the Roman emperor himself and his family enjoyed this privilege.

So how many triumphal processions led a Roman emperor (i.e., excluding triumphs by other members of the imperatorial family and smaller processions, so called ovations) did take place during Paul’s lifetime? What’s your guess?

The answer is: ONE.

Now, this seems to be quite an important observations. Does the fact alone that in some triumphal processions in the distant past captives had been executed justify Hafemann’s thesis that Paul imagines himself as being “led to death”? And is it even plausible that Paul is thinking about the Roman ritual at all? For if the triumphus was not an event as frequent as the Super Bowl parade, this might mean, after all, that when Paul uses the word θριαμβεύω he might have a totally different scene in mind? Maybe a pagan epiphany procession? After all, the God Dionysos had the by-name θρίαμβος (also the Greek translation of Latin triumphus). Or perhaps Paul used that verb to refer to YHWH’s eschatological victory celebration? Or what if the verb had already lost association with the idea of a procession of any kind at that time? (After all, when we use “to triumph” as a synonym for “to conquer” in English, we are also not thinking about a procession celebrating a victory … )

Or, perhaps Paul uses θριαμβεύω precisely because he has this single triumphal procession in mind that had taken place only a few years before he wrote his second (canonical) letter to the Corinthians? It seems at least prudent to test this possibility if the other options are not plausible. This is particularly true given the astonishing fact that almost no commentary even mentions this procession by Claudius (let alone refers to it as the background of 2 Cor 2:14).

Hence, we have to answer the following questions: Is there any evidence that Paul might have heard anything about this specific event? And if he really has this specific incident in mind, what does this imply for the function of the metaphor in his communication with the Corinthians and for his contribution to contemporary discourses on the Emperor Claudius?

If you want to read more on this, see here.

Update from 2019: Note that Guthrie and I discuss this matter a little bit further under the original Facebook note.

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Christoph Heilig is the author of Hidden Criticism? (Fortress, 2017) and Paul’s Triumph (Peeters, 2017). This research has recently received the Mercator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Additionally, he has co-edited (with J. Thomas Hewitt and Michael F. Bird) God and the Faithfulness of Paul: A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N. T. Wright (Fortress, 2017). In his most recent – and voluminous – project, which has just been completed, he discusses the importance of “stories” and “narrative substructures” for understanding Paul’s letters.

Greetings to those who are currently at the annual SBL meeting in Denver!
Since Theresa and I are not there ourselves, I thought I should at least write a blogpost and point you to some of the books by members of our peer mentoring group (and by Prof. Frey) from 2017 and 2018 that you should have in your case when leaving …

Let me begin with some unashamed self-promotion: I have written on my books Hidden Criticism? and Paul’s Triumph on this blog before. This combined work on the Roman Empire as context of the letters of Paul has recently won the Mercator Award in Social Sciences and the Humanities. If this is a reason for you to take a look, you should visit the booth of Mohr Siebeck and/or Fortress for the first and the one of Peeters for the second volume. When you pick up your copy of Hidden Criticism? from Fortress, make sure you also get a copy of God and the Faithfulness of Paul that I co-edited. It’s really cheap and a must-have if you are interested at all in Pauline studies. Don’t take it from my – buy the book and see for yourself!

My name is also, though in smaller print of course, on The Glory of the Crucified One: Theology and Christology in the Fourth Gospel from Baylor. It’s a collection of groundbreaking essays on Gospel of John by Prof. Frey, translated by Wayne Coppins with my assistance. (There is a whole session on this publication today!) If you don’t do things by halves, make sure you also get the now completed commentary on Luke by Michael Wolter in the same series (edited by Coppins and Gathercole) and also the just released Yale Shaffer lectures by Frey and a translation of his commentary on 2 Peter/Jude.

If you want to read some recent dissertations by junior scholars who are associated with our group, you should arrange enough time at the Mohr Siebeck booth. The most recent publication is the Tübingen dissertation by Jan Rüggemeier on the Poetik der markinischen Christologie, which has won the Armin Schmitt award. Also, you should of course check out the Jordash Kiffiak’s big book on the Responses in the Miracle Stories of the Gospels, which has been introduced to readers of this blog in a two-part series (see here and here) by the author and which has already received an enthusiastic reception by senior experts in the field. The same holds true for Monika Götte’s work on conceptions of the origin of evil. For Friederike Kunath’s thesis on the preexistence of Jesus in the Gospel of John, you have to make a little detour to the de Gruyter booth, but it is certainly worth it as you can see from this succinct summary by the author.

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Christoph Heilig is the author of Hidden Criticism? (Fortress, 2017) and Paul’s Triumph (Peeters, 2017). This research has recently received the Mercator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Additionally, he has co-edited (with J. Thomas Hewitt and Michael F. Bird) God and the Faithfulness of Paul: A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N. T. Wright (Fortress, 2017). In his most recent project, which has just been completed, he discusses the importance of “stories” and “narrative substructures” for understanding Paul’s letters.

 

The following interview was first published on Mike Bird’s blog.

Professor Jōrg Frey is Professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Zurich and is the author The Letter of Jude and the Second Letter of Peter: A Theological Commentary (trans Kathleen Ess; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018).

Jude and 2 Peter are much neglected letters, and you’ve written a distinctly theological commentary on them, so what would you say is the theological mileage or theological benefits from reading Jude and 2 Peter?

Well, my commentary is a full philological, historical, and theological commentary. But it is true, Jude and 2 Peter have always been in the shadow of the more important NT writings, such as the Gospels, the Pauline epistles or also 1 Peter. Their contribution to Christian doctrine has only been marginal, and there has been a lot of suspicion about them since antiquity. So my interest is indeed to show their qualities, in language, intellectual discourse, and spiritual intention – while not neglecting the theological and hermeneutical problems they pose.

But it is important to look at each writing separately. Although they are connected by literary dependence, as 2 Peter utilizes Jude, they address different situations and problems, and also the respective opponents are quite different. The theological benefit from reading these texts is, that we cannot avoid to see the ambivalenses of those texts (which is, in some way, a very realistic reading): We must try to reconstruct the in the position of the respective opponents and how the two authors react (quite differently) to the challenges of their time.

So let’s first have a look at Jude. It a very short text, only slightly longer than 2 and 3 John. For long, it was considered a shortening of 2 Peter (thus, e.g., by  Martin Luther), thus being superfluous in the canon. Its alleged author is an otherwise almost unknown figure. Traditionally it was attributed to the “apostle” Judas son of Alphaeus, and only in modernity (since J. G. Herder), it is considered that the Jude meant here is the brother of James, thus a brother of Jesus. So, Jude is, in fact, a “Second James”. But most readers could not find any particularly important theological message in Jude. It was considered to be an expression of “early catholicism”, i.e. a decline from the original (Pauline) faith. Many readers were, instead, unhappy with a letter that is almost totally a fierce polemics against some “heretics“ the author considers damned to hell. This makes it difficult to be considered by some as an expression of a really Christian spirit.

In my commentary, I have tried to demonstrate that Jude is not just negatively focused on the polemics but also displays a pastoral interest in the various categories of community members.  Here, in v. 22-23, we find aspects of spiritual concern and of the spiritual practice in the community. So there is not only the early catholic idea of “faith according to the tradition” (cf. Jude 3), but there is also a lively interest in the addressees to be saved from what the author thinks is dangerous, and Jude 20-21 is a brief instruction for spiritual life.

There are many more interesting aspects in Jude. The way it utilizes Jewish haggadic traditions about the Watchers, Sodom and Gomorrah, Balaam, or Cain, and, in particular, the unique usage of 1 Enoch as Scripture, and also of other Jewish angel stories (Jude 9)

But there are also problems: The author is fond of angels and angel stories. And if people seem to disrespect the angels and the world order traditionally connected with them, he expects the worst things. Such people who have no respect at all, will also commit every evil deed – and there we have many standard polemical insults which are probably much exaggerated if there is any truth in them. And of course, he can take from Enoch (and only from there) the view that those angelic beings will be kept in a dark prison (as already the watcher angels are kept) for final destruction at the last judgment. A very dark, threatening scenario, considered that his opponents possibly held a view as expressed in Rom 8:38-9 that no kind of principalities, powers, angels or rulers can separate us anymore from the love of God in Christ, or Col 2:8 and 2:18 that angels and cosmic powers are not to be worshipped or particularly considered, since the power of the kingdom is with Christ. If this is the dispute – within the biblical canon – we have to decide, theologically, whether Jude’s high regard for the angels, and his polemic against all who do not follow him, is a problematic view.

The problems are even more substantial if we see what the author of Jude does. He is a divider. He wants the addressees to separate themselves from the ‘others’ who are apparently part of the community and their meals. But the reason for dividing is probably over a very special teaching. However, such processes often happen in faith communities even today. So if we reconstruct the struggle between Jude and his opponents we can also learn how not to act in a faith community.

Where did the letter from Jude originate? Who were the false teachers that the letter of Jude denounces, are they a specific group, or a generalized picture of impiety and wickedness?

In my view, the letter originates from opposition to the Pauline and Deuteropauline tradition, especially in response to criticism of the veneration of angels, as we have it in Colossians. Possibly the opponents (or the community members the author wants to denigrate as opponents) held views in the Pauline and post-Pauline tradition that critiqued angel veneration. For the opponents, “faith” (that has already become traditional), “freedom,” and “spirit” may be important words for them. But they are now considered disrespectful, denying the divinely installed world order – and thus, in the eyes of the author, they do the same blasphemy as the Watchers did (Gen 6:1-4; 1 Enoch 6-9), or the Sodomites … – and they will share their fate in judgment.

To see this, however, a critical reading is necessary that tries to distinguish between standard polemics and the issues actually at stake. As we can see from comparisons with other polemical letters, many charges of sexual impurity, boasting, deceitfulness etc. are directed against every group of heretics, by NT authors, church fathers, but also in philosophy against Epicureans, or other deviant groups. So it is doubtful whether all these charges are true or whether they are, as is often the case, derived from the imagination of the accuser who images what immoral people might do. The clearest issue – maybe the only clear one for my mind – is the charge of disrespecting angelic beings (Jude 8-9). Here is the most vibrant “dogmatic” issue which causes the author to polemicize against the group of “some” who seem to be hitherto members of the community of Jesus followers participating in the community meal and who might have considered themselves as true Christians.

To locate and date the letter is not easy. I suppose from the theological topics that it comes from Asia Minor where the Pauline tradition (and Colossians) is located, maybe somewhere at the end of the 1st or the beginning of the 2nd century.

There is no hint that the letter was written by a Semitic native speaker. It is written in very elaborate Greek. Thus, the author construction is pseudonymous. There is also no hint at all that the addressees knew the real Jude, brother of James and Jesus or were somewhat linked to his mission. We know about this person only from the notes about Jesus’s siblings in the Synoptics, and then, from an episode from Hegesippus, reported in Eusebius’s church history about Jude’s grandsons somewhere in Galilee, who were accused of ‘Messianic’ claims and reportedly brought to emperor Domitian who dismissed them in contempt. But if, at the end of the 1st century, at that time, his grandsons are in view, their grandfather must be already a figure of the past. So this Jude is virtually an unknown figure, and the authorial fiction is not elaborated beyond verse 1.

Actually, the authority in Jude 1 is created by the relation to James. So, Jude is, in fact, a Second James – and this fits into a theological position which is critical of or opposed to the Pauline tradition.

Does Jude regard 1 Enoch as Scripture?

Certainly, he does, regardless of which textual form was available to him. Jude 1:14-5 regards Enoch as a prophet and quotes 1 Enoch 1:9, notably the only Scriptural quotation in Jude.

But this is only strange for us. In the first two or three centuries, Enoch was an authority for many Jesus followers, as there is talk about the ‘Son of Man’ (in the Parables), and a lot of apocalyptic stuff. And from the Qumran library, we have so many Enochic manuscripts that it is clear, Enoch had a great authority in some (not all) Jewish groups.

At the end of the 2nd century, Tertullian still keeps Enoch in high respect. Only since Christians learned that the Jews (i.e. the Rabbinic restitution of Judaism after 70 CE) in their focus on the Hebrew tradition no more accepted Enoch as an authority, Christians also rejected it, because now it was useless for debates with Jews. And of course it did not fit the Christological views developed in the 3rd and 4th century, so Enoch was forgotten in Byzantine Christianity and only transmitted in Ethiopia, where it is part of the Bible still today. So, Jude provides us a glimpse into the difficult history of the Biblical canon.

What does Jude mean by “salvation”?

Salvation, for Jude, is to be considered to be found in true faith and blameless at the day of judgment. This is also a point where Jude (maybe in the line of James) differs from Paul. Of course, the addressees are chosen by God and Christ, but their faith is quasi status on probation, and final salvation will only be granted if the faith and conduct will be kept through the temptations until the end. You can hope to be saved in the end, but you can never be sure. Here, Jude is closer to Matthew 25 than to Paul (cf. Rom 5:1 or Rom 8:38-9) and John (cf. John 5:24-5; 10:28 etc.). And again it is interesting that there are different teachings within the canon, and finally I – as a theologian and when preaching – have to come to a sound verdict which one is stronger, or with which view I can live and die. And here, I am with Paul and John, not with Jude!

2 Peter is a letter widely regarded as pseudepigraphical, but the dating of the letter remains a puzzle. Richard Bauckham argued that the Apocalypse of Peter was dependent upon 2 Peter, enabling him to date 2 Peter in the 80s. However, Wolfgang Grünstäudl has argued that the relationship is the reverse, 2 Peter is dependent upon the Apocalypse of Peter! What makes you date 2 Peter to the second century?

Of course, this is a very important issue. First of all, I should again stress that we have to consider each letter separately. And even if 2 Peter used Jude, it is in a different situation. Probably the audience of 2 Peter was not supposed to know Jude, so the usage did not evoke suspicion.

But now, the chronology. I do not generally prefer late dates for NT writings. I keep, e.g., Luke-Acts in the period between 80 and 90. But on the other hand, the general tendency of conservatives to date writings as early as possible is also unrealistic and often guided by some wishful thinking. So if 2 Peter adopts Jude (already in a different situation), if 2 Peter also refers to 1 Peter as an already accepted writing (2 Pet 3:1), if it furthermore presupposes a collection of Pauline epistles which the author consideres somewhat complete (2 Pet 3:15-6: “in all his letters”), we are already well in the second century. Bauckham’s attempt to locate 2 Peter still around 80 CE was the last attempt of a conservative to date it as early as possible, all others have only repeated his arguments but added no further plausibility, but his presupposition of a Petrine school in Rome (including 1-2 Clement) is a bold construction that has been questioned and, in my view falsified, so there is no further link to the Roman context or a living memory in Rome.

The problem is, thus, the location, and Grünstäudl’s groundbreaking thesis is, primarily, about the location of 2 Peter which is, finally, located not in Rome, nor in Asia Minor, but in Alexandria. This is in accord with new scholarship on the (very strange) Apocalypse of Peter which seems to originate also in Egypt or Alexandria. There is mention of an “Acherusian Lake”,  strange angel names. and, very important, the motif of a total conflagration of the world in fire which is alien to Jewish tradition (as fire in judgment punishes the wicked but never burns the whole universe), a Stoic tradition which in Judaism is only adopted in the Sibylline Oracles. Apart from the Apoc. Pet., we know of another Petrine writing from Egypt, the “Kerygma of Peter” (with a very Gentile Christian teaching of Peter) which is used as a source by Clement of Alexandria. So if there was a “Petrine Discourse”, or the negotiation about what the figure of Peter stands for, in Alexandria (rather than in Rome), how could 2 Peter fit in there?

Now there is indeed the question what is first, the (canonical) 2 Peter or the (non-canonical) Apoc. Pet.? Of course, we are used to the idea that canonical writings are prior to non-canonical writings. But again, things are complicated. The Apoc. Pet. was very popular in the second century, and even Canon Muratori or Muratorian fragment (which I would still date at the end of the second century) mentions it next to the Apocalypse of John – so there were 2 apocalypses considered (at least by some authors) to be authoritative. We can be happy that the Apoc. Pet. was finally not adopted, as it is a cruel text with its descriptions of punishments etc., but that was what people liked to read (from the Odyssey until Dante’s “inferno”, and we could continue this until today).

The argument about priority is complicated, also due to the fact that the Apoc. Pet. is fully available only in the Ethiopic text. The Greek fragment from a codex of the 6^th century is not very reliable, and only a few papyrus fragments from Vienna and elsewhere can help clarify the text as a few points.

There are some small but telling parallels in the description of the Transfiguration  (2 Pet 1:16-18) where 2 Peter differs from Matthew just in those aspects where there are parallels in the Apoc. Pet. Thus, 2 Peter might be influenced from another (indeed very different) description of the transfiguration.  There is also a strong analogy in the adoption of the motif of the conflagration (Apoc. Pet. 4-5; cf. 2 Pet 3:7, 10, 12). The observation that the argument in 2 Pet 3 (defending the hope for the Parousia) is so un-christological has stunned interpreters. Bauckham, therefore, speculated about unknown Jewish traditions from the lost book of Eldad and Modad, but this is completely speculative. But if we consider the pattern in the Apoc. Pet., we can see that (on the Day of God), there is first a burning of the whole world, and then (in ch. 6.) Christ appears to enact the judgment. So the burning, the conflagration is yet unrelated to Christ. This could explain the text in 2 Pet 3 (and also the very difficult textual problem in 3:10 where the new Nestle-Aland edition and ECM have a totally unnecessary conjecture.

But the most telling point is, probably, the mention of Peter’s death or martyrdom. In Apoc. Pet. 14:4 (text according to the Vienna fragment), Peter is warned of his martyrdom in Rome, and from this event (under Nero), the text seems to develop some hope for the beginning of eschatological events: “Therefore, Peter, I have revealed and presented everything to you. And go into the city that rules over the west and drink the cup that I have promised you, in the hand of the so in Hades, so that his destruction might have a beginning …” With Peter’s martyrdom in Rome, the destruction of Nero or the evil power should begin! This is a very strange ‘dated’ eschatological announcement of time (which must become questionable, of course, if time passes and nothing happens).

I think this can explain the complaint about the “scoffers” in 2 Pet 3:4 that “the fathers have died” and the world remains at it is, so the promise of the Parousia, of eschatological fulfilment is empty. Could these scoffers possibly react to a somewhat naïve eschatological expectation, spread under the name of Peter in the Apoc. Pet.?  But now, if Peter was already dead since decades, such a view (and with it the whole eschatological expectation) appeared questionable. In my view, this would be a plausible scenario for an author who could now write Peter’s “authentic” testament, the “real story” what Jesus had foretold him about his death (2 Pet 1:12-15) but also reject the critical scepticism and defend the hope for the parousia and the new world. There he could adopt aspects from the Apoc. Pet. (e.g. the conflagration) but correct the link with the date of Peter’s martyrdom, and draw a perspective in which a day can be thousand years (2 Pet 3:8-10). So, there is no “delay” of the Parousia, but it comes when it comes according to the divine timetable.

I think such a reconstruction can explain the rationale of the writing of 2 Peter, the debate on eschatology in 2 Pet 3 and the use of the figure of Peter for authenticating quite different teachings in the second century.

If 2 Peter is second century, then who are the opponents denounced in the letter?

The opponents (called “scoffers”) were probably sceptics with regard to eschatology. But as 2 Peter seems to draw on some philosophical ideas about “the eternity of the world”, arguing for the possibility of a final destruction, they seem to be rather educated people. Maybe we can conclude from the interesting passage mentioning “our dear brother Paul” that they also read Pauline epistles and referred to them. But now, “Peter” (i.e. the author of 2 Peter) says: “Regardless what you read from the Pauline epistles, I know that Paul and I are in consensus, so I know what the real meaning of Paul’s letters is.” This quite bold statement in some way prefigures in some manner what Peter later was used for: the authoritative voice of Catholicism: “Rome has spoken and the case is finished.” Thus, we get again insights into a vivid discussion on the meaning of Paul’s letters and (as in Jude) on the issue of salvation and judgment, freedom and ethics, or even “faith and works”. 2 Peter is, in my view, the last writing in the chain James – Jude – 2 Peter, in critical distance against Pauline tradition and, thus, authorized by another figure whose authority was unquestionable: Peter.

Should 2 Peter be considered as part of the Testament genre?

The testament genre is, of course a very wide genre, that consists of quite different texts – from the Jewish Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (or even Deuteronomy as last words of Moses) through the Johannine Farewell Discourses until 2 Timothy and also 2 Peter. But 2 Pet 1:12-15 clearly shows the image of Peter now phrasing his last and definitive teaching for the communities after his death. So, the testamentary character is clear.

What does 2 Pet 3.10-12 contribute to ecological ethics?

Interesting question. Should we say, if the whole world will burn in the fire of the conflagration, we should not care for our world or environment? That would certainly be a wrong conclusion from 2 Pet 3 (or also Rev 21:1), and in Romans 8 we read perhaps more moving ideas about the suffering of the creature and the created world. Perhaps 2 Peter shows how a Christian author very competently enters philosophical debates about cosmology and the possibility of change and destruction. He does not simply adopt the philosophical theories (i.e. the Stoic view of an infinite sequence of destructions and recreations) but corrects them from his biblical perspective: There are only three worlds, the antedeluvial world, the present world, and the new world we hope for in which justice will prevail.

Maybe this is the most advanced discourse between biblical tradition and philosophical learning in the NT. I think, this should inspire us not to remain in Christian closed circles but openly enter debates, while preserving the hope that is inspired from faith in Christ.

Do you see any resonance between Jude/2 Peter and the Pauline and Johannine corpora?

With the Johannine corpus, there are very few overlaps. If 2 Peter knew John, he did not use it, nor draw on its topics. Given the importance of the Spirit in John (and Paul), it is striking that 2 Peter never mentions the Spirit as a present reality in the communities. Its function is limited, instead, to inspiring the prophetic writings. Maybe, this is already a critical reaction to other groups in early Christianity.

As already stated above, there is a clear resonance of Pauline tradition which is referred to explicitly in 2 Peter but also implicitly in Jude. For both authors, Paul as an advocate of “freedom” seems to be provokingly liberal (or, possibly, he is misunderstood and taken as a legitimation for some kind of libertinism). Of course, the situation is different: Where Paul deals with the issues of the Jewish Law, these issues are now far away. So the discussion on freedom and Christian ethics has changed. For 2 Peter (1:5-11), faith has to create virtues, a “Christian” lifestyle, in order to finally provide salvation.  Is this “legalism”? A backdrop into a position “faith not without works” (cf. James 2)?  Is such a view legitimate, or even necessary, in a different situation? Or is it “early catholicism”, a betrayal of Paul? These discussions have to be continued in view of the whole of the NT canon, with its varieties, and there we have to look for the place and legacy of writings of the third generation, but also for preserving the provocative and liberating force of Pauline theology.

 

There are currently many hilarious memes on missing negations in our Facebook timelines. But for me personally, this topic is associated with a frustrating experience I had recently. The memories are still painful. It’s the nightmare of any scholar. After having read my Hidden Criticism?, Larry Hurtado wrote me a very kind email – with one devastating observation. He pointed out that in the concluding sentence of the book, I had written (p. 160):

 “Despite the associated problems, we should, therefore, avoid this complex of questions [i.e., whether Paul critisized the Roman Empire in the subtext of his letters]  …”

Of course, I meant “we should NOT”!

Some might wonder whether I am now sympathetic with Trump’s explanation that he struggled with the “double negative” during the Helsinki press conference. And indeed, one might expect that in light of this horrendous blunder I have lost any trust in successful and reliable communication.

Fortunately, when the realisation of my mistake hit me, I had already written on ambiguous  negations in “Paul’s Triumph” (pp. 21-22). Thus, I knew that in everyday situations contextual factors already point us to the meaning that a speaker intends and that missing (and additional) negations are, therefore, most often no problem at all. (In fact, there are missing and additional negations in important literary works that have been overlooked by critics for centuries!)

And, in the end, my own experience with Hidden Criticism confirms this: I’ve never seen my book cited as evidence for why we should immediately drop the whole counter-imperial approach! And even if my ideas about how many careful readers my book might have had are probably far too optimistic, it is telling that it took two years after the publication that somebody even noticed the issue (and once having noticed it, Larry Hurtado was, of course, certain that I had forgotten a “not” in that sentence).

So what are we supposed to do with Trump’s claim in light of our own painfully obvious fallibility? Are we indeed willing to seriously consider his explanation? In what follows, I will do something that so far doesn’t seem to be a typical reaction: I will, despite brevity, seriously consider the possibility that he might be telling the truth and explore how one might decide whether or not this is actually the case.

Often, the immediate context of an utterance already clarifies the discourse meaning because it creates (in terms of Bayesian confirmation theory) a strong “prior-probability” for one of several theoretically possible meanings. The full sentence in my book reads:

“Despite the associated problems, we should therefore, avoid this complex of questions [despite its problems] but tackle it in the most methodologically sound way possible.

Note three things: First, the text I’ve but in brackets is confusing for the reader and thus already indicates that some corruption of the text might have occurred here at the final stage of copyediting (it should go without saying that this happened after my good friend Wayne Coppins had read through the manuscript). This sentence is, thus, actually quite typical for what oral communication looks like, a form of communication where corrections, additions, repetitions etc. are the rule. (For more on this, see Gansel and Jürgens, Textlinguistik and Textgrammatik [3^rd ed., 2009], chapter 6). Second, note what is said immediately before: “There is a risk of overinterpreting parallels. But the risk of overlooking important elements of Pauline thought by rejecting such a research project altogether is equally real.” The whole corrupted sentence thus is clearly intended (“therefore”!) as in inference from the description of this situation. (Cf. Heinrich von Siebenthal, Griechische Grammatik zum Neuen Testament, §334 and Duden §1787-1788.) And the “Despite”-phrase communicates a concessive idea to that conclusion that picks up – by means of “associated problems” – the earlier mentioned “risk of overinterpreting” – i.e. a possible argument for NOT continuing the research program. Third, and perhaps most importantly, note that the “but” introduces an adversative statement. My comment on the future for our discipline thus follows a Negativum-POSITIVUM-structure (on this, see Heinrich von Siebenthal, Griechische Grammatik zum Neuen Testament, §338 and Duden §1793-1799): one complex of events is referred to by both stating it explicitly and (as a supportive statement) by also mentioning the counterfactual alternative (narratologists call this “disnarrating” of events).

Especially with the third observation in mind, I would encourage you to now take a look at Trump’s full statement:

“So let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the democratic national committee? I’ve been wondering that. I’ve been asking that for months and months and I’ve been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know, where is the server and what is the server saying? With that being said, all I can do is ask the question. My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others and said they think it’s Russia.

I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have confidence in both parties. I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? 33,000 emails gone — just gone. I think in Russia they wouldn’t be gone so easily. I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails. So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that president Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. And what he did is an incredible offer. He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people. I think that’s an incredible offer. Okay thank you.”

Pretend for a moment that the word “would” were missing from the text and ask yourself: to which meaning does the context point and, thus, what word would you expect at that place? Perhaps this already clarifies the issue for you… (check out Stephen Colbert’s methodologically sound analysis).

But perhaps you will also notice just how difficult it is to carry through a similar discourse analysis of these sentences. I personally have real problems understanding the intended semantic structure indicated by the two “but” clauses– even though the terms used in both cases (“server” and “confidence” and “both parties”) should (!) in theory give us enough “thematic” indications to understand the coherence of the text (cf., e.g., Heinrich von Siebenthal, GGNT, § 301 for a NT example and Gansel/Jürgens, Textlinguistik and Textgrammatik, pp. 40-42 in general). To be sure, this presupposes that there is indeed a coherent communicative intention behind the utterance as a whole (and even though this might surprise some, I think that there are indeed good text-linguistic reasons for maintaining this also in this case).

What then are we supposed to do in order to clarify the intended semantic-pragmatic structure of Trump’s statements, given that the connectors in the immediate literary context might not offer enough contextual clues for at least some of us?

In the case of my problematic sentence in Hidden Criticism, I think that, even without the factors I’ve mentioned already, the broader context would probably be sufficient for you to understand my intent. I am referring to things like the general line of argument of my book, paratextual factors such as the cover text, my statements in presentations etc. In Trump’s case this would include earlier statements on Russian meddling with the election on the one hand and on the reliability of the US intelligence services on the other hand.

And perhaps that’s what makes it so difficult to assess Trump’s statements as we normally decode contributions to everyday communications – and what has caused some political experts to exclaim in frustration that they know that Trump is lying but that they can’t prove it.

Note what I say in Paul’s Triumph (p. 22) in the context of describing the methodology of resolving the meaning of statements with problematic (here: additional) negations:

“If we do not know … the stance of a person on a specific issue, and he or she inserts an additional negation in an utterance, this will inevitably lead to a misunderstanding. Consider, for example, the utterance: ‘Nobody with any sense isn’t going.’ If a friend says this with regard to a party of which we know that he or she does not like it, we will even understand this Statement as indicating that reasonable people do not go there. However, if we are not familiar with the speaker (i.e., we have no syntagmatic/contextual indications) we will conclude that the person is affirming the appeal of that event, since the double negation is an appropriate choice for expressing this thought.”

I’ll say it with a wonderful German idiom: Ich denke, genau hier liegt der Hund begraben.

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Christoph Heilig is the author of Hidden Criticism? (Fortress, 2017) and Paul’s Triumph (Peeters, 2017). This research has recently received the Mercator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Additionally, he has co-edited (with J. Thomas Hewitt and Michael F. Bird) God and the Faithfulness of Paul: A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N. T. Wright (Fortress, 2017). In his most recent project, he discusses the importance of “stories” and “narrative substructures” for understanding Paul’s letters.