Chair: Dr Angus Paddison
Session 1:
'Reading NT Texts: a Surprising Discovery; a New Methodology'
The NT 'hermeneut' is initially challenged to read a book or letter as the writer intended; only when he/she can do this can he/she begin to interpret it accurately. The first readers had the original texts and the technical skills to help them meet this reading challenge. All later readers (since the third century?), lacking the original texts and the necessary disciplines, have been failing the challenge.
The surprise, then, is to discover important literary features that have been sitting unnoticed in the NT all along, that can help us 'see' the original texts today and teach us the reading skills we have been lacking. All twenty-seven texts, for example, disclose consistent use of a three-part writing style: in the minutest details; in the arrangements of major components; and at every literary level in between. Also, each of the twenty-seven texts discloses an illuminating plan, or structure.
I will demonstrate how 'Parsing', with Rhetorical Analysis, helps us:
1) identify the writers' divisions and sub-divisions of all twenty-seven texts;
2) define books and letters in terms of their structures; and, as a consequence,
3) read and interpret the texts as the writers intended/expected/wanted us to.
'The intolerable wrestle with words and meanings': John 21, T.S. Eliot and the sense of an ending'
The writer of John's Gospel, T.S. Eliot and the literary critic Frank Kermode all have much to say about the endings of things. This paper considers the ways in which a reading of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets illuminates the ending of John's Gospel, when both are approached from a literary critical perspective. How do fictions of ends endow the interval between them and fictions of beginnings with meaning?
Session 2:
'Tracing Tricksters: Creation and Creativity in John'
This paper displays anthropological accounts of tricksters from groups as diverse as West African tribes to Winnebago Indians alongside John's presentation of Jesus. Johannine irony, joking and illusion is accordingly perceived in a somewhat different light.
'The Kingdom' as Sacred Space: Issues for Interpretation'
Because it is not fully realised in the present, physical world, the concept of 'the kingdom' utilised by the Historical Jesus (and characteristic of his message) has defied definition as a space even though it is interpreted in later contexts (whether labelled apocalyptic, chiliastic, or millenarian) as an expected future reality. Recently, Halvor Moxnes has understood the kingdom as an 'imagined place,' visualised as a household. His work constitutes an important application of spatial theory to ancient texts, focussing on the transformation of the present for Jesus and his followers through the articulation of a new space. Certainly, the kingdom brings challenges in the present, yet the future aspect of the kingdom raises questions for interpreting the kingdom spatially. The paper will consider anthropological definitions of sacred space as well as some recent applications of critical spatial theory to biblical texts, with a view to outlining an interpretative strategy for understanding and reading biblical spaces, using the kingdom as a challenging test case.
Session 3 (Joint with NT: Use and Influence):
'Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach: Exegesis and Propaganda in late 15th and early 16th century illustrations of the Book of Revelation'
This paper will compare and contrast Albrecht Dürer's and Lucas Cranach's approach to the Apocalypse through their woodcut images of 1498 and 1522 respectively. While Dürer's Apocalypse has been studied extensively by art historians and Cranach's by Reformation historians, very little has been written on the way in which their respective series of images function as interpretations of the Apocalypse. I will argue that Dürer's artistic interpretation belongs to the History of Exegesis of the Apocalypse. While his primary purpose was undoubtedly an aesthetic one, close reading of his dramatic images reveals a sophisticated understanding of the text as well as a concerted effort to allow the Apocalypse its own voice through the medium of the image. By contrast, Cranach's images, created especially for Luther's 1522 version of the New Testament, can be said to serve the Protestant requirements for literalism and anti-papalism first and the Apocalypse second: the voice of the Apocalypse is stifled. For these reasons I will argue that Cranach's images belong to a separate category of interpretation which we might call the History of the Use of the Apocalypse.