Scholarship has fashions. In recent years, “reception history” has been in vogue in NT Studies. This is the study of how a NT was received by the early church after the apostles. A fashion can be discerned by the frequency of papers and theses that get written during a given period. In the history of NT scholarship, there have been many fashions. Such passing “trends” leave behind tendencies. They leave behind key ideas that influence scholars at a presuppositional level. In the case of “reception history” the tendency that might be left behind is an influence on what interpretation can be ascribed to the NT text. The argument can be put that if an interpretation proposed today is unrepresented in early church commentary, it is unlikely to be true because people much closer to the events and NT times did not come up with the ideas. Similarly a nuanced interpretation today can be bolstered in scholarly articles with the argument that it has ancient pedigree.
In peace-time, breaking a tendency requires a publishing event or a change in cultural mood. A tendency left behind by the redaction critical fashion of the 1960s was that the Gospel writers wrote for their communities. A common research exercise at the time was to hypothesize about the communities of the evangelists. Terms such as “the Johannine community” or “Markan community” were common-place. This tendency was broken in 1998 with the publication of The Gospels for All Christians.[1] This is the sort of book that needs to be on a Bible student’s shelf and it demonstrates the principle that Gospels have a wider audience than any local community of which the evangelist was a part.
The Christadelphian community is a tertiary writing community. That is, without a professional clergy or Bible college, its writers use the secondary literature of scholars to teach about Bible background. This is not to deny that in and amongst this tertiary writing there is original thinking which has solved exegetical problems in the text. In fact, the doctrinal independence of the community has produced a fund of original lines of exegesis unknown or barely represented in the world of scholarship. However, reliance on scholarship for Bible background needs to recognize its passing fashions.
In closing, a note of irony: the fashion for feminist criticism of the Bible in the 1980s and 1990s has largely dissipated, although it has left its mark in the community. One of the effects of this criticism was to change the style of scholarly articles and university and journal guidelines for the use of the masculine pronoun. Today, more often than not the gender of choice for the implied reader of the scholar is feminine. The reader is a “she” or a “her”, and you will read things like, “The interpretation a reader makes will depend on her background”; sometimes, rarely, an author will use s/he and him/her. The irony in this shift is that articles by male authors (the majority) now give a stronger patriarchal impression precisely because of this shift to the feminine pronoun (they convey the male as a dominant teacher in the church and the female as a subordinate learner). This appearance of patriarchalism is far stronger than in articles, say, from the 1950s which treat the reader as a “he”; rather than follow fashion, a better approach would be to use s/he and him/her for gender neutrality.
[1] R. Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998).
Analysis of the eschatology in 1 Thess 4:13-5:11 and 2 Thess 1:5-2:12