REFLECTION- Rhetoric and Ethic: Introduction

This is the beginning of a series of reflections based upon my reading of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's book Rhetoric and Ethic (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999). Schüssler Fiorenza is a New Testament scholar who has been foundational for feminist biblical studies. Each reflection will be based upon a chapter of the book and will generally start with a quotation from which the bulk of my thoughts will spring. Hopefully, my thoughts will be relevant and provoking without having read the book; but if you are interested further, you should pick up this book or another book by Schüssler Fiorenza (In Memory of Her is an excellent starting point).

"If biblical studies were to change into a public discourse it would not seek just to describe and understand but to change and transform the unjust situation of wo/men's religious and academic silencing marginalization, and exploitation. Biblical studies would then be able to acknowledge openly its political function rather than to continue to hide behind a value-neutral and disinterested scientistic ethos of scholarship." (Schüssler Fiorenza, p.8)

Perhaps those of us on the margins know it best: interpretation has consequences. How we read a text influences our actions, especially when these texts are viewed as sacred scripture. This is not necessarily shocking news to anyone: in the past hundred years we have witnessed many horrors as the result of dangerous interpretation. And scholarship has certainly learned that it to has to be careful what it says. But, dangerous interpretation is not the only problem with which biblical studies needs to be concerned. The myth that Schüssler Fiorenza identified ten years ago still pervades biblical scholarship today; this myth is that there is a solitary correct interpretation of a text ("what the author really meant") and that with the proper tools we can discover this interpretation.

Does this sound a little like high school chemistry? It should: that's why Schüssler Fiorenza coins the term "scientistic" to describe it. And that's the problem: biblical interpretation cannot be a science. For starters, we are too removed from the time period and the texts we have are so scrambled that it is anyone's guess what the original manuscript actually said. We can make damned good educated guesses, but at the end of the day, we have to admit that we are nowhere near certainty.

Maybe it is possible to actually discover what someone actually wrote and meant two thousand or more years ago. But even if the apostle Paul were to pop in from heaven (or hell...) and tell us exactly what he meant in all his letters (and which ones he actually wrote), this would not change the fact that the Bible has a life of its own. Trying to leave biblical interpretation under the terms of the first century is impossible because too many people still find these texts to have relevance and meaning to their lives today. Claiming historical authenticity is not a method of exact interpretation: it is an attempt to fortify one's interpretation in the past in order to blockade responsibility for the consequences of an interpretation.

The truth is that everyone approaches textual interpretation with a different background and point of view: our experience informs how we read a text. As a gay man, I read the Bible differently from someone else, be s/he heterosexual, transgender, lesbian, etc. Too often, the "most historically accurate" reading of a biblical text is truthfully the way a white, educated, Western, heterosexual male would interpret it. What biblical studies must do is realize that there is a plurality of interpretations for any given text, and this is okay. Instead of focusing on whose interpretation is the most accurate (nobody's is), we need to discover what informs each other's approaches, attempt to learn about other backgrounds and reading methods, and seek to examine and critique the consequences of an interpretation. This approach seems much more fruitful than a quest for the holy grail of true textual meaning.

On "Literal" Translation

These days it seems just about impossible to talk about the New Testament, as written in Greek, without somehow ending up in a discussion about what the most "literal" translation of the text would be. Actually, this can be found in discussion of translation outside of the Greek NT: in my last Greek class (classical Greek), we would often cite the "literal" translation of a word or phrase. This terminology is problematic. The problem is that "literal" is becoming synonymous with "accurate" - a translation of the text that is not literal strays too far from what is actually written in the original. Maybe that part isn't such a problem by itself. The problem is when "literal" also comes to mean "word-for-word" (as close as possible). Unfortunately, translation is not an exact science: you cannot plug one word in for another as if decoding a child's cipher (a=1; b=2, etc.).Languages do not develop with the thought "How will this translate?" As a student of Greek, I have come to discover that it is impossible to completely convey the sense of a Greek text in another language. No translation can be perfect: the goal of translation therefore is to give the best approximation of a text in a language that will allow it to be read by a wider audience. It is possible for one translation to be better than another, but it is also possible for two translations to be very different but equally accurate.

Moving back to "literal" translation, meaning a translation that tries to convey the meaning of each word individually. As noted before, this method generally does not produce an accurate sense of the original text when the entire translation is put together as a whole document. However, when an argument is being made, reference is often made to the "literal" translation in order to make a more convincing argument. I have come to prefer a less loaded term for this kind of translation: usually either "hyperliteral" or "over-literal." These emphasize the fact that word-for-word translation produces a very convoluted version of the original text. Using these terms helps to prevent the danger of allowing "literal translation" to imply the more accurate translation.

So, where does this all leave us? Translation is ultimately subjective. There is no such thing as one objective, most-accurate, "literal" translation. This notion must be abandoned. Every translation is subject to the emphasis and concerns of the translator(s). This is crucial to be conscious of, whether one is reading a translation or doing the translating.

Sound Byte: Rabbi Jonathan Magonet

"Sound Bytes" are quick-ish quotations that I come across that seem interesting and relevant for me to share, but I feel they do not require further comments or explanation at the time.

"In 1968 our progressive Jewish youth movement hosted a group of young Czech Jews for a conference near Edinburgh...We studied some Bible texts and they were incredibly good at understanding them, picking up all the nuances very quickly. I was surprised as they had never studied the Bible before. 'It's easy,' they explained. 'You see, in Czechoslovakia, when you read a newspaper, first you read what is written there. Then you say to yourself, "If that is what they have written, what really happened? And if that is what really happened, what are they trying to make us think? And if that it what they are trying to make us think, what should we be thinking instead?" You learn to read between the lines and behind the lines. You learn to read a newspaper as if your life depended upon understanding it--because it does!' Sometimes the same applies to the Bible, you just have to learn how to read."

-Jonathan Magonet, A Rabbi's Bible (London: SCM Press, 1991), 25; as quoted in Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 14.