I certainly agree with most of what Ken says, but feel he goes too far
when he says to simply "give up tring to determine the autor's
intention". Every act of communication is between a communicator with a
particular message and an intended audience. Of course, determining the
author's intention is much easier if you ARE the intended audience,
because communicators (anybody who speaks or writes) typically adjust
the form of their message to their audience. And the more context
communicator and receptor have in common the easier will be the
communication.
But I fail to see the purpose of reading Paul if we are not trying to
discover what Paul had to say, some current literary theories
notwithstanding. We don't have access to Paul today. But we don't have
access to losts of people whom we read and understand pretty well. Paul
is further from us in time, culture, world view, etc., etc. Granted.
But that shouldn't, in my view, change our purpose to do all we can to
understand what Paul had to say. One way to get closer to Paul is
precisely (as Ken has said) to immerse ourselves in information about
his day. There may well be things Paul has written that we, from our
perspective, will never fully understand. But that doesn't mean we
should throw up our hand in dispair and quit trying.
If Paul's meaning is simply unreachable, why bother to do all the
background work required in exegesis courses? It is true that as
readers we see a text through a certain pair of eyes and a given series
of life experiences. But that is true --to some degree-- in all
communication. And yet we manage to communicate. In modern
communication, people from vastly different cultures and with profoundly
different sets of assumtions about the world and the universe
communicate. Sometimes problems arise and there are misunderstandings.
But we keep on trying and often do quite well.
> On the one hand, study of the culture and history as best available
> (once we can dcecide which texts are historical and what that means)
> provide asistance in bracketing out what the origianl implied and real
> audience of a NT text would not have seen. To use a trivial example,
> your common sense knowledge of the 1st century should tell you that the
> people who have interpreted the locusts in Revelation as Phantom jets
> (in the late 60's), Huey attack copters (in the early 70's) and the like
> are being wildly anachronistic. The more one knows about 1st century
> Mediterrranean culture, the better able one can differentiate between
> what would and what would not have been a likely understanding of a NT
> text. However, a) our knowledge is imperfect too a large degree; and b)
> it is simply impossible to extricate one's own hermeneutical horizon
> from interpretation. No matter what I do or know, I still read texts as
> a late 20th century Califorhia male with a particular world view. You
> cannot read without filtering data through your world view. So
> interpreting texts must always be a struggle between your intepretive
> "grid" and what you know about the cultural space in which the text was
> produced, always seeking to reduce the distance between your
> hermeneutical orizon and that of the text. The closer they get, the
> better you can understand the text "correctly". If that seems too
> brief, I don't see an alternative. You need to read up on issues
> outside of Greek grammar. I've only run into many of these issues in
> the last two years in my doctoral program. My school is very very heavy
> into methodoogy, like reader-response, while totally disinterested in
> content it seems. No one ever talks about what Paul "meant" but we sure
> talk a lot about post-modern implications for trying to read texts.
Ron Ross
Department of Linguistics
University of Costa Rica