Report from the AAR pre-conference meetings

I arrived Thursday afternoon, and have been having a very fruitful set of discussions with colleagues as part of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning pre-conference plenary.

Peter Ochs, the organizer, has characterized the discussions as "the first Abrahamic revival meeting." Our sessions were divided between time spent doing SR around a collection of texts on music, and discussions of the future of SR practice in Europe and North America.

For the music study, we looked at several Suras from the Qur'an, a passage from Chronicles, and a passage from the Book of Revelation. What I found most fascinating (and had not known before beginning the study) is that there is no mention of music in the Qur'an. I found that incredibly surprising, but as time went on, that fact opened up an amazing discussion about the way in which interpretive traditions will insinuate and "read" things into texts that are not literally present, and the hermeneutic problems (and possibilities) that ensue.

This evening I will participate in a second (and unrelated) pre-conference symposium dealing with the upcoming edited anthology from the Liturgical Press's Rock and Theology project, to which I have contributed a chapter.

Exhausting day, but a really good day as well.

APHA Conference deadlines approaching

For folks who might be interested in attending the 2011 American Printing History Association conference in San Diego this fall, the deadline for Early Bird registration is this Thursday, September 15th.



The theme this year is "Printing from the Edge":

What have been the transformative moments in printing history that have changed the direction of printing, typography, papermaking, bookbinding, or book design, and moved us to a new edge? What are today’s frontiers? Where is tomorrow’s edge?

The conference takes place October 14-15 at UC San Diego. More information can be found here at the APHA website.

Bart Ehrman to speak at MTSU Friday, Feb 18th

If folks are in or near Murfreesboro (about 40 miles south of Nashville) this weekend, this will be worth your time.

The Middle Tennessee State University Department of Philosophy
is happy to announce a lecture by

Professor Bart D. Ehrman
"Misquoting Jesus: Scribes Who Changed the Bible and Readers Who May Never Know"

Friday, February 18 at 3:30
State Farm Room of the Business and Aerospace Building

The lecture is free and open to the public. Professor Ehrman will be signing copies of his books immediately following his lecture.

Bart Ehrman is the James A. Gray Professor with the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among Professor Ehrman's fields of scholarly expertise are the historical Jesus, the early Christian apocrypha, the apostolic fathers, and the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.
He is the author of over twenty books. Among his most recent are a Greek-English edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press), an assessment of the newly discovered Gospel of Judas (Oxford University Press), and three New York Times Bestsellers: Jesus Interrupted ( an account of scholarly views of the New Testament), God's Problem (an assessment of the biblical views of suffering), and Misquoting Jesus (an overview of the changes found in the surviving copies of the New Testament and of the scribes who produced them). His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.

The lecture is part of the annual Applied Philosophy Lyceum sponsored by the Department of Philosophy with appreciation to the Distinguished Lecture Committee.

Stumbling into the goldmine

When I was writing my dissertation, my third chapter was devoted to trying to develop a set of definitions and a methodology for examining "the Bible" as both a "linguistic" object (what often gets referred to as the "text" - meaning the intangible ideas "contained" in a book) as well as a physical object (the other, conflated meaning for the word "text").

It took me over eighty pages, and the apparatus was unwieldy at best. Part of the problem was that I was trying to develop, and import, a whole mode of analysis that is very alien to the weltanschauung of contemporary theological studies. In previous generations, theologians were as much text critics as they were proto-philosophers [1]. A survey of the works of Calvin, Luther, Barth and other notables shows as much biblical commentary and exegesis as it does attempts at systematic theologies (and often more so). In the last thirty years, however, a divide has opened between the practice of Christian theology and the practices of exegesis and textual criticism. My chapter was an attempt to "work backward" through this divide, and even beyond and beneath it, to recover a sense (if, indeed, it ever existed) of the importance of the "book-ness" of the Bible. The physical presence of the printed object was and is, I argued, theologically relevant and indispensable.

But I didn't know how to talk about that insight in a simple or straightforward way. Indeed, in many ways I am still working on that very problem (hence attempts, such as the postings on this blog, to address the issue repeatedly in the hopes of improvement).

So I am happy to report a discovery that is going to help this quest considerably.

During a recent visit to the University of Virginia, I had the pleasure of meeting professor of English and book historian David Vander Meulen, and of being introduced to the UVA Rare Book School, housed in the basement of their library [2]. I cannot put into adequate words what has now become available to my scholarship.

In the first place, Dr. Vander Meulen made me aware that the methodologies and vocabulary I have been struggling to invent and grapple with already, to large extent, exist. In the work of bibliographers and book historians, the "grammar" for reading books as physical objects exists and can be learned. The hour I spent speaking with Dr. Vander Meulen was an absolute revelation. Not only was I ecstatic to discover another scholar who was as as excited about the "archaeology of printing" as I was, but I was also shown a series of syllabi and monographs that point the direction to the answers I need.

These monographs were written by Dr. Vander Meulen's mentor, G. Thomas Tanselle - widely recognized as the preeminent American scholar of bibliography and book history.

The Rare Book School has available a wide selection of these works by Tanselle. Upon my return from Charlottesville I ordered several (as well as two DVD's on book production - because I am a total nerd), and the box arrived a few days ago.

I just finished reading Tanselle's "Sol M. Malkin Lecture in Bibliography," entitled Libraries, Museums and Reading, delivered in 1990 to the Columbia University School of Library Science. I am absolutely blown away. In thirty-one pages he clarifies several of the questions with which I spent all those chapter pages wrestling and grappling. Though his focus is not on biblical interpretation, I can easily see how many of his insights will be directly applicable to the project of Material Scripture and my research. I am absolutely ecstatic.

I need to read the lecture again, and study it more closely, before I can adequately express to you the connections I see. I hope, as the summer progresses, to bring several of these insights into the blog and talk about the lecture piece by piece. I think that would be the most profitable approach.

For now, however, let me lift out this one quotation:

Scholars who concentrate on the transmission of texts - that is, textual critics and editors - have often been misunderstood by other scholars, their work greeted condescendingly as if, however basic, it lacks the intellectual challenges of supposedly more creative historical and critical scholarship. What editors actually do is to read the documents (what else could they do?), trying to read all the evidence these objects have to offer and assessing it critically. The process of criticism does not begin when a literary critic or a philosopher takes up a text provided by an editor; it begins with the editor's own work, which reflects an attitude toward all the issues that critics confront. But editors' work suffers in the eyes of many scholars from the taint of the physical: work involving physical evidence is thought to be mechanical and objective, in contrast to the higher critical powers required to deal with the intangible intellectual product. The body has been chosen rather than the soul [pp. 27-28, underlined emphasis mine].

I could not agree more with this analysis. Translating it into my own project, let me gloss the quotation thus: "The process of [biblical and theological] criticism does not begin when a [theologian] takes up a text provided by an editor [and a publishing staff]; it begins with the editor [and publisher]'s own work, which reflects an attitude [and a set of theological and community commitments] toward all the issues that [theologians] confront."

Nearly all the 340 pages of the dissertation were trying to build toward an insight such as this. Here, in Tanselle's work, I find a scholar who has done much of the methodological development (with which I have been fumbling these past several years) to help me more elegantly frame and ground these suspicious intuitions I have had about Bibles and theology.

Though Tanselle and I are ultimately interested in a different set of questions, I am very encouraged that this overlap exists where we have come upon a problem with a similar trajectory. I have no doubt that Tanselle's insights (and indeed, the work of book historians like David Vander Meulen and others) will prove invaluable not only to Material Scripture, but to related projects such as the Syracuse Iconic Books center.

I feel like it's my birthday. I can't wait to read more.


[1] For an excellent example of this, consider D. Moody Smith's The Composition and Order of the Fourth Gospel: Bultmann's Literary Theory, in which Smith demonstrates how Bultmann reconstructed and re-edited the Johannine text to fit a trajectory of theological assumptions that he considered to be more "original" than the textual evidence currently available in ancient manuscripts and fragments, in effect creating a "new" and heretofore unseen Gospel of John. My thanks to my colleague Jimmy Barker for bringing this example to my attention.

[2] My thanks to Rebecca Rine, Ben Maton, Scott Yakimow, and Luke S.H. Wright for these introductions.

The Magisterium, delivered right to your door

In the May 7, 2010 issue of Commonweal, Kenneth Woodward offers an extended reflection, "Church of the 'Times': A Dissent," in which he examines the weltanschauung of the editors and staff of the New York Times. I will leave it to my readers to judge for themselves the legitimacy of his overall claims about the newspaper's purported allergy to religions (particularly the Roman Catholic Church). I think that is a worthy conversation to have, though I am not sure this is the forum in which to have it.

However, this one paragraph caught my attention and I wanted to take a few minutes here to make a comment or two about the issue he raises (since I think this is the proper forum for such an issue):

...like the Church of Rome, the Times exercises a powerful magisterium or teaching authority through its editorial board. There is no issue, local or global, on which these (usually anonymous) writers do not pronounce with a papal-like editorial “we.” Like the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the editorial board is there to defend received truth as well as advance the paper’s political, social, and cultural agendas. One can no more imagine a Times editorial opposing any form of abortion—to take just one of that magisterium’s articles of faith—than imagine a papal encyclical in favor.

In my doctoral dissertation, The Covert Magisterium: Theology, Textuality and the Question of Scripture, I make the suggestion that Bible publishers (and the larger corporations of which many of them are now a part) exercise a de facto magisterial authority over the shape and form of printed Bibles. That, in itself, is a relatively uncontroversial claim.

What interests me about Woodward's assertion above is the ideological power that is brought to bear when these magisterial effects are wedded with certain types of material objects. That editors and corporations control the content (and therefore, to an arguable extent, the possible readings) of books and newspapers is plain. But the Bible is not an ordinary book, just as the Times is no ordinary newspaper, in terms of the relative cultural power wielded by both.

By virtue (is this the proper word?) of their respective material presentations, the editorial decisions that go into the construction of an imprint of a Bible version or an issue of the Times are of an elevated ideological nature. Words in the New York Times are different, in their weight and influence, than similar words found in the Chattanooga Times, for example.

Similarly, though I bemoan the fact, I can cite numerous instances when my students (undergraduate and masters level, both) have pointed to a footnote, chapter heading, or editorial introduction in their various "study Bibles" and quoted it with the authority of Scripture itself. These aspects of printed Scripture that (arguably) are not Scripture perform as a sort of "blurred space" at the margins of scriptural authority. Gerard Genette calls these sorts of additionals the "paratext," and he (along with Phillipe Lejeune) argues that these paratextual elements shape and control how a given reader reads the text.

The "editorial shape" of a printed object is an artifact of larger ideological positionings within a set of cultural disputations. Ancillary to this claim, it is important to distinguish the claim that certain printed objects will have (within a given set of contexts) greater ideological forcefulness than others. This is why, while it might be appropriate to examine the ideologies involved in the editing and printing of an edition of The Joy of Cooking, I would be hesitant (at least in the current set of contexts) to interrogate that object as an example of a (covert) magisterial artifact.

Both the many (and multiplying) imprints of Holy Bibles and The New York Times, however, are currently situated within our culture such that the interrogation of their editorial and paratextual shaping can yield good critical fruit.

For example, Woodward later quotes Times editor Daniel Okrent, who says, “If you are among the groups the Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn’t wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you’re traveling in a strange and forbidding world.”

I interpret this to mean that the editorial position of the Times does not exist in isolation, but rather as a part of a larger set of overlapping ideologies and communities within our cultural landscape. Certain "types" of readers identify with the editorial positions of the Times, and others will feel alienated by them. They are influenced by the Times. But these various groups are also influencing the Times through their economic power (whether or not they purchase the paper, for example, or whether or not they patronize the advertisers within), their reaction to the Times in the wider cultural discourse (articles like Woodward's, for example, as well as the blogosphere). Additionally (but not finally), the Times also exists as an abstracted totem, a crumb that is gnawed as a morsel or hurled as an insult within the over-simplified posturings that pass for political discourse currently (a totem of "Eastern elitism" or "informed journalism," alternately).

So the Times, so the Bible. Or, that is to say, so the many Bibles available as objects within the retail sphere (which, today, is the only sphere that matters). Just as certain readers will not feel at home reading the Times, we might easily be able to think of certain classes of readers made very uncomfortable the The Patriot's Bible, and other classes equally uncomfortable with The Green Bible. The editorial decisions that shape these objects are part of a much larger milieu of cultural and ideological disputes that are not one-way in their influences. The differentiation of Bibles creates hospitable (and inhospitable) ideological and theological space for differing classes of readers. These classes, moreover, are themselves complex and overlapping. In fact, it is the negotiation of publishers, wrestling with demographic data, with as many of these overlapping groups as possible that leads to the multiplicity of Bible imprints currently available.

All this is to say that I think Wooward's observation that the New York Times exists as a type of magisterial entity is right on the money (quite literally). Within the wider ideological landscape we are navigating with this analysis, it is an insight well worth exploring.

Information about upcoming Glasgow Conference, "Re-Writing the Bible"

The following is available online here

Re-Writing the Bible: Devotion, Diatribe and Dialogue

14th-15th June 2010


University of Glasgow


Keynote panellists include Michael Schmidt, Michael Symmons-Roberts,
Kei Miller, Sara Maitland and Michelene Wandor.



“…there is no reading of a work which is not also a ‘re-writing’.”

- Terry Eagleton



A recent exhibition at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art consisted of a bible, laid open alongside a supply of pens, with the invitation, “If you feel you’ve been excluded from the Bible, please feel free to find a way to write yourself back in.” The comments scribbled in the margins—and the very notion of ‘writing in the Bible’—became the subject of a widespread controversy, resulting in the gallery’s decision to place this bible inside a perspex cube, effectively sealing it off and protecting it from what might be deemed ‘undesirable’ commentary. Visitors were still invited to write comments, but now they were written on sheets of paper that were then selected by gallery staff and inserted between the bible’s pages.


In light of this very present debate, Re-Writing the Bible: Devotion, Diatribe and Dialogue invites poets, writers, and scholars to engage with interdisciplinary questions surrounding the phenomena of retellings or revisions of Bible in creative writing. These retellings have a heritage that, arguably, starts within the books of the Bible itself and stretches across many literatures and traditions; poets and writers in every age filter biblical themes and images through the
focus of their own period and practice. Dante, Milton, Bunyan, Blake, Yeats, Owen, H.D, Plath, Kinsella, Hill; the list is long, diverse, and continues to grow.


This symposium asks why contemporary writers have chosen to rework this particular source text, and what stances they have taken towards it: faithful, using creative writing as a means of prayerful reflection or theological exegesis? Or furious, a railing against the Bible’s injustices and absences? Or a mixture of both, a sometimes difficult, sometimes delightful kind of dialogue? If every reading is also a re-writing, then it follows that every re-writing is also a reading, and for this reason many biblical scholars are fascinated by the literary ‘afterlives’ of the scriptures, the ways in which the Bible is sustained by creative imaginations in cultural settings and times very distant from its own writing and compilation.


We are seeking 20-minute papers from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, including but not limited to: literature, theology, biblical studies, critical and cultural theory, history, politics, and so on. We will consider papers on all forms of ‘creative writing’: poetry, novel, short story, sermon, liturgy, prayers, songs, political writing, theatre, and so on. Our emphasis is on twentieth and twenty-first century works, but we will also consider abstracts on rewritings from other periods. We would be particularly interested in papers looking at spaces that often go unexplored by research in retelling and revisioning, such as biblical romance novels, evangelical speculative fiction, biblical archetypes in autobiography, contemporary liturgy, or popular music. There is the possibility that proceedings will be published.


Please send abstracts (approx. 200 words) to rewritingbible2010@gmail.com, by no later than 19th April 2010.

Review of Chuck Zerby's The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes

The footnote, like any other significant invention, begins as an idea in someone's swirling gray matter, then seeks a way through human distractions, daydreams, fantasies, arguments and conflicts, and then gets itself transformed into a "thing" [p. 37].

Chuck Zerby's little book, The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes, is a book I keep feeling I should have liked more than I actually did.

In the first place, the book is chock full of good and useful information, and not an inconsiderable amount of history and insight. Of particular interest to someone of my odd ilk, Zerby effectively highlights the very deep entwinement the development of the footnote has with the history of the printed Bible itself.

In fact, Zerby makes the claim, based on the available textual evidence, that the first recorded footnote, properly speaking, was placed by one Richard Jugge, in charge of the Bishop's Bible somewhere around 1568 [pp. 19 - 24]. This is of especial interest because, as Zerby intimates, the footnote has never - not from its very beginnings - been a neutral or innocuous addition to a text. Footnotes are always personal, persuasive, and polemical, much to Zerby's delight.

Perhaps it is this delight that I found offputting. Zerby's research is at many points an excuse for some rather precious phrasing and overly-narrated historical asides. E.g., "These details of Crabbe's life, and the ones that follow, have been lifted (as in shoplifted, perhaps) from a consistently amusing thumbnail sketch of him by Michael Schmidt" [p. 122, n. 9]. Zerby does not simply purloin others' bon mots, however. He feels at liberty to develop his own imaginative back-stories to the literary figures he recounts, not always to the credit of the furtherance of the overall argument.

Zerby's research, it should be noted, relies heavily on another volume, oft-quoted on the bottoms of the pages of Devil's Details. This other volume, Anthony Grafton's The Footnote: A Curious History, functions as a sort of foil to Zerby's text, in that Zerby relies on it repeatedly for information, all the while disagreeing with Grafton's conclusions and methodological assumptions. He admits as much when he avers, "I have borrowed a great number of [Grafton's] facts and his antidotes [sic]; our interpretations of them differ dramatically" [p. 90 n. 2].

The reason for this complex relationship to Grafton's text eventually becomes clear. The question that drives Zerby, at the end of the day, is this: should a footnote be informative or performative? Grafton holds to the former; Zerby clearly opts for the latter. That is to say, for Zerby, the dramatic possibilities of the footnote eclipse its mere discursive possibilities, and he has choice words (nay, paragraphs - even unto whole chapters) for those who would think otherwise.

Thus Zerby's book itself employs and deploys footnotes not only to the end of logging sources, but for the evocation of effect and drama. There are points when this affectation works rather well (and I am still poststructuralist enough in my interests to enjoy a good performative aside every now and then). The difficulty arises when, enraptured with his own joyous prose, Zerby loses sight of restraint and, eventually, the reader. For such a short book, it was, at points, a very tiring exercise when these flights erupted.

That does not mean this is not a book worth laboring through. While I found Zerby's style more off-putting in the early pages, by the time I got to the last third of the book, I had settled into a truce with it, and found the book both informative and entertaining. If I were to compare the book to a movie, I would say its marketers and director were unsure whether it should be a documentary or a romantic comedy. Trying to be both, it ends up falling short of either.

For that shortcoming, however, there are still jewels here. The Devil's Details manages to be a useful history of the footnote, despite itself.