Jargon: Between Economy and Snobbery

Every particular academic discipline is its own sub-culture, operating with its own scholarly language. This language is a necessary thing, allowing scholars to speak to one another without having to go over the preliminaries time and time again. It's useful. However, my question is: when does the technical language of a particular field cease to be a matter of economy and start being an occassion for snobbery? When does the field stop conveying information and start clouding it?

Translating back into Greek

Today in Greek class we had to prepare our translations for another section of Philostratus' Life of Apollonius. However, our professor had in mind a little something different. We had to give a simplified English translation of what was going on, then go back and re-translate it into Greek. This was honestly one of my favorite activities. I give a huge thanks to David Alan Black and his "Learn to Read New Testament Greek" along with my Greek professor at Southeastern - memorizing paradigms made this exercise significantly easier.

Without any accents or breathing marks (can someone point me to a tutorial on how to type those out?) here's what we wrote for one part:

εστι πηγη Διος εγγυς τη Τυανα, και καλουσι αυτο Ασβαμαιον. αυτη μεν εστι ψυχρα,
παφλαζει δε. ιαοται μεν ευορκους, βλαπτει δε επιορκους. υδωρ ποιει τους νοσμους
τοισισδε και ομολογουσι.

Free high five to anyone who can translate that without all the accents and such.

Making too much of a word

As we were translating more of Philostratus' Life of Apollonius I came across this sentence:

παρ' ων υπαρχει μαθειν, ως υποθειζων την φιλοσοφιαν εγενετο.

Which is:

From which it is possible to learn how divinely inspired a philosopher he was.


I asked my Greek professor why Philostratus used εγενετο when he could've just used ην (I apologize for the lack of accents/breathing marks/etc - I haven't figured out how to do them yet), and if his choosing εγενετο was to indicate that Apollonius was born a divinely inspired philosopher, not just that he was one. My professor said that, unfortunately, εγενετο is simply one of those words that one has to make a judgment on nearly every time they come across it and that he wouldn't build too much of an argument for anything based on a single word. I said that's because he's not a New Testament scholar. Oh, kidding.

An Interesting Post on Christology and Development of Doctrine

This post here on the blog "Army of Martyrs" titled Development of the Various Dogmas in Light of the Universal Acceptance of Nicaea. The post and comments that follow are interesting.

James Crossley, William Lane Craig, and Ghosts

I suppose since I've taken this title for my blog, I should actually blog about the NT from time to time. I was watching James Crossley's debate with William Lane Craig over on Mike Bird's and Joel Willitts' blog and I heard Dr. Crossley say something interesting about the disciples seeing Jesus and thinking he was a ghost (Mk 6:49-50), not someone who was walking around bodily. This was by no means the crux of his argument - he mentioned it once or twice and moved on to other evidence for his position.

All the same, I had just read Jason Robert Combs' (of Yale Div) article in RBL titled, "A Ghost on the Water? An Absurdity in Mark 6:49-50."(1) Combs' argument is that Mark uses this story to show that Jesus is not, in fact, just a ghost by virtue of the fact that he's on the water. Combs goes through primary sources from antiquity showing that it was a common belief that ghosts could not walk upon water.

Mark's "ghost sighting" is characteristic of ancient ghosts stories in three ways:

1) It occurs at night (6:48 - τεταρτην φυλαχην της νυχτος) during the fourth watch, which allowed for there to be some early morning light - (2)which was thought to be necessary to see ghosts, as the ancients did not share our sentiment that spirits luminesce. And 3) it caused the disciples fear.

However, Mark departs drastically from the typical ghost story by having Jesus appear on the water. Combs gives the rhetorical reasoning:
"The disciples' lack of understanding has long been recognized as a Markan theme that appears throughout the Gospel. Here it forms a striking narrative portrayal of cognitive dissonance: the disciples clearly want Jesus to be something that he is not, to the point that they are willing to believe the absurd (JM: That Jesus is a ghost) when Jesus approaches them as something much grander than they had imagined. Gods and divine men walk on water; ghosts do not. But when the disciples see Jesus walking on water, they believe the impossible rather thant he obvious. Mark's insertion of this absurdity, "because they saw him walking on the sea they thought he was a ghost" (6:49), emphasizes in dramatic fashion the discpiles' misconstrual of Jesus' messiahship."

(1)Journal of Biblical Literature; Summer2008, Vol. 127 Issue 2, p345-358.

Oh for the love of academia!

I have to ask you professor types out there - is it not the most frustrating thing in the world when students do not do even the most preliminary research before coming to class? Well, rest assured, it is equally frustrating for those of us who actually did it but have to waste time in class listening to you answer all the silly questions.

In my Classical Islam class we've had such stellar questions as:

So....wait......was the Qu'ran written before the New Testament? Yes, absolutely. Did you not see the bit in there about a time machine?

So do Muslims pray to Muhammad or Allah? And who is the sacrifice for their sins? - The most staunchly monotheistic religion on the face of the planet figured it needed some intermediaries, so please - go ahead and pray to Muhammad.

After the Professor spoke about the importance of the Ka'ba, not to mention its location in Mecca:
Isn't the Ka'ba near the wailing wall? - ............


Now, the second question up there has more to do with students not understanding that there isn't a 1:1 correspondence within religion. There is nobody like the Jesus of Christianity in Islam for the fact that the concept of sin is completely different (seen as more of an issue of ignorance). How frustrating it must be to have to go over such silly things (that could be found on a Wikipedia page - sorry, Jim).

April DeConick has written a blog post concerning "weighing in on Avalos and Koester." She hits on something that I think is relevant here - that some students aren't willing to think outside of their own religious paradigm or they're unaware of the fact that they aren't doing it. I've decided if I'm ever afforded the chance to live out my dream as a professor in a religion department, the first thing I will talk about is trying to see things through different "lenses."

Hilarious

Just go see it here.