Doing all this work on my doctoral dissertation has gotten me thinking about the people who shaped my work in biblical studies. I have to credit my father for being the one who first stimulated my interest in the Bible. My father had read the Bible through five times before he entered college - a feat he made sure I knew about, and which I did not even come close to matching - but I did begin to read it as an adolescent, and I remember being very surprised by some of the things I found in it (e.g., the story of the daughters of Lot getting him drunk and getting themselves impregnated by him!). I think I knew at an early age that the Bible was a pretty interesting book!
I did not take any courses in Bible in college. I had been advised to use my undergraduate years for the liberal arts and postpone "religious" course work until I was in seminary, so I majored in Sociology and minored in English. Drury College did not offer any courses in Greek and Hebrew - I might have taken them if they had (though I'm not sure about that), and I certainly wished later that I had started my study of them earlier than I did.
My first course in Bible in seminary was with Old Testament professor J. Coert Rylaarsdam. I was fortunate. He was an outstanding teacher. He opened up the world of the Bible in a way that I found very exciting. I can thank him for introducing me to a very basic tool of biblical study - the "
word study." I loved word studies. They require simply a Concordance, a Bible, and a lot of patience. He would assign a word - one I remember was the word "fountain"- and you would look up every occurrence of that word listed in the Concordance and read the verse and its context. There might be scores of occurrences to look up. You would get a sense of the various meanings of the word from its various contexts, then you would organize those into categories and write an essay on the meaning of the word and, if appropriate, how its meaning changed and developed over time. Such an exercise has its limitations, of course, but I found it fascinating. At that stage I had to do it in English, which was not as fruitful as using Hebrew. That would come later. But even with that limitation, it was revelatory.
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| J. Coert Rylaarsdam |
When I first went to seminary, I was primarily interested in a field that was called
Religion and Personality, which explored the relationship between psychology and theology. I had no thought or intention to become a biblical scholar. I had been very much influenced by the field of religion and psychology through my father's experience of "Clinical Training" at a state mental hospital when I was in high school. It was pretty much dinner table conversation for a good part of my high school years. I then worked as an attendant at that same mental hospital as a college sophomore. But my later experience of Clinical Training the summer of 1955 at Danville State Hospital, PA, was not so positive - primarily because I was very unhappy with the Chaplain who supervised our work. This led me to question my intentions and to switch my major in seminary to
New Testament Studies - in an effort to go back to the very roots of my faith. How could I relate Christian faith to psychology if I wasn't sure what Christian faith really was? That decision brought me into the orbit of Prof. Markus Barth, Professor of New Testament in the Federated Theological Faculty of the University of Chicago.
Markus Barth was the son of the then-famous Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, the primary figure in what was called Neo-Orthodox Theology. Karl Barth is still read today, I am sure, especially in conservative seminaries. But in the 1950s, he was HUGE in ALL seminaries, even Chicago, which had a long-standing liberal tradition. I took two courses with Markus Barth, one on the Sermon on the Mount, and one on Baptism. I had never experienced anything like him. His approach to biblical study was incredibly meticulous and highly doctrinaire. He was a "Barthian" for sure. And for a time, I became one too. I ended up doing my B.D. thesis under him - "The Spirit in Romans, Chapter Eight." When I read it today, I feel that I am reading the work of another person. But I learned a great deal from Markus Barth, especially his passion for biblical study. He was a kind and gentle teacher. During my final year, my father was ill with a brain tumor, was in a coma in a hospital in Iowa City for three months and died just two months before my graduation, just during the time when I had to be writing my thesis, completing course work and taking exams. I wanted to drop out and help my mother, but my mother urged me to stay and complete my work. Prof. Barth was amazingly understanding and actually gave me a grade for a course that I was not able to complete a paper for, rather than giving me an "Incomplete" and thus postponing my graduation - on the promise that I would write the paper later (which I did). I just learned today that Princeton Seminary is holding a Seminar on the legacy of Markus Barth just a few weeks from now - Sept. 26-29. I might just be able to take in a day of it. That would be quite special for me.
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| Prof. Markus Barth. He was never without his pipe. |
My introduction to biblical languages came in my final year of seminary with a course in Introductory Greek - inspired by my decision to study the New Testament. This was not a course in biblical Greek (Koine Greek), it was a standard introduction to Attic Greek. I soaked it up, and only wished I had started it earlier in life, when my brain would have retained it even more thoroughly. My teacher, Horst Moehring, became a friend. He was the same age as my brother, and was completing a graduate program at the University of Chicago. When I graduated from seminary, he got his Ph.D.and a job at Brown University. He and his wife, Constance, and Shirley and I all drove east together after graduation ceremonies (he and Constance to Providence, RI and Shirley and I to Dummerston, VT where I would become pastor of the church there). That was after supper at a German restaurant in Chicago, after which we drove through the night. Horst was German, had come to the U.S. to complete his education, and had "met'' his wife initially as a "pen pal" (an earlier version of
match.com). We liked them both. Horst would become a very important person in my life - it was he who a few years later suggested that I come to Brown to get a Ph.D., and he arranged a fellowship in the Dept. of Religious Studies there to make that possible.
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| Horst Moehring |
My study of Greek continued at Brown, with Horst, and Hebrew was added to it. My first year, I was actually studying German, French, Greek and Hebrew simultaneously! I had to pass exams in all four languages in order to continue in the doctoral program. I did, but it wasn't the best way to learn languages. I never really felt comfortable in any of them. But I was able to use them in at least a basic way.
My Hebrew teacher was Prof. Ernest Frerichs. He was a jovial man, and a good teacher. After learning the basic grammer of Hebrew, I read the book of Amos with him. He died just. a few years ago.
Ernest S. Frerichs was Co-founder of the Religious Studies Department
and the Judaic Studies Program at Brown University; also professor,
assistant dean of the College and dean of the graduate school across
42-year career at Brown; lectured widely in Hebrew Bible and the history
of Biblical Interpretation across England, Europe and the former Soviet
Union . . . Noted
for such traits as modesty, humility, compassion, and gentleness, his
life is best characterized in the title of a festschrift presented to
him by friends and colleagues, Hesed ve-Emet (Kindness and Truth).
Equally at home in Jewish and Christian circles, he knew no enemy, but
gave great encouragement to all, especially those in need, preferring to
think of himself as an enabler.
While I was at Brown, a Jewish scholar from England, Dr, Raphael Loewe, came as a Visiting Professor. He was the son of the very well-known Jewish Scholar, Herbert Loewe, of
Rabbinic Anthology fame. He too was a very kind and patient teacher. I took a course with him on
Targum Song of Songs, reading an un-pointed Aramaic text, line by line. I was way out of my depth, but he was very patient with my stumbling efforts. He was also very supportive of my dissertation, and actually encouraged me to make an article out of an excursus in it which dealt with the issue of the first-century Palestinian Lectionary Cycle, and paved the way for it to be published in
The Journal Of Jewish Studies, of which he was an editor! It was my first publication, and it is one of the articles that I have found has been frequently cited by other scholars.
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| Dr. Raphael Loewe. |
Dr. Loewe died about seven years ago, Here is an excerpt from his obituary:
"Raphael Loewe, who has died aged 92, was an extraordinary teacher and
scholar whose great love was the poetry and philosophy of the Jews of
medieval Spain. He often said that he could feel the presence of one of
the greatest of those poets, Solomon ibn Gabirol, hovering over his
shoulder as he wrote. Raphael's linguistic skills were superb, and he
regarded such linguistic facility as an absolute essential – without it,
one could not understand the nuances, the alliterations and the
associations of medieval poetry or prose. He was working on translations
right up until his death."
I'm afraid I never achieved "linguistic facility," much to my regret.
The other professor at Brown in New Testament, alongside Horst Moehring, was William Schoedel, whom I knew as Bill. I had to decide under whom I would write my dissertation. I am sure Horst thought I would do it with him. I liked Horst, but his approach to biblical scholarship was not my style. His field was not biblical studies
per se, but the figure of Josephus, the 1st century Jewish historian. Horst had been working for years on a Josephus Concordance - a painstaking listing of every word in Josephus's very large corpus of historical writings. I had come to Brown because of Horst, but I actually became a closer friend of Bill. My office as a grad student was next to his and we had long conversations. I found his mind more compatible. He and his wife, Grace, also became friends and Shirley and I typically spent every Friday evening with them at their home having pizza and playing Hearts. They had children of an age similar to our Betsey and John. So that relationship blossomed and the one with Horst and Constance didn't end, but it faded a bit. In the end I chose to do my dissertation with Bill. His field was also not New Testament
per se. It was Early Church, specifically the Apostolic Fathers, a field he has published in prolifically. Initially, he steered me toward doing something closer to his specialty. As I recall he suggested I do a translation and analysis of Origen's
Commentary on Romans. That seemed beyond my depth linguistically and also was not of great interest to me. So he left me free to choose (thank you, Bill! I know many thesis advisors who would not have been so flexible). I settled on
The Old Testament Quotations in the Gospel of John. I think Krister Stendahl's study of the OT quotations in the Gospel of Matthew, titled
The School of St. Matthew, had just come out and had created quite a stir. No one had done a similar thing with John. So I set to work on that and about four-five months into it, I learned that in fact someone
had done it - Edwin Freed at Harvard. A fellow-student had happened upon the Freed dissertation when he was doing his own research and let me know. I read it, as did Bill, and that was that. We had to drop John. About that time I happened to run into Markus Barth, purely by chance, at the Dartmouth Library during the summer. I had not seen him or been in touch for seven or eight years. When I told him what I was up to, he suggested I consider doing the Old Testament in the Gospel of Luke. Luke is very different from John in many ways, and not least in the way it has used and interpreted the Old Testament. It was way too big a topic. I don't remember if Markus Barth suggested this, but we decided to focus on one very important quotation, Isaiah 61.1-2, in Luke 4.16. That might seem like an incredibly narrow topic, but we sensed that it wasn't. That quotation, made by Jesus at his inaugural sermon at Nazareth, was in effect the Prologue to the entire Gospel, and thus would reach out in as yet unknown ways. It proved to be a fortuitous choice. I didn't know where it would lead when I started out, but I ended up convinced that Luke, far from being a Gentile stranger to the Jewish faith, was in fact a kind of rabbi himself, and an expert in the Jewish technique of
midrashic exegesis. That was a break-through, and it put me on the ground floor of what would become a burgeoning field of Lukan study. Which is why I now have an almost seven-page long list of books and articles that have cited my dissertation, and it is still growing. Talk about lucky!
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| Bill Schoedel and me at my Brown commencement in 1966 |
