393 - Commentaries: Windows To The Text

Commentaries: Windows To The Text
By Pheme Perkins

WHEN we hear the word "commentary" in the secular media, we anticipate a well-crafted, personal reflection on a situation or topic of current interest. Frequently, the commentator is a distinguished figure in media or political life. Such commentary is not a report about the facts of the issue but a perspective, a way of setting some issue in a larger context.

"Commentary" on texts of Scripture also seeks to provide a larger framework than one can gain from reading and re-reading the Bible, but the "rules of the game" are quite different. The scholarly standard established by historical-critical Bible study demands that a wealth of facts, background information, comparative ancient literature, and linguistic analyses be brought to bear on each text. Though even here there is plenty of room for individual judgment in choosing and interpreting the material brought to the discussion of a text, the model for the scholarly voice is abstract and impersonal. Our individual experiences and perspectives do not often figure prominently in the enterprise.

The most significant control on idiosyncratic perspectives in the scholarly commentary is the tradition of commentary on the particular text, which may include material from the church fathers as well as the reformers. No one sits down to write a commentary on a biblical text without being aware of the wealth of commentaries and scholarly articles already on the library shelves. This tradition has already established many of the questions about the text that must be resolved by any commentator: where are the ambiguous phrases, what references need to be illuminated by historical or literary background, which words are peculiar theological terms used by the author, and the like? There may also be a tradition of theological issues associated with particular texts like the question of preexistence in Phil. 2:6-11, the divinity of Jesus in John, or the place of Israel in the economy of salvation in Rom. 9-11.

I

One of the major tasks in writing a commentary is to provide a window on this tradition of interpretation. Passages which have played a major role in liturgy, theology, or ethical practice need to be treated not

Pheme Perkins is Professor of New Testament at Boston College. She is the author of Reading the New Testament (1978), The Gnostic Dialogue (1980), Love Commands in the New Testament (1982), and Resurrection (1984). She has written commentaries on the Johannine Epistles (1980) and The Book of Revelation (1983).

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only in the context of the Bible but also in terms of their post-biblical incarnations. Most of us begin working on a commentary by taking stock of the notebooks, card files, and computer disks full of information that we have already accumulated in years of study, teaching, and preaching. There will be twice as much when the manuscript finally goes off to the publisher.

Where does it all come from? Some new material results from new discoveries. Archaeological information about the physical world of antiquity as well as finds of new inscriptions and manuscripts change our understanding of particular sections of the Bible. Even more frequently, scholars have noticed parallels in content, literary form, or religious expression in "old texts." Or, there has been a significant change in strategy for approaching the text over the years. For example, Gospel criticism has been dominated by the questions of the sources used by the writers. Eventually, the balance shifted to questions about the narrative structure of each Gospel as a whole. Or, the study of Acts was dominated by the question of the historical information (or lack of it) in Acts, and the desire to harmonize Acts with the Pauline epistles. More recently, scholars have begun to ask whether or not Acts intends to be history in that sense. Perhaps Acts should be seen as more of an historical novel with its literary parallels in the popular Greek romances of its day. Both of these changes have begun to shift what scholars feel ought to be in a commentary on a particular passage.

Another major shift in the orientation of biblical studies, concern with the social world of a text, is also making its way into the commentary tradition. It is no long appropriate to write about the church in Acts or the incident with the silversmiths at Ephesus without discussing the religious and political patterns of life in ancient cities. How did the early Christian communities conform to or change their environment? This new emphasis on the social world leads us to ask questions about the social and communal implications of particular statements in the Bible. "Love of enemies," for example, is not primarily a statement of personal ethics but a mandate for the community in particular social contexts.

Finally, contemporary ethical and political concerns also reshape the traditions of commentary. The modern perception of war and peace, especially the need to overcome the human experience of war as the inevitable mode of problem-solving, poses a challenge to images of God that apparently foster war by "the righteous." The struggles of poor and oppressed people for liberation challenge interpretations of the Bible which might be used to legitimate the domination of the powerful. The need for a new vision of the roles of men and women in family and social life finds the patriarchal structures and images of much of the Bible difficult. The experiences of the holocaust and on-going anti-Semitism in our communities make many New Testament statements about Jews or Israel unacceptable. Even the most academic commentary, one that will avoid commenting directly on such issues, is constrained by them to provide the background information that makes such statements and

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attitudes both intelligible in their own time and extrinsic to the Bible's message of salvation in our own.

II

When I was a graduate student, we had an exegesis course in which the professor lectured for the entire semester on Jas. 1: 1- 17 ... and that without touching any of the "modern" issues like Christian-Jewish relations. It seemed quite absurd at the time. Now, when working over the material on any passage of Scripture for a commentary, I sometimes wonder how he covered so much material! Since I have never had the luxury of writing a commentary whose length and page format was not dictated by the publisher in advance, such visions of "telling all you know" get pushed aside quickly. So do the temptations to depart from the main roads of the commentary tradition to explore some interesting connections. Those sidelights will have to wait for journal articles.

Deciding what to include and which scholarly arguments to present is one of the most obvious tasks in writing a commentary. Sheer volume of discussion cannot determine what should be included. Volume might be generated by what is in principle an undecidable ambiguity. If the ambiguity is a problem only for scholars with access to original languages, and the commentary is intended for a more general audience of pastors and students, then the commentator may have to decide for herself how the issue should be resolved, but that process will not make it into the commentary. Of course, I have had the experience of scholars reviewing commentaries written for that audience and trashing the book for not jumping into a particular academic fray.

Other features of the commentary genre play a role in determining what is to be included. Two of the most fundamental are which translation to use as the basis for the commentary and how to divide the text. Like translating, writing a commentary demands that one decide the meaning of every word and phrase. No translation is or ever can be adequate to every passage. Even when the editors have decided in advance that a commentary series is to be based on a particular translation, one sometimes has to take issue with the version because it does not convey the meaning of the biblical text.

About two years ago, a publisher sent me a copy of the commentary I had written on Revelation suggesting that it be revised because the translation on which it was based (New American Bible) had been redone. They bad a copy-editor go through and mark every place in which the new version of the text was different from the old. Because the commentary was for general Bible study, I tried to avoid comments directed at the translation as much as possible. Sitting down at the computer to do the revision, I thought it would only take me a couple of hours. Instead, it took two afternoons of work to make sure that the commentary matched the revised translation.

The problem of outlining the biblical text and dividing it into units is almost as difficult as that of translation. Pastors and preachers run into

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this problem when they set out to use the lectionary. Its divisions often differ from those in the Bible translations. I frequently write homiletic columns on lectionary readings. The editors usually want material based on the "common lectionary" that embraces the cycle of readings in different denominations. One quickly finds out that no two lectionary traditions are the same. One or more readings may differ on a given Sunday. Even if they do not, one church may have divided the text differently from another. If the publisher has a denominational affiliation, then its church takes precedence. Otherwise, I simply have to choose a set of readings on which to comment. In an ecumenical context, making sure everyone has the same readings and translation before hand can save some confusion.

Outlining a biblical book and dividing it into sections for a full length commentary is just as difficult as dealing with the lectionary divisions. Of course, there are large-scale divisions that everyone recognizes like the infancy narratives, passion narratives, the Sermon on the Mount. Small scale divisions like miracle stories, parables, and pronouncement stories are also fairly easy. In between, the divisions may be determined as much by the length of the commentary, the intended purpose (Bible study, preaching, private meditation, use by students or scholars) as by literary features of the text. Even when we are fairly certain about where to divide the text, commentators face the problem of providing "titles" for each of those units. Like many commentators, I probably spend the least time worrying about the titles for the units in the outline. They are the most vulnerable to editor's changes. However, classroom experience keeps reminding me that students and preachers often rely on them as the primary piece of information that they use in presenting a text.

The question of "titles" is one example of how the use to which commentaries are put influences decisions about their content. Theological themes like an author's understanding of Jesus or descriptions of the type of community that appears to be addressed in a writing require that evidence be drawn from the writing as a whole. They do not lend themselves to treatment as comments on individual units. As a result, commentators have recourse to longer essays within the commentary or to extensive introductions. Sometimes these essay-length units follow a passage that is particularly important in understanding the theme in question. Sometimes they are printed at the end as appendices. Unfortunately, commentary users tend to focus on the sections that contain the text for the sermon or exegesis assignment. They often ignore the essay material unless they are preparing a presentation on the theme of the essay section. Some one-volume commentaries like the Harper's Bible Commentary (ed. James Luther Mays; 1988), instruct their contributors to adopt the style of an extended essay in treating a whole biblical book. Several of us who were writing for that volume found that we had just as much difficulty figuring out divisions in the text and topics for that style of commentary as we had for commentaries in the more conventional format,

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Outside of exegesis courses, few people will ever read a commentary straight through. Even those commentaries designed for Bible study groups are read piecemeal. A group choses the sections of Scripture that it wishes to study for the next week and reads that section of the commentary. The individual units have to be relatively self-contained. In contrast to many other books, commentaries have a relatively long shelf-life. They also tend to be longer in the editing process. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (1989, Prentice Hall) is appearing over twenty years after its widely used first version. Those of us who wrote commentaries for the volume had to have them submitted to the editors four years before that. It was very difficult to write material that one knew would not be published for several years and that was likely to remain in use for twenty years after that. Friends writing the sections on archaeology and history felt the problem even more acutely, since every season's excavations bring new information. What is the latest theory in scholarly journals may not be well enough established to risk enshrining it in a commentary. Once again, writing a commentary requires the constraints of tradition in a way that other forms of presentation do not.

III

A commentary for scholars would have little text but extended footnotes, as the great German commentaries do. Summaries of research, scholarly debate, linguistic observations and parallels from other ancient material make up the core of the scholar's preoccupation with the text. Most people are intimidated by the lengthly and expensive volumes that result. For the typical commentary user, the pastor, the theologian, or the Bible study group, the two criteria of a good commentary are interest and relevance. By interest, I mean the need for a commentary to show us something about a biblical text that we had never noticed or thought about before. The commentary needs to foster a sense of the author and audience of the biblical text as living human beings, people of faith who discovered how to apply that faith to the circumstances of their own times. In the process, the Bible becomes a little bit strange because it speaks about cultures and times that are different from our own and also more familiar because we discover our common humanity with the believers in those earlier times.

The second demand that non-academic readers make of commentaries is relevance. Theologians want to know how the biblical texts relate to the doctrines and practices of the church. They may also want to know if the Bible suggests any new ways of understanding old doctrines so that they can be made intelligible for people today. Pastors want to know what message they can take from the biblical text to their preaching on Sunday morning. Bible study groups want to hear a word from Scripture that will help them develop lives of Christian discipleship. For some, that means primarily lives of service and social action. For others, the focus is more on individual piety and worship.

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The stunning success of the Interpreter's Bible lies in its combination of interpretation by exegetes with the best of American preaching in its day. Faced with the impossibility of meeting the needs of all the diverse persons who use commentaries, publishers today attempt to develop commentary series for particular markets. Several years ago at a Board meeting of the Massachusetts Bible Society, we thought that it would be a nice idea to put out a little book-mark listing some good Bible commentaries. When we tried to compile the list, we found that there were far too many with very different orientations to make such an idea practical. The staff would have to continue coping with the requests that came in on an individual basis.

IV

In medieval and Reformation times, being a theologian meant commenting on the Bible. Nowadays we have become much more specialized. One person would hardly dare write commentaries on the whole New Testament let alone the whole Bible. Theology and ethics have become specialties quite separate from the academic world of the exegete. The commentary user cannot expect to find everything she or he will ever want to know about a particular passage in one commentary. Seeking to discover the theological and ethical implications of the Christian message will often require one to go quite beyond the world of biblical commentary altogether.

I like to think of commentaries as windows into the world presented by the biblical text. Windows let us see out (or in). They also provide a framework for our field of vision. We have some neighbors who live across from the local pond. They have torn the top off their ranch house in order to convert it into a much larger, two-story home. One of the most interesting parts of the new construction as I jog by every morning is discovering what they have chosen for windows to fill in all the holes in the frame. All we know for sure is that they will have a much grander view of the pond than they did before. Whether the windows will also make their house more beautiful or somehow distinctive remains to be seen. The Bible is like the pond. It's what we really want to see. It's much more than we can see even through all the windows of all the houses around the pond or even from my canoe out in the middle of it. Commentaries are the windows. You need the windows to get a view of it from inside your house. Every window has its own perspective, even a time of day when the light is best. Those of us who write commentaries do so because we enjoy the pond and would like to enable other people to share our view.