After a long delay, I am now back to writing some more entries. For starters I have some observations on the SBL conference.
First off, I was fairly appalled at the near-total lack of knowledge of even the most basic steps of scientific methodology. While there is no question that most of these PhDs are very knowledgeable and well-read in their fields it became apparent very quickly that their many years of training and study included not even five minutes about the methods involved in formulating a scientifically sound theory. While I am probably unfairly generalizing here, it seemed true in many cases in the lectures I attended. Let’s take some examples:
Waiting for the Kingdom by Giovanni Bazzana. Now, this is obviously a smart and dedicated man. Unfortunately, his theory was far less smart. Actually, to be accurate, there is no way to know if his theory was good, bad, or indifferent. Why? Because he completely neglected one of the most significant pieces of a theory, falsification. I tried pressing him on the issue, asking for some hard numbers. Basically, he has two examples of papyri (PKoeln 7,313, 13-22; and 1 Mac 13, 36-39) where he finds some similarity in the wording between the release of debts and the Q version of the Lord’s prayer. A few natural questions should have occurred to him at this point, they certainly occurred to me right away. Two examples out of how many? He wasn’t quite sure, tens of thousands… Are there any other decrees on papyrus where similar word patterns can be found that match formulaic expressions in the NT? He didn’t know, hadn’t checked. At this point I stopped asking as his eyes were glazing over and he didn’t seem to have the faintest clue as to what I was asking him. I was asking for quantification. He said near the end of his presentation, “I think this is significant,” referring here to his findings. Really? You think it’s significant? Why do I care what you find significant? I don’t! What you think is irrelevant, it is your evidence that needs to convince me. Unfortunately, you showed up without any theory and without any evidence other than two highly dubious textual parallels. If you cannot show some hard numbers, if you cannot provide grounds for falsification, then you have nothing. Well, I guess you do have some interesting musings that might serve as inspiration to others, which is nice but hardly scientific.
Let’s look at another example, this one by Larry Hurtado, which was very disappointing since Hurtado is obviously very smart and has done some truly excellent work over the years. What is even more disappointing is that his work on Mark and Codex W was a solid piece of good scientific work, so he clearly knows how to do these things. I won’t say too much on this topic because Bart Ehrman really laid into Hurtado so effectively that very little remains to be said. Ehrman’s attack was effective and accurate but even he did not truly understand the exact nature of the problem with Hurtado’s work, all he knew was that there was something wrong with it. I asked Hurtado about his conclusions regarding scrolls and codices and their respectives roles, trying to find out how strong his case was. Again, I was trying to get hard numbers. How many scrolls and codices were we talking about, how many had markings to facilitate reading and to what extent? Again, basic information without which it is impossible to arrive at any kind of conclusion. Hurtado seemed to not understand what I was asking. I was beginning to think that I had forgotten how to speak English but subsequent tests proved that I was indeed capable of forming coherent sentences. Ah, well…
Final example, Holger Strutwolf who was talking about text types and the need for a new classification scheme. Now, he may be entirely accurate, again there is no way to know, at least not given the data he presented. He tried to show that the percentage of variation did not group the exemplars into reasonably clear and delineated text type groups. I am curious to know how he measures variations. How does he weigh them? Does he even weigh them? What words are ignored? Why? You can’t just go in and take two texts and count the differences, word by word. At least, not if you expect to get any kind of useful answer. I think he asks an important question but I am far from convinced that he has the knowledge and skills necessary to make this case, one way or another. Check out my previous blog entry on how to weigh differences, How differrent is different?
Enough complaining for now. There were a lot of bright spots as well. It was great to meet Stephen Carlson (again), Jeffrey Gibson, Ken Olson, Catherine Smith and many others. There were some great lectures. I especially enjoyed Thomas J. Kraus speaking about Miniature Books, Codices, or Formats? Categories, Contexts, and Conclusions, Peter M. Head on Named Letter Carriers in the Documentary Papyri, Gilbert van Belle The Use of the Pronomen Abundans in the Fourth Gospel and Kevin Wilkinson on “Hermeneiai” in Manuscripts of John’s Gospel and the Art of Bibliomancy just mention a few.
Anyways, that is it for now. I have been working on a syntactical parser for Koine Greek. It is coming along really, really well and I will be writing about that next time. The problem is that every time I have an oppotunity to sit down in front of the computer, I want to work on my parser rather than writing a blog entry.
TTFN,
Julian