David Capes
And we talked with Ruben Zimmerman recently from the University of Mainz, he was on a previous podcast. Most of his writings in are in German, but we talked about one he was writing for an American audience, primarily, and it’s called Puzzling the Parables. It really a great book. It’s a big book on the parables.
And he finds parables in the Gospel of John, which not everybody does, thinking a lot about apocalyptic lately. Apocalyptic is kind of a genre. And it seems like when you’re reading in the gospels, and you come to something like Matthew 24:25, that all of a sudden you shift gears. And it’s not visionary, in the sense of Jesus has a vision, and this is what he sees, like you see in the Apocalypse of John, the Revelation of John. There still are apocalyptic elementa embedded in that. Am I seeing things? Or is that really happening?
Jeannine Brown
No, I think gospel scholars would say, you have the mini or the little Apocalypse in Mark 13, and then the Matthew corresponding part. And also in Matthew 27. After Jesus dies, and certain saints come to life. Some see that as a kind of apocalyptic, you’d like you say, visionary kind of moment that we need to understand in light of a shift in genre. It’s a subtle shift in genre. And often that’s the way embedded genres work. There are some clues that show that we’re shifting genre, and you’ve just shared some of them. And then we want to learn more about what is apocalyptic. Not that we would say, here’s a full- blown apocalypse. But if there’s some apocalyptic tendencies here, or elements, it would be good to know what those are.
The same with recognizing poetry when you’re in a letter or in the gospels? Well, what kind of poetry is it? Much of that poetry in the New Testament seems to resemble Jewish poetry in that there’s parallel lines, parallelism. Knowing how to recognize certain elements will help us both understand what’s being said and also recognize it elsewhere. This idea of finding it more places partly comes because oh, I’m now looking for poetry. And I understand that much of the poetry in the New Testament is Jewish style poetry, at least in my opinion. So then I’m looking for it in different places. Oh maybe that’s a bit poetic. It is recognizing and then interpreting it in light of those kinds of conventions.
This is stuff we do all the time our own world easily with not even a second thought. We shift genres, don’t we? It’s not something that is artificial. When it comes to the biblical text it just takes a little more legwork. I don’t think we’re doing something wrong or why are we doing all this work? No, we do so much work in our brains in our own context, but it doesn’t feel like we are because we know how to read a novel or we know how to read something that has something else inside of it.
I use Jane Austen as an example. Our family loves Jane Austen. Our daughter is Elizabeth Austin Brown Cook. I use her novel Pride and Prejudice and all the letters that are in the book. The letters are embedded. You can see them and we shift gear because now we know we have switched to a first- person account from the third person narrator who doesn’t know everything. And whatever they disclose, we will realize that this is an important moment in the novel. And they are often key turning points, but we’ll just read that and know that. Whereas in the New Testament or in the Bible, I think sometimes especially those of us with a high view of Scripture, we flatten everything out into one thing. Well, this is the Bible. This is God’s word. And it’s flat. And so what has been a strength is maybe a high view of Scripture, now kind of flattens out the really interesting contours of what a writer is doing. I just think the New Testament writers are very thoughtful about what they’re up to.
David Capes
They’re artful. They’re artful in what they do. And so what was your conclusion about the Christ hymn? Is it a hymn? Or is it just an exalted prose as some have described it? What is it?
Jeannine Brown
Yes, right! Well, I chose to not follow that either-or. I chose to say is it poetry or prose, and if it’s a hymn that’s a secondary issue. Because the hymn question really did absorb the scholarly commentaries in the community early in the nineteenth century. And hymn or not became the question rather than poetry or not. And if you’re arguing against hymn, you might argue against poetry by necessity. I feel like sometimes that’s what I hear in Gordon Fee, who I just love in Philippians and elsewhere, but he called it elevated prose. Not poetry. I just think, oh, my goodness, the parallel lines that come throughout, especially the line about “in the form of humanity”, taking on the human form. And the two parallel lines are very, very similar. They look like Jewish poetry, but they’re obscured because sometimes a verse break comes in between the two lines.
David Capes
Yes, translations can sometimes make that more difficult to see.
Jeannine Brown
The King James translation kind of perpetuated that. I think the language and the cadence pushes me to think it’s poetry. I know you’re a Pauline scholar so that always makes me nervous. I have some fear and trembling here.
David Capes
Oh no, listen, I’m thinking through these things all the time. And I never pound the pulpit saying this is what the Lord says about that. It’s always negotiated in a sense, and I think it is poetry. One of the questions too, is this preformed poetry? Is this something that Paul adopts as part of his letter? Or is this something that he himself has created?
Jeannine Brown
Right. The hymn question often was, well then, is it Pauline or not? I love Michael Gorman, on this, wherever he got it. If he got it somewhere else, he certainly has adopted it as his own, you know, so this is Paul. And he maybe has tweaked it. But my final form analysis, where I intend to land on is let’s just look at what we have and see how it functions. I certainly think it’s poetic. And Paul owns every part of it.
David Capes
Yeah, it’s really part and parcel. I think that image of Jesus as the one who gives his life and suffers, descends to our level, and dies the death on the cross. That becomes the example that he sees in his own life and the life of the Epaphroditus. And he says, model yourself on this Jesus. And it really fits in beautifully I think with the rest of the letter.
Jeannine Brown
Yeah, it’s the first example, the primary one and then we kind of roll out Timothy, Epaphroditus and, Paul himself. But it’s that Jesus, that Christ poem that I think shimmers and kind of shines across the whole.
David Capes
I love Larry Hurtado’s phrase of that. He said it was “Jesus is the Lordly example”. And I thought what a great phrase because the term Lord becomes so important for Paul. Jennine has a great book. It’s entitled Embedded Genres in the New Testament: Understanding their Impact for Interpretation. People who are serious about reading the New Testament, go out and just buy it! It is very readable. And I like it. It’s great. Thank you for putting it together.
Jeannine Brown
Thank you so much. Glad to do so and glad to be here.
A Nugget of Wisdom from Jeannine Brown.
Always ask the hermeneutical question. This isn’t just about the Bible but it’s about life in general. When you hear something whether in scripture or when someone else says something expressing a conclusion, how did they get there? That’s what I mean by hermeneutical question. How did the biblical writers get to saying what they did? How did an interpreter of the Bible who disagrees with me, how did they get there? Or, if I’m having a disagreement with someone in my life, how did they get there? Rather than just assuming they are wrong, they have a bad intention, or something like that. Ask the hermeneutical question, how did they get there.
