Articles the Untimeliness of Biblical Philology
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10.3726/78000_9 Articles The Untimeliness of Biblical Philology Ronald Hendel University of California, Berkeley Abstract In response to Nietzsche’s call for an “untimely” philology, one that disrupts the present age for the sake of a future age, I explore the disruptive effects of biblical textual criticism from the Renaissance to the present. This brief genealogy of disruption features the controversial effects of Erasmus’s editio princeps of the New Testament, Cappel’s Critica Sacra, which inaugurated modern textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Wellhausen’s call for a critical eclectic edition of the Hebrew Bible, and my own text-critical project, The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition. The essay closes with a critique of postmodern anti-philology and prospects for future philology. Keywords philology, Nietzsche, critical edition, New Testament, Hebrew Bible, textual criticism A little more philology, a little more knowledge, a little more lack of knowledge, are not in the domain of impossible wishes. Julius Wellhausen1 In the second of his Untimely Observations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtun- gen), Friedrich Nietzsche, professor of classical philology at Basel, called for a new kind of philology, one that disturbs contemporary culture: “I do not know what meaning classical philology would have for our age if not to have an untimely effect within it, that is, to act against the age and so have an effect on the age to the advantage, it is to be hoped, of a coming age”.2 1 Wellhauesen – Bleek, 1978, p. 656: “etwas mehr Philologie, etwas mehr Wissen und etwas mehr Nichtwissen, gehören nicht zu den unmöglichen Wünschen.” 2 Nietzsche, 1980, p. 8; 1874, p. vi (“ich wüsste nicht, was die classische Philologie in unserer Zeit für einen Sinn hätte, wenn nicht den, in ihr unzeitgemäss – das heisst gegen die Zeit und dadurch auf die Zeit und hoffentlich zu Gunsten einer kommenden Zeit – zu wirken”). © Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 9–28 10 Ronald Hendel Nietzsche practiced this kind of philology – a painstakingly close read- ing of the meaning and internal contradictions of European culture and thought – though, as his fellow classicist Ulrich Wilamowitz vigorously noted, Nieztsche’s “future philology” was far from the canons of academic discourse (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, 2000; see further, Porter, 2000 and Pollack, 2009). While classical philology as such has rarely been untimely since Nietzsche, I wish to make the case that biblical philology has con- sistently been so, since at least the Renaissance, often despite the explicit intentions of its practitioners. There is something about biblical philology that is disruptive, that acts “against the age” (gegen die Zeit), even when it addresses the most banal of textual details, such as small scribal errors like dittography (the repetition of a letter) or haplography (the omission of one of two similar letters). The disruptive power of such details is emphatically voiced in rabbinic literature, as when a young scribe meets Rabbi Ishmael: “When I came to Rabbi Ishmael, he said to me, “My son, what is your occupation”? I said to him, “I am a copyist”. He said to me, “My son, be careful in your work, for your work is heaven’s work; for should you omit one letter or add one letter, you will destroy the entire universe”. Such consequences – even if only im- agined or exaggerated – indicate the potentially disruptive power of biblical philology, even in the precincts of textual criticism, in which diagnosing scribal errors are normal practice. When trafficking with a textually-based regime of knowledge, philology can be most untimely. As the following examples will illustrate, biblical philology can raise epistemic doubts and disrupt networks of authority. These effects are often marked, as we will see, by accusations of hubris and heresy. The work of textual criticism has a tendency to open new vistas by disrupting the doxa of everyday knowledge, the tacit “consensus on the sense of the world”, in Pierre Bourdieu’s formulation (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 167). These disruptive effects often set into motion the discourses of heterodoxy and orthodoxy, which reinforce each other by their contesting claims. This dialectic of disturbed (and hence focalized) doxa and con- sequent conflicts of heterodoxy and orthodoxy surrounds the practice of biblical philology in the modern era, even when its practitioners are in- nocent of such intentions. The work of biblical philology entails, to echo Jeremiah and Ecclesiastes, a tearing down and a building up. Given the status of the Bible in western culture, the untimeliness of this dialectic is inevitable. © Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 9–28 The Untimeliness of Biblical Philology 11 My brief genealogy of the disruptive effects of biblical philology begins with Erasmus’s 1516 edition of the New Testament, continues with Louis Cappel’s establishment of the discipline of textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, and ends with a new project in which I am involved, The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition (the first volume is Fox, 2015). In the longue durée of biblical scholarship, the making of critical editions is an untimely act, bordered with imagined and real fears. In tracing the untimeliness of these philological works, I hope to contribute to Nietzsche’s call in “We Philolo- gists” (Wir Philologen) to “pose philology itself as a problem” (Nietzsche, 1990, p. 372),3 and to promote a philological practice that is self-reflective and aware of its own contradictions. The New Instrument In 1516 Erasmus published the first critical edition of the Greek New Tes- tament, titled Novum Instrumentum (“The New Instrument”) (Bentley, 1983, pp. 112–93). The Greek text was accompanied by a Latin translation that differed in many details from the Vulgate, which at this time was a more or less corrupted version of Jerome’s fourth-century translation. The variants from the Vulgate caused much furor. Among the readings omitted by Erasmus from his critical text and translation were a verse from the Epistle of John (1 John 5:7) that is the sole New Testament attestation of the Trinity, and a sentence in Matthew 6:13 that is the conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer (“For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen”.). These missing verses, along with other less sensational differences, raised controversy. Popular preachers and learned theologians accused Erasmus of heresy; some likened him to the Antichrist (Rummel, 1989, vol. I., pp. 117, 128, 137). Prior to publication, Erasmus’s friend Martin van Dorp cautioned him, “My dear Erasmus, much evil could come of this! Many people will begin to discuss the integrity of the text of the Sacred Scriptures, and many will begin to doubt even if only a small part appears to be false” 3 “Stellen […] die Philologie als Problem hin” (Nietzsche, DKG, NF-1875.5.135); see also Pollack, 2009, p. 937. © Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 9–28 12 Ronald Hendel (Asso, 2008, p. 172).4 Here is the fingerprint of biblical philology’s un- timeliness: it disturbs unquestioned doxa, such as the integrity – and by extension, the authority – of the biblical text. “Even if only a small part” is in question, the fact of raising this issue to popular consciousness is a clear danger: “many people will begin to discuss […] and many will begin to doubt”. The unsettling of biblical doxa and the ensuing critical discourse lead to heterodoxy. Philology, whether intentionally or not, dis- rupts the unquestioned habits of Christian faith. Dorp also rightly asserted that Erasmus’s philological method un- dermines the institutional authority of the Church theologians. As Cecilia Asso observes: “This is the substance of Dorp’s accusation: You have ridi- culed the theological profession as a whole, denigrating them and lowering their prestige in the eyes of the people, and now you take on a task which is traditionally theirs. Would that not indicate that you desire to eliminate their raison d’être?” (Asso, 2008, p. 171). The interpretation of Scripture was the theologians’ domain. Now a mere philologist was usurping their authority. This, Dorp cautioned, was an obvious danger to the Church. Erasmus was not shy about asserting his philological claim to au- thority in the domain of biblical interpretation against the scholastic the- ologians. The preface to the Novum Instrumentum included a section on method, Methodus Verae Theologiae (“The Method of True Theology”). In it he made clear that philology undercuts the authority of the theologians. Philology, he argued, offered the only reliable avenue to biblical truth. The prerequisite was not institutional authority but linguistic facility, which excluded virtually all the professional theologians of his time: The first concern must be the thorough learning of the three languages, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, because it is agreed that all the mystery of scripture is made known by them… I do not think that these men deserve attention who, while they rot in sophis- tical trifles until senility are accustomed to say, “Jerome’s translation is enough for me”. […] [T]hose who have invested a good part of their life in Bartolus, Averroes, Aristotle and the Sophistical cavilings do not savor the divine letters as they really are but only as they think they are (Jenkins – Preston, 2007, pp. 250, 253).5 4 “Officiet mehercle, Erasme. Nam de sacrarum litterarum integritate disputabunt plurimi, ambigent multi, si vel tantillum in iis esse falsi” (Allen, 1910, p. 15 [Ep. 304, 1514]). 5 “Prima cura debetur, per discendis tribus linguis, latinae, graecae, hebraicae, quod constet omnem scriptuam mysticam hisce proditam esse […] Nequem audiendos ar- bitror, istos quosdam, qui cum in sophisticis tricis, useque ad decrepitam aetatem © Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 9–28 The Untimeliness of Biblical Philology 13 These remarks on method are addressed to “the future theologian” – they clearly exclude the current crop of theologians who “rot in sophistical trifles until senility”.