In this response, Jason actually refers to my review of his book. I thought this interchange and the one below were especially enlightening.



----- Original Message -----
From: "jasonbeduhn" <jasonbeduhn@yahoo.com>
To: <evangelicals_and_jws@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 6:47 PM
Subject: [evangelicals_and_jws] Re: Jn 8:58 Debate - A Question for Dr. BeDuhn


[Barry]

>What Jason does not appear to realize, and what he may realize if he
>extends his Greek studies to areas outside of biblical Greek, is that
>this construction is just plain unusual.

[Jason]

>>Isn't it rather presumptuous of you to suggest my Greek studies are in need of extension "outside of biblical Greek"?  For one thing, Barry, you have no knowledge whatsoever about my "Greek studies."  I am the only one in this discussion to bring in examples from outside the
Bible.  For another thing, there is no such thing as "biblical Greek."
There is the Greek spoken and written at the time the books of the
New Testament were composed.  There are absolutely no distinctions
between the language used by the biblical writers and that used at
large.  And for yet another thing, you are the one who in your (wildly
inaccurate) review of my book showed no understanding of why the Greek
words for 'child' or 'student' are neuters.  If you are going to
criticize me, you had better know what you are talking about.<<

[Barry]

Again, this is one of those absolutely astounding statements that encouraged me to write the review in the first place.  My original review, the one at the website, is approximately twice as long as the one published in the WTJ.  The book review editor gave two reasons for forcing me to cut down the review:

1) The WTJ is devoted to biblical and theological scholarship of particular importance to the reformed theological world.  I was informed that your book would at best only have a marginal impact on NT studies in general (an assessment with which I agree), and an even lesser impact on reformed scholarship.  It would be of greatest interest to those involved with cult studies.

2) Basically, a full length review article on a work so outside the mainstream of scholarship would be a waste of space for the Journal and a waste of time for the readers, because anyone with an above average reading ability in Greek will be able to intuit what's wrong with the text.

If I have written a "wildly inaccurate" review of your book, then it is simply because you wrote a book in which it was widely possible to misunderstand what you were saying.  Obfuscation and poor writing on your part should not be equated with lack of understanding on the part of others.

On a purely linguistic level, you might have some justification that there is no such thing as biblical Greek, if, for example, you are making the same sort of argument as Deismann and the many who have since followed him.  However, while Deismann showed adequately that the language of the NT was well in accord with the spoken Greek of the period, the designation "biblical Greek" still suffices to categorize the LXX and the NT, as well as certain documents heavily influenced by that body of literature.  It is also true that while the grammar
and structure of the language have strong affinities with the broader linguistic context, on a semantic level we find a number of distinctions: there is no doubt that within the canonical literature (or speaking more accurately, what would become the canonical literature), particular words are used with a range of meaning not shared with the broader language, so that it is fair to speak of
a biblical or canonical usage of the word.  From that perspective, it is certainly reasonable to speak of biblical Greek as being distinct from the broader language and literature of the time.

However, I simply meant it as convenient term to cover the LXX and NT, along with some of the early Christian literature, much the same designation used by BDAG in terms of composing that lexicon.

With regard to accusing me of failing to understand why Greek uses the neuter of children and students, I would find it greatly interesting to find out why you think that it does.  As it was, you made the wildly inaccurate claim that Greek never uses the neuter of persons, a claim easily disputed not only from the biblical text, but by reference to any one of your favorite grammars.

[Barry]

>It calls attention to itself.  Under no circumstances is it the
normal >way to express the concept he wishes to see expressed.  The
simplest >way for the concept to be expressed would be:

> PRIN ABRAAM GENESQAI EGW EGENOMHN
>
> "Before Abraham came into existence, I came into existence..."

[Jason]

>>You haven't been paying attention.  I have never said that I
understand or "wish" the verse to express this.  All along I have been
explaining the verb, as the grammars do, as a PPA.  A PPA is not a
past tense; Jesus is not saying something about what WAS, but what has
been and continues to be.  He is talking about his ongoing existence,
not his origin.  It is Rob who has contended that the PRIN clause
makes the verbal action restricted to the time antecedent to Abraham's
birth, not me.  Your confusion about my position is similar to that
found throughout your review of my book.<<

[Barry]

I will reserve further comment on this specific issue for later, except to note that I should have been a bit clearer: this would be the intuitive way to retrovert the English translation you have suggested.  I doubt very seriously that if you handed any reasonably competent Greek speaker of the first century antequam Abraham fieret ego eram/fui he would have rendered it with EGW EIMI. This non-idiomatic use of the present tense (the historical present is usually reserved for narrative context, not discourse), calls attention to itself as a discursive marker (but something tells me that your exegetical exposure may be lacking a great deal of attention to discourse and literary analysis).

And no, I don't think I am confused with regard to your book, again, not unless you have seriously miscommunicated (but I find that unlikely).  One of the especially troubling things about the book is that you show absolutely no sensitivity to the finer points of exegesis, and particularly how discourse and literary analysis may influence our understanding of the text in question.  What you do over and over again is state very simple rules of grammar, as though they
are prescriptive, rather than descriptive, and then use them as a kind of procrustean bed to make everything fit your notions of the grammar.  It is as though you are stuck on the advanced elementary or intermediate stages of mastery, and begin to make conclusions without taking the more advanced grammatical and linguistic elements of the language into account.

Ironically, those who find your book the most impressive are the JW's, who have a strongly vested interest in the validity of your conclusions, and those who have never studied Greek or studied very little (also a description of the average JW).  Those of us who have spent some time in the language, however, see a multitude of problems with the several examples that you use in support of your overall thesis.  Ironically, in arguing that the major translations are all
infected by bias, you show that you yourself have contracted a particularly virulent form of the disease.

I would be glad to discuss any particulars with you if you like.  It would have been better if you had stuck with publishing in your major field, where you show some measure of competence (as far as I could tell from reviewing several of your publications).  I think it is no accident that your publisher is "University Press of America," a publisher famous for printing a lot of publish or perish stuff -- most of which should have perished.  How many rejection slips from major publishers did you get before you got them to do it, I wonder?  This
is not simply an ad hominem observation: one would expect  a work as good as you seem to think your work is to be published by Fortress or Augsburg or Zondervan (which has recently published a number of works that push the evangelical envelope), but no, you had to send it to University Press...

The following exchange was my commentary on the lengthy interaction between Rob Bowman and Jason BeDuhn on the “Evangelicals And Jehovah's Witnesses” e-mail discussion list. There are some comments included which are directly relevant to my review of Jason's book. Jason here bids the group farewell and offers his evaluation of the debate, so I in turn offer mine:

This is too bad.  I am about 2/3 of the through those 500 pages, and hoped to
make some comments.  In general, I think what we saw in this debate played out
is the maxim that "hermeneutical goal determines exegetical methodology," or we
might say, presuppositions at work.  Allow me to comment on a few of your
observations, and then explain my overall perspective at the end.

> Well, with Rob's departure, I will be signing off, too.  We dragged
> out the John 8:58 thing nearly a year.  I think the light generated
> constitutes the barest fraction of the 500 pages compared to the
> smoke, and I apologize to you all for that.  I think it is no secret
> that after a while I found it exceedingly tedious to deal with the
> "try anything" approach of my opponent.  My own reading of the debate
> is that it loses coherence after last November, as Rob tries to keep
> too many balls in the air at the same time and picks up threads of
> arguments that one has to look back to much earlier postings to make
> any sense of.  His "helpful" quotes of the relevant parts of the
> earlier discussion are often too selective or too out of context to
> truly help (although towards the end of the debate he made an effort
> to quote more systematically).  Far too often I found in his postings
> serious misrepresentations of sources and truly phenomenal leaps of
> argument, and it became much more like correcting student papers than
> engaging in a discussion of the issues.  And we rather got stuck
> there, complaining about each other's arguments rather than moving
> ahead with the topic at hand.  Of course, students don't usually
> object to my corrections of their mistakes.  Well, what can I say?
> Rob is a man of deep convictions, and they rule him.  I don't imagine
> he would find that attribute anything he would need to apologize for.
> He is an apologist for the dominant theological position in modern
> Christianity and that gives him the assurance of numbers and tradition
> and defending what already so many accept without thinking.  He
> completely missed the irony of his using that "Boldly spoken" anecdote
> on someone else, when he is the one in the fortunate position of
> speaking in the company of likeminded fellows.

Well, somewhat cumbersomely, all you have really said here is that Rob is
biased, and reads everything from a biased perspective.  More on that idea
below.  In reading over the various citations and quotations, however, I do not
come to the same conclusion, that Rob mishandled his sources.  If anything, what
I think the discussion illustrated is the ease in which one's presuppositions
can influence the reading of any text.  This is as true of you as it is of Rob.
It would be interesting to give this exchange to some "dog that doesn't have a
bone in the yard" and see what the evaluation would be.

> Unfortunately, being in that position militates against looking at
> things from a fresh and objective perspective.  It also makes it
> difficult to understand a person like myself, who is not coming at
> this subject as a theological opponent.  Rob never could shake off the
> mistaken notion that this was about interpretation, that to concede
> any of my grammatical points would be, in effect, to endorse a
> different theology than the one he holds.  All along I have repeated
> that the translation I have been explaining as the most accurate of
> the original Greek ("have been" or "have existed" as you please -- one
> of the more quixotic and pointless issues Rob raised) does not
> necessitate the Jehovah's Witness Christology any more or less than it
> does the Trinitarian one.  It definitely rules out, as John's
> representation of Jesus intended, the idea that Christ was a mere
> human being.  Beyond that, it could be interpreted along the lines of
> a number of different supernatural or divine Christologies, which is
> precisely what happened historically.  This history of diverse
> interpretation (with Athanasius and Chrysostom on one side, and a
> cavalcade of nearly forgotten figures on other sides) demonstrates my
> point that the original Greek had a greater flexibility of
> understanding than that which is imposed on it by the traditional
> English rendering.  And this same circumstance of confusing
> interpretation with translation has put Rob in the position of
> defending a translation that simply makes no sense to the innocent
> reader, but relies on a great deal of exposition, supposed connections
> to other passages that the person must be told about, odd word games
> that make the verb a secret code for a name (this is the "I AM
> nonsense," which is exactly like taking the sentence "The rainBOW
> MANaged to peek out over the hill," and saying it is actually a
> reference to Rob Bowman), and so forth.  Of course, that's not how
> John's Gospel was first read in his own time, and it is not how it is
> read by anyone coming to it new today.  Coming from so deep within a
> theological tradition makes it difficult to step back and see how the
> text worked in its original setting, which is why I as a historian
> have work to do.

I think you have correctly identified some of the issues that divide you and
Rob.

1.  The distinction between translation and interpretation is one which has
greatly exercised scholars particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Essentially, the two are so closely associated as practically to be inseparable.
It is impossible to discuss the subject without a great deal of attention being
paid to the relationship of hermeneutics and exegesis to translation
methodology, the exact principles to be applied in transferring intended meaning
from the source to the receptor languages.  Traditionally, we have formal and
dynamic equivalency, with several strains and combinations possible thereof.  To
what extent do we allow our translation formally to reflect the structures of
the original, and to what extent is it the responsibility of the translator to
clarify in the receptor language what may have been clearly understood from the
original, but is not necessarily implied by the necessary changes in structure
that must result in the translation process?  It is important to realize that a
formal equivalence translation such as the NASV or the NWT are every bit as
interpretive as dynamic equivalent translations such as the NIV or the TEV,
simply in a different way than the formally correspondent translations.  In
either case, the final product may limit or introduce possibilities of
interpretation of the text in ways not foreseen by the original author in the
original language.

2.  Above, Jason, you make the claim "Of course, that's not how John's Gospel was
first read in his own time..."  Apart from specific commentary from contempories
of John, how can you know how John's gospel was read in his own time?

3.  Implied in your comments, I think, is what is sometimes called "the
arrogance of the modern."  Now, that is not to say that you, Jason, personally
communicate arrogance.  I don't think you do.  Rather, the terminology refers to
a particular mindset that has been popular since the enlightenment period, that
previous generations have gotten it all wrong and that we "moderns" now know
better.  Your tendency simply to charge all who support the traditional
rendering of the text as theologically biased, even ancient commentators who
habitually thought in ancient Greek, reveals this mindset.  Personally, I think
much greater weight should be placed on the history of interpretation, rather
than your rather naive approach of "reinventing the wheel."

> Let me further add that I objected in private communication with Rob
> to the idea of posting summaries, since these only invite the
> temptation to badly represent the arguments of the other and try to
> lead the reader to see in the debate what we want the reader to see.
> Rob has now posted two such summaries, neither of which bear even the
> slightest scrutiny as fair and accurate representations of what they
> purport to summarize.  Indeed, I found his last posting almost a
> caricature of his method in this debate, and simply not worth
> responding to.  Since we were supposed to be talking about the
> essential matters of John 8:58, I long ago grew tired of constantly
> needing to deviate from this purpose to correct Rob's claims about
> what had just happened in the debate, and his slick efforts to dodge
> getting caught at some dubious tactics, not to mention the several
> times when he apparently unawares actually ascribed to and criticized
> in me something that was his own position (such as the absolute
> copula)!  So I did have a few laughs along the way.  But the truly
> frustrating thing was Rob's tactic of blithely carrying on without
> answering my direct questions and without ever taking a position on
> the actual grammatical construct involved in John 8:58.  The fact that
> he could take one position on Tuesday, a completely different one on
> Wednesday, and say that I couldn't criticize him for taking Tuesday's
> position when it was Wednesday, or vice versa, was just the most
> absurd situation I have ever found myself in intellectually.  The fact
> that he could devote dozens of pages to a position, and then say it
> was not his position when it was shown to be indefensible, then revert
> to that position as if nothing had happened, finally brought me to
> recognize that I was not dealing with the normal conditions of
> intellectual exchange.

I do not see Rob doing this, myself.  What I do see him doing is introducing
lines of evidence which push the limits of your own self-chosen paradigm
restrictions, and which, I think, reveal one of the major limitations of your
approach.

> In the end, then, true dialogue never happened.  I suppose no one
> expected that it really would.  So everyone will take from the record
> of this debate what they want to.  This is hardly a forum for
> open-minded mutual exploration, which is a shame because the two
> parties on this site share a deep conviction in the importance of
> these matters, which others do not.  I share the view that these
> matters are important, but from the very different perspective of a
> historian and investigator.  I know Rob ridicules the notion of an
> objective researcher, and it is all too easy for him to see my work as
> biased because it takes a position different from his own.  The point
> I make about bias in my book is different.  It is not identified
> simply by someone taking a position different from yours.  It is
> identified by someone taking a position that does not accord with the
> ordinarily valid bases for a position, in particular exposed by
> self-contradiction.  What I showed in my book in the case of John 8:58
> as in other cases is that translators deviate from how they ordinarily
> handle similar grammatical constructs.  That is, they don't deviate
> from some standard that I set; they deviate from a standard they
> themselves set.  Towards the end of the debate, Rob himself identified
> sentences identical to the traditional translation of John 8:58 as
> ungrammatical.  This is a classic example of the revealed hand of
> bias.  Rob kept trying to pin on me that I am biased in favor of the
> JWs.  I am not.  I criticize the NWT for its own weaknesses using the
> same principles I apply to other translations.  And I explain at the
> end of my book my opinion about why the NWT tends to come out as more
> literally accurate than many other translations, which has to do with
> the circumstances in which the JWs formed as a radical break from
> existing traditions of reading the Bible.  This is a historical
> observation and hypothesis that has nothing to do with favoring or
> disfavoring JW interpretations and theology.  I explain in my book the
> pressure of tradition on reading things into the biblical text, and
> this is exactly the phenomenon involved in Rob's defense of the
> traditional reading of John 8:58, which was never very far from
> theological grounding, while I slogged on naively talking about how
> Greek works as a language, slow to realize that for Rob God trumps all
> rules and practices of grammar.  That might sound good in theological
> circles, but the fact remains that the Bible was communicated in
> ordinary language and did not come with a decoder ring.  We have no
> viable alternative to taking the language on its own normal terms,
> unless so full of our own convictions we have ceased to listen to it.
>
> I think one may fairly conclude that the historian and the theologian
> belong to separate domains, and the difficulties of this debate
> suggest how hard it is to find common ground on which to have a
> meeting of minds.  Well, it was worth a try.  I was invited here as a
> guest on this one subject, and now take my leave of you.  My best
> wishes to you all.

My own evaluation of the debate, some of which observations have been made
elsewhere:

1.  You naively (yes, that's really the best word here) assume that your
position as a "historian" implies some sort of neutrality to the text, and that
everybody else's approach is rife with theological bias.  By now it should be
clear to all your readers on this list that you are as much infected by bias as
everybody else.  There is no such thing as a neutral approach to the text, and
this discussion has gone far toward providing evidence for that thesis.

2.  I have said this several times, both in responses on this list as well as in
my book review: you have an extremely simplistic approach in your use of the
language in exegesis.  It has been interesting to get the reaction of other
scholars who are at your level of scholarly competence or close to it: they
basically see you as out to lunch, not to put too fine a point on it.  You seem
to have very little awareness of how basic grammatical rules both contribute to
and are conditioned by the overall literary context in which the text might be
found.  These rules, of course, do not exist in the abstract, but only in
application in real texts.  Part of the problem is that the grammars on which we
tend to rely will isolate texts to demonstrate rules which are essentially
abstractions, and it is fairly easy to carry that methodology back to the text
when we actually attempt to read it, a species of the "cart before the horse"
problem.

3.  I don't want to leave Rob out, either.  He also, at least in the exchange on
this list, seems to have used a similar methodology.  The invention of "the
eternal present" I found particularly amusing and spectacularly non-helpful.  It
reminds me of the various categories of the use of the genitive that some
scholars, such as Wallace, seem entranced with producing.  We don't need to
invent a grammatical category, especially a theologically biased one, every time
we find a singular or unusual usage.  What we have to do is understand that
usage in its context.

In other words, I think the methodology that both of you assumed for the
purposes of the discussion was fundamentally flawed.  While it is impossible to
verify empirically how the original readers of John's text might have understood
what he had to say, it is safe to say, that as readers familiar with Koine Greek
as a living language, they did not have to resort to the kind of extensive
grammatical analysis of which modern exegetes are fond, any more than native
English speakers such as yourself reading this text are saying to themselves,
"Ooh, he just used a progressive present, I wonder what he meant to imply by
that usage?"  Now, some of this type of discussion really is necessary, since we
are not native speakers of Koine and we are a couple of millenia removed from
the context.  But much of what passes for exegesis is actually artfully
contrived apologetic to prove an a priori position, however that position may
have been derived initially.

This way of using the text is a natural result of the purposes for which the
text is used, and the way in which the original languages are approached in most
seminaries and Bible schools, which provide comparatively little reading
experience to the amount of vocabulary and grammar drilled.  The students are
given word lists and taught how to parse the aorist in order to provide weight
for the interpretations which they might wish to defend from the pulpit and
other ministry contexts.  They are taught to produce translations, but not to
read the text, so that the original languages become, to employ your language,
"the secret decoder ring" better to understand the English text and use it for
ministry purposes.  I laughed when I saw your use of that terminology, since I
have employed it myself on more than one occasion!

The cure to this is to teach students how really to read the original languages,
and not simply use them as tools.  This would include not only the text of the
NT, but the LXX, and lots of extra-biblical literature as well.  Producing
students who can really read Greek and Hebrew would greatly improve the quality
of exegesis, and derivatively help the students as they move into their
professional ministry positions.

My background before moving to NT studies and historical theology was Classics,
and I was forced to read heaps of extra-biblical Greek, and that background is
certainly part of my bias here!  Before my seminary studies, I would
occasionally pick up commentaries or read such famous exegetes as A.T.
Robertson, and wonder "Where are these guys coming from?"  It was like I had
gone from the sane world of literary interpretation into a sort of Alice and
Wonderland planet where words could mean just about anything the interpreter
wanted them to mean.  At WTS, studying under people such as Vern Poythress and
Moisés Silva, and reading folks such as J. Barr, who have a great deal of
cross-disciplinary experience along with their evident mastery of NT
scholarship, I came to realize much better what the problems were, and that my
experience learning to read and interpret Classical texts as literature was
invaluable in application to the NT documents.  I must admit, if I gave your
exchange to some of my former professors, I think they would find the whole
thing vastly amusing, if they didn't first die of terminal boredom at about page
353.

With John 8:58 in particular, I think much of the difficulty is the focus on the
simple grammatical form to the exclusion of John and his purpose in writing his
gospel.  Yes, both you and Rob compared other texts in John (and many other
texts as well) in order to prove your divergent points, but this only
contributed to the problem rather than solved it.  What I mean is that the text
cannot be separated from the entire context of the gospel, and that the general
reading strategy which the gospel requires must be specifically applied at 8:58.
Part of that reading strategy must recognize that John, for all his grammatical
simplicity (in fact, that simplicity is, I believe, a deliberate stylistic
choice), is an extremely careful writer who organizes his text and provides
details all directed toward his purpose in writing, producing a deliberately
crafted and artistic work, no part of which is irrelevant to his purpose.  Our
failure to recognize this is in part, I think, due to our failure to consider
the genre of the text, and to look for literary formulations and constructions
which are not native to John's genre.  Once we begin to recognize the unique
nature of this genre (gospel = theological narrative), then we begin to see the
unique literary forms which John employs in support of his purpose.  This
includes the various "I am" statements, which should not be isolated either as
theologically charged or semantically neutral, but seen in the light of John's
use of "thematic building," or allowing the earlier portions of the gospel to
provide the foundation for later development, which in turn informs the reader
about what John intends in those earlier portions.  This approach, I think,
yields far more hermeneutical fruit than the barebones grammatical-historical
assumed by you both, and will tend to guard against the external imposition of
theological bias as well.

N.E. Barry Hofstetter