THE JOYS OF POACHING (Especially in Classics)

5/19/2013

I used to take the campus metaphor seriously. I took colleges and universities at their word. Each was indeed situated on a campus, an open field where people could move about freely, and ideas and knowledge could easily be exchanged. You could wander around or settle down in the shade of the great plane tree, talk, argue, love. Even in the most crowded, urban setting a campus was a locus amoenus, a pleasant, pastoral setting, a good place for all three of those activities.

No, that’s not a fantasy; we experienced it first-hand. Don’t you remember?

But then signs began to go up: “Private Property.” The campus was no longer one field; it was a cluster of fields, with carefully surveyed disciplinary boundaries.   That was, I guess, the way it had to be. If you’re serious about knowledge, you have to be willing to specialize, dig down at one place or another, find friends and maybe your vocation there.

After a while, though, the signs changed: “No Trespassing.” “No Hunting.” “Keep Out.” OK. I understand that. This is my field. That’s yours. Good fences make good neighbors. Keep away from my field and I’ll keep away from yours. Cut the barbed wire and what was once a locus amoenus becomes a minefield.

Well, not really.   Nobody gets blown up. Those signs are just the “Trespassers W” sign in Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood. But they left me dissatisfied, looking for something more, “hungry”, you could say. And D.H. Lawrence knew what that meant: “They poach because they’re hungry.” Think of the signs as essential to the joy of poaching. You can’t poach without them. It’s delicious, sneaking in and out by the back gate, trying not to get caught, savoring the catch that night by the fire.

In Classics poaching is a special joy, not just because the field has been so subdivided, but because now so much has been outsourced.   Ancient history has goes over to the History silo; Plato and Aristotle to Philosophy. Things are crowded in Art these days but maybe they’d take upGreek and Roman art and ancient material culture for that matter. Political theory? Sent off to Political Science. Don’t worry the Quants won’t even notice. Interested in the development of literary genres? Comp. Lit owns the silo for that. And so on.

That’s why three of us renegade classicists decided to start poaching.   We were hungry, sick of hearing the old Tom Lehrer song:

“Once the missiles go up

Who cares where they come down?

That’s not my department,”

Says Werner von Braun.”

We couldn’t claim expertise in any of the outsourced fields. Others knew the specialized scholarship, but as classicists we thought we knew something, too: How to interrogate a Greek text. So we picked a short out-sourced one, the Gospel of Mark, and tried reading it together as if it were a newly discovered text from the Hellenized eastern Mediterranean at the beginning of the Roman empire. Verse by verse, chapter by chapter, we read it as Greek, and emailed each other about what we saw in it. We argued, agreed, disagreed, and along the way kept experiencing a kind of discourse for which we had been trained (partially at least) but hadn't encountered very often in academia. I hope that we three renegade classicists might have modeled that discourse by our efforts to be true to the Greek, by our frankness and honesty with one another, and by our play-filled tussling with the text and the issues it raises.

You can judge the results at www.Gospelrenegades.com.

For the sheer joy of it, there’s nothing like poaching -- well, nothing quite like it. Give it a try.

4 Comments

Bill

5/19/2013 01:07:59 pm

In a way, though, it's a lonely task, isn't it, poaching on that particular territory? Bible Studies have never been exactly a hotbed of critical thought. Just look at all the BINOs (Bibles in Name Only) the Bible Scholars (γραμματεῖς, "scribes" in the New Testament) go on using and producing, from King James through the New International Version and beyond, with their tendentious mistranslations of the koinē Greek and their utter neglect of the Septuagint — even after the Qumran discoveries!). If the students or teachers catch sight of us squatting on the lawns of their divinity schools and theological seminaries, they'll either tell their feets to do their stuff, or yell, "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" And even outside those hallowed precincts, will people ever get used to looking directly at the Greek of the New Testament without the traditional filters? Is the educated secular audience even interested in doing so? That, I guess, is the challenge. Keep up the struggle, guys! You're seeing stuff that's been carefully hidden for millennia!

Bob Connor

5/20/2013 04:33:14 am

Bill's comment gets at the core question of who "owns" a text and what they do with their claimed ownership. I don't know much about how theologians and NT scholars read the Greek of Mark, except what I see on the Internet. That does not inspire great admiration, but maybe I am missing the best stuff.

What concerns me more is the attitude of what Bill calls " the educated secular audience" including classical scholars. Here are two BIG Greek texts that we classicists have outsourced, the Septuagint and the NT. If analogous material from the fifth century BCE suddenly turned up and fell into our laps, we would rejoice and read every letter with intense philological delight. And no doubt we would learn a lot, including better ways of interrogating a literary text.

Kate Cooper @kateantiquity link

5/20/2013 08:48:57 am

As someone who has taught the Roman period in both Religion and Classics departments over the years, I'd say that there is a lot of enthusiasm among NT historians, especially those working in liberal arts colleges and research universities, about learning from other disciplines, and the converse is true as well more often than one might imagine. This said, it's never easy for people to cross the invisible disciplinary lines. Still, over the last couple of decades, there have been some good inititiatives, especially in areas like papyrology - e.g. the papyroloigcal commentaries on the gospels project, which is reading the gospels with fresh eyes in in light of what we know about textual communities and daily life in the eastern provinces from the papyri. So hope your own project continues to flourish!

Neville Morley link

5/20/2013 04:18:58 pm

And here I was thinking that the US was the promised land in which departments weren't so rigidly segregated and where it was possible for someone to be cross-listed, so to speak, with formal status in two different departments if that's where their research interests lie. In the UK, this is rare, and frequently problematic in the few cases where it does occur.

I'd also be inclined to take a longer view; there have been arguments over who 'owns' key texts since the Renaissance if not before - before there were defined academic disciplines, indeed, and arguments over how those texts should be understood and hence who had the best claim to understand them were one way in which those disciplines sought to define themselves. Cf. claims that Thucydides clearly 'belongs' to the historians and not to the philologists, or clearly 'is' a political theorist rather than an ordinary boring historian. What may be new is that a lot of these arguments seem to have been abandoned; rather than a single debate about the best way to read Thucydides, we have more or less separate discussions within different disciplines, and I can imagine that the same is true for other key texts. I'm not sure how many texts there are that classical scholars now won't touch because they're felt to belong to someone else; the problem is rather that the classical discussions are quite separate from the other discussions. While your approach to Mark may well yield new interpretations as a result of trying to read it through new eyes without the accumulated tradition of reception (not sure how far this is actually possible, but as a deliberate strategy it's interesting), but the risk is that it remains a classicists' exercise rather than contributing to any broader debate.

The great advantage of Altertumswissenschaft is that it's barely a discipline anyway, except in terms of institutional organisation, so is ideally placed to drag these different discussions back together rather than simply offering another internally-focused reading. Which may simply be to propose a different model of academic activity, enabling (or perhaps imperialism) rather than poaching...

THE JOYS OF POACHING (Especially in Classics)

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