Subject: Re: Post-modern textual criticism

From: Jim West <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 1997 12:33:37 -0500 (EST)

At 08:18 AM 1/22/97 -0800, you wrote:
>  There's no longer an author.  The text has 
>been liberated from any such constraining notion as an author or an 
>intent.  

In fact the text has not been liberated at all by this method- it has been
brought into the bondage of the reader who may understand absolutely nothing
of what the author intended.  And, by the by, to suggest that an author
intends nothing is the purest folly.  What fun Erasmus and Hutten would have
had with deconstructionists!  Would that their mighty spirits arise from the
netherworld and put to right what has been so wrongly asserted.

>So we can never do anything but count MSS.  As Larry pointd out 
>quite adeqautely, there are no more copyist errors.  

It is impossible for anyone who has ever graded a students paper to actually
believe this nonsense.

>When one scribe (I 
>forget which MS) in Luke 3 apparently went across the columns instead of 
>down, making for a very interestng geneaology, that's not an error.  
>It's another, equally valid reading.  I see no way under this construct 
>to even defend the idea of doing textual criticism.  

True enough.  Thats why no one of a deconstructionist bent does text
criticism.  To your tents, O Israel!

>How can you 
>possibly attempt to get to an autograph, if you can not ask about intent 
>or context to help determine what is or is not a "good" reading?  Just 
>so you don't wonder, I just spent the last semester working through some 
>of these authors and have spent the January break reading Thiselton's 
>New Horizons in Hermeneutics.  He seems to show, at a much more erudite 
>level than I can, that my appraisals are not far from the mark.
>
>Ken Litwak

Jim

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Jim West, ThD
Petros TN

[email-masked]

---

From: Nichael Cramer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 1997 13:36:02 -0500 (EST)

Jim West wrote:
>Ken Litwak wrote:
> > [...etc...] 

Jim, I will try not to be unkind, but exactly this appeal to
"postmodernism" is a point Ken has returned to repeatedly. 

He's obviously free to do as he pleases in this regard.  However, it's
very difficult not to read his (repeated) postings on these topics as
anything other than an effort to perform an "end run" around those results
of Biblical scholarship which he apparently finds so unappealing. 

(For exmple, on a related topic, this is all certainly cut from the same
cloth as his attacks on evolutionary science.  I.e. once his "scientific"
arguments were shown to be without merit he retreated to the stock
"postmodern" refrain of "all knowledge is subjective, therefore we can't
_really_ know anything, therefore...")
	
In short, as Prof Ehrman pointed out earlier, caricatures of postmodern
criticism exist on both sides of the fence. 

N

---

From: Kenneth Litwak <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 1997 18:07:38 -0800

Perhaps N would like to show in what I have caricatured specific 
authors I mentioned.  If N wuold like it, I will refer to specific pages 
 in Derrida, etc.  It's easy to attack someone for a "caricature" if you 
don't have to prove it.  That's one of the theings that give "rhetoric" 
a bad name.  What's worse, N has clearly not understood what I have 
written to him about scientific method, and evidently knows little about 
what recent philosphers of science have to say about how one itnerprets 
data, which as a matter of fact applies to TC as well.  His attack is 
itself an unsupported caricature.   

"K"