This is a reminder of the seminar this Friday (Mar 16; 1:30-5:00pm, Sydney
Note also that all Graduate Research students are expected to attend the Seminars this year.
Schedule
1:30-2:15 Xavier Lakshmanan, “Realistic Temporality”
2:15-3:00 Anthony Rees, “Reading Numbers 25 with the Jewish Tradition”
3:00-3:30 Break
3:30-4:15 Jione Havea , “Sea-ing Ruth with Joseph’s mistress”
4:15-5:00 Karl Hand, “Document L as a thought experiment in source-critical epistemology”
Abstracts
Xavier Lakshmanan, “Realistic Temporality”
This paper explores how Ricoeur’s notion of metaphoric reality redescribes the existential human reality and reorganizes temporality into a fresh existential possibility of being by providing humans with self-knowledge in terms of self’s understanding of its possibility. It has been established that Ricoeur’s idea of the “revelation of the real as act” functions to “establish another world” which “corresponds to other possibilities of existence” than the actual ones. These newly refigured possibilities are the “most deeply our own” as they are reoriented through time. This redescription of temporality is attained based upon narrative hope, comprised of a passion, imagination and time. The passion gives rise to the redescription of temporality; creative imagination energizes it; and the temporal features of time restructure and reorient it in the world. Existence is seen as the form of this realistic temporality, in which a being is a constant possibility; existence is a radical conflict; and mortality is a way to temporal-eternal and eternal-temporal circularity. Self-knowledge is grasped as the totality of reoriented temporality here and now as the presence of the possible retrospectively, prospectively and introspectively. The eternal-temporal circularity is established by arguing that temporality possesses eternality and eternity possesses temporality. Thus the totality of human temporality is temporal-eternal, which ultimately constitutes self-understanding. In this way, the discovery of human life is always fresh and such a life is with self-understanding and identity.
Anthony Rees, “Reading Numbers 25 with the Jewish Tradition”
The story which unfolds in Numbers 25 echoes through the biblical tradition. Its trace is heard in Psalm 106, 1 Corinthians 10, 2 Peter 2, Jude and Revelation 2. These instances though, are little more than fleeting references, short intimations. What is found in extra-biblical references to these events though is a far more extended re-telling, beginning with the role of Balaam in the orchestration of the initial encounters between Israel and Moab (Num 22-24), through to the role Phinehas plays in the ensuing war on Midian.
Beginning with 1st Century Jewish historiographers Philo and Josephus, moving then to the Talmud, Targum Onqelos and the great Rabbinical commentaries of Rashi and Rashbam, this paper will examine the expansion of the biblical narrative in Jewish tradition.
As the sea (as boundary and path) connects islands otherwise seen as isolated from each other, evident in sayings like “no text is an island” and in the drive to name “Pacific islands” as “Sea of islands,” this essay transfers the currents that flow between islands into a transtextual reading of the two stories of two non-Hebrew women characters, Ruth and the unnamed Mistress of Joseph. As a male reader, i admire Ruth for uncovering the feet of Boaz, fulfilling the fantasies of manly eyes, equally so he should admire the Wife of Potiphar and Mistress of Joseph for grabbing his body. “Sea-ing” these two women characters together is an invitation to rethink the association of remoteness with islands, in other words, those who see islands as isolated from each other overlook the context of island life: the sea. From the sea to the Bible, this chapter will expose the land-locked-ness of [colonial] biblical hermeneutics.
Karl Hand, “Document L as a thought experiment in source-critical epistemology”
Source criticism has recently experienced a renaissance during the ‘third quest’ for the historical Jesus. This was a boom-time research economy for postulated gospel sources such as Q and the Historical Jesus, and yet extremely little was done on Luke’s hypothetical source, L. This gap in the research could be due to a lack of any method to create a critical text of L, since it was only quoted by one source (Luke), and therefore lacks any control text. This highlights the central weakness of source-criticism as a methodology. That is, since the epistemology of source-criticism is so unique among the humanities, what is the basis of validity in source-critical theories?
This paper addresses these issues by presenting a rigorous methodological postulation of a ‘Document L’. The process of validating a source is clarified by analogy to Archimedes’ formulation of an ‘exhaustion method’ to postulate the quantity of the numeral pi by setting maximal and minimal limits to the numeral, and then narrowing the gap. Applied to L, an exhaustion method may set a maximal limit by the elimination of material known to belong to other sources, and then chip away at a minimal limit by structural analysis, stylometry, and the study of hapax legomena. The result of this method is a critically testable Document, which I argue should be added to the canon of hypothetical gospel sources. This is followed by a critical reflection on the implications of this process for both the epistemology and ontology of the biblical text.
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