MetaCatholic

I wish you all a very Happy New Year. I am not going to make any resolutions. I am going to try to pay more serious attention to my photography this year, however. This is a photo taken at dusk tonight of Worcester Cathedral.

Michael Bird begins 2008 by announcing the demise of the “New Perspective on Paul” era. While I regard NPP as a useful shorthand for describing a number of views, I’m not entirely sure the differences between many of its leading proponents aren’t nearly as great as those between “NPP scholars” and others. I’m not totally convinced there ever really was a single New Perspective, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an era.

For Mike, the sign of the end is the publication of a single commentary which entwines some NPP views and some others. One swallow does not make a summer. The assigning of end points is highly unlikely to be remotely possible at only one year’s remove from them, and the assigning of a starting point is equally arbitrary. Why should Mike pick 1976, the publication of the collected essays of Paul among Jews and Gentiles, and not 1963, the publication year of the most seminal essay in that collection: “Paul and the Introspective conscience of the West”? Just as it took more than one essay to mark the beginning of the era, so also it will take more than one recent commentary to mark its passing.

In any case, this business about eras is largely pointless. It seems to owe its existence partly to the human proclivity for organising ideas, and partly to the discipline of the often tedious literature review. We have seen it again and again in the factually dubious declarations of numbered Quests for Jesus, which “begin” and “end” with remarkable regularity, while the work of historical research is continuously ongoing. There is some benefit to noting and grouping the emphases of particular phases, but it is a limited benefit.

The danger with classing things in eras is that it gives one scholar the opportunity to believe themselves intellectually fashionable, and dismiss another as hopelessly out-of-date. Eras usually tend to distract from arguments. Classifying someone is a poor substitute for engaging with them.

(Updated PS — I do not include Michael Bird in that latter comment: he is particularly good at constructive and eirenic engagement of those who hold different positions to his own)