From social description to social-scientific criticism. The history of a Society of Biblical Literature Section 1973-2005

Abstract

The thirty year history of an SBL Section reveals an essential component of the exegetical enterprise coming of age. Focused from the beginning on the social and cultural dimensions of New Testament writings and their social settings, the Section has undergone notable permutations and cleavages while also reflecting the development, refinement, and academic influence of a now standard sub-discipline of the historical critical method.

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This history of a "Section" of the Society of Biblical Literature was first presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 17-22, 2005. Delivered in the Social-Scientific Criticism of the New Testament Section of the SBL on November 20, 2005, it was one of several papers addressing the Section's general theme of that year, "The New Testament and the Social Sciences after Thirty Years: Retrospect and Prospect." It is published here as it was presented, with only minor modifications.

In the Beginning, Social Description

To put these three decades into historical perspective, I want to take us back to the loins and first organizational stirrings whence came this SBL Section. This would take us to the year 1972 and the historic meeting of the AAR/SBL in Los Angeles with the theme, "Religion and the Humanizing of Man." On Monday, September 4, 1972, a so-called "Section" of the SBL met under the theme "Experiments toward a Social Description of Early Christianity." Wayne Meeks of Yale University presided, and five papers were presented. The following year, at the annual meeting of the AAR/SBL held in Chicago, a working group emerged with the theme "The Social Description of Early Christianity," with Leander Keck and Wayne Meeks serving as co-presiders and seventeen persons signed up as participants: Paul Achtemeier, Scott Bartchy, James Charlesworth, John Elliott, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, John Gager, Robert Jewett, Leander Keck, Robert Kysar, Wayne Meeks, Dean Moe, Frederick Norris, Peter Richardson, Wayne Rollins, Jonathan Z. Smith, Robert Wilken, James Wilde, and Raymond Williams. (On the undertaking see also W. Meeks 1975). At this meeting the decision was made to focus on the social formation of Christianity in a particular region of the Circum-Mediterranean, and the choice was for Antioch on the Orontes. Following five years of papers on Antioch, Robert Wilken and Wayne Meeks published their 127-page co-authored volume on Antioch in 1978. It was entitled Jews and Christians in Antioch in the First Four Centuries of the Common Era (SBL Sources for Biblical Study 13. Missoula: Scholars Press, 1978). The authors state that the book "reflects the convergence of two disciplines, New Testament studies and early church history or patristics" (1979: vii). One of the additional projects of this working group was the construction of an inclusive bibliography of materials on the social world of antiquity. I contributed to this effort the large bibliography assembled by the San Francisco BASTARDs (Bay Area Seminar for Theology and Related Disciplines). It was a massive bibliography, which, to my knowledge, was circulated among a few but never published.

While the study on Antioch involved no professed inclusion of, and indicated no interest in, the social sciences, it did include much social detail on the situation in Antioch and exemplified one of several possible loci for "social descriptions" of early Christianity. A paper prepared for the group by Jonathan Z. Smith and eventually published in 1975 listed four possible goals that a "social description of early Christianity" might envision.

* The first goal might be a description of the social facts contained in early Christian materials.

* The second would entail a composition of a social history of early Christianity or of specific phases thereof.

* The third goal could involve an analysis of the social organization of early Christianity in terms of the social forces giving birth to the movement and the social institutions it formed.

* The fourth could entail an interpretation of early Christianity as a social world providing meaning to and a plausibility structure for those inhabiting this world.

While Smith did not indicate what role the social sciences might play in this analysis of social realia and social issues, the point was soon taken up by two other members of the working group, John Gager and myself. Gager noted that "social description" is not to be confused with sociological analysis, stressing that description is one thing and sociological analysis another (Gager 1979:175). It was the latter which Gager was promoting and which is clearly evident already in his study, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (Gager 1975). I cited Gager to make the same point in my 1981 study, A Home for the Homeless by way of introducing what I then called a "sociological exegesis" of 1 Peter. For this analysis I found useful the sociological model of a conversionist sect, drawing on the work of sociologist Bryan Wilson (Wilson 1973) to investigate and explain the social situation and socio-rhetorical strategy of I Peter and its sectarian ideology. Meeks had already explored the utility of the sectarian model in his article on "The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism" (Meeks 1972), and Robin Scroggs (1975) proposed it as a useful social model for examining the formative Jesus movement in general. Eventually I reorganized Smith's four types of approaching social issues and added two further ones that involved purposeful use of the social sciences for examining Mediterranean social and cultural scripts and for investigating the social dimensions of biblical texts (Elliott 1993:18-20). The collection of essays edited by Meeks in 1979, Soziologie des Urchristentums, on the other hand, had little to do with sociology and much to do with social history.