Meredith Kline's works online here.

HT Josh James

A few jottings I made in last week's class that I forgot to blog about at the time. These may give a flavour of Dr Poythress' style...

I don't think any of us really know where most of our ideas come from...

Grammatical-historical exegesis, in order to be scientific and rigorous, is also superficial.

I once heard a Puritan preacher...

I didn't think he was quite that old!

We could almost think of land as a sacrament - as a means of experiencing God's presence and blessing.

How do you make that an interesting lecture?

Professor C. L. Seow just treated the poets class to a 2 hour close reading of the Hebrew text of Job 1-2 - which was fascinating in itself - with a long digression on the history of interpretation of Job's wife. There is a significant tradition of interpreting her words, literally 'Bless God and die' positively. According to Professor Seow, the first negative translation, 'Curse God and die' was Luther's.

But what was especially fascinating was the way Professor Seow traced the interpretive tradition through art work from early bas reliefs, through to mediaeval, renaissance and later works. One painting, by Georges de la Tour, was especially interesting. The painting had been thought to represent the angel coming to rescue Peter from jail. Here, obviously, the angel was thought to be comforting and warm. Then someone noticed the broken pot on the floor by the naked man and realised this was actually intended to be Job. As a result, the painting was given the title 'Job's wife mocks him.' Yet the woman is the same figure who was once thought to be angelic, bringing relief and escape to Peter. How much more likely (particularly given the long tradition Professor Seow has identified) that de la Tour wanted to show Job's wife comforting him.

I was reminded of a lecture I went to at SBL on mediaeval representations of the Song of Songs. The lecturer there made the point that modern scholars tend to ignore large parts of the history of interpretation because we only focus on texts. But music, art, sculpture and, no doubt, other media also convey historical interpretative traditions we would do well to take notice of. Particularly when we're looking at periods of history when texts were rarely possessed but paintings could be seen week by week in church.