Whose Text Is It

It was exactly twenty years ago that Professor Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza gave her landmark presidential address entitled "The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship."1 There she argued for the need for biblical scholarship to "continue its descriptive-analytic work ... for understanding of ancient texts and their historical location" while also "exploring the power/knowledge relations inscribed in contemporary biblical discourse and in the biblical texts themselves." In such an approach, the work of those "traditionally absent from the exegetical enterprise would not remain peripheral or non-existent for biblical scholarship," but "could become central to the scholarly discourse of the discipline."2 My address to you this evening is intended to further this call for a shift in our self-understanding of our scholarly work. We have made progress in the past twenty years, but work remains to be done. My particular focus was provoked in a session I attended at the SBL annual meeting two years ago. In introducing a session on feminism and postcolonialism, a moderator reported that she had been asked why the session had been organized around a book on African women's voices published a few years earlier (i.e., not hot off the press), to which her response had been "because nobody seems to be listening." The authors experienced their claim to ownership of the text, at least within the guild, as being discounted or overridden. Attempting to listen to global feminist voices within biblical studies has been a key theme of my own work, but developing viable modes of engagement between white Euro-Atlantic feminists and global feminism remains a challenge. That challenge, however, is but one component of the much larger question of how we all as scholars engage one another over a wide range of dividing lines, since we all claim texts as our own through our acts of interpretation. I will first approach the question of "Whose text?" and competing claims to ownership in a wide-sweeping overview and then turn more specifically to feminist postcolonial interpretation as a particular example. Before launching into the overview, let me note that I will use more "I" language and anecdotal material than is usual for the presidential address. I want the style of my speaking to reflect my perspective that being more self-consciously contextual, more public rather than less so about the personal in our work, is critically important to a way forward in any mutual engagement across dividing lines. I. "WHOSE TEXT?" IN OUR DESCRIPTIVE ANALYTICAL WORK The question "Whose text?" as I am posing it has two principal dimensions: first, who claims a particular text as important; and, second, how are competing interpretive claims to be negotiated when more than one group has a stake in the same text. I find it helpful to remember that the question, thus conceived, has actually been with us for a long time in our traditional descriptive and analytical research. In the field of text criticism, for example, the degree of differences among manuscript families, as well as evidence of intentional scribal emendations, has led to theories of different schools or centers with different manuscript choices. Here interpretive claims are expressed through variations in the text itself, and scholars ask what kind of contextual hermeneutical and identity claims may lie behind the different manuscript traditions. Studies of canon formation whether of the TNK or the NT are a second, well-established locus of exploration of "Whose text?" The emphasis on Judaisms (plural) of the Second Temple period and beyond, and our knowledge of the many extant Christian writings as well as those that were lost to us and not canonized, provide rich fodder for exploring ancient ownership claims to different texts and competing interpretive claims for texts held in common. A third example of our scholarly historical inquiry into "Whose text? …