Malachi151

Well, I tried. I submitted a paper to the Society of Biblical Literature to present this year, but all of the groups that I sent it to rejected it. I expected that would be the case, but I figured I'd give it a try and at least see if I got any comments back, but I didn't get comments either, just form letters.

Here is the paper that I submitted. It does have typos, because I didn't learn about it until almost the time of the deadline, so I had to throw it together.

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/te...spelofMark.pdf

karlmarx

Did they give a reason why it was rejected?

Malachi151

No, just a form letter that says that they had many excellent entries and that they were unable to accept all papers. I got the same letter from all four groups. No biggie.

BTW I applied to the Synoptic Gospels group, Historical Jesus group, something about Roman and Jewish Interactions group, and one or two others.

karlmarx

"Why accept something controversial when there are so many other safe papers to chose from?". :banghead:

Charles Gadda

I discuss the rigging of lectures at SBL and ASOR in this article.

Could papers by Israeli archaeologists who disagree with the "Qumran-Essene" theory also have been submitted and rejected, since Jodi Magness gave three lectures (two with the same title, one of them at a "plenary session") in which she "attacked" (as I have seen it reported) the research conclusions of these archaeologists?

Ted Hoffman

Malachi,
I have read most of your paper - though the one I have been going through is the one on rationalrevolution.net. It's a good work generally.
Congratulations for attempting to submit your paper at SBL. My suggestion is that you repackage it and resubmit it.
I am not a scholar but I have a few comments/suggestions I can make regarding why they may have blown you off. Take my comments for whatever they are worth - they are just speculations.

1. First of all, your paper is not a scholarly paper. It is like one written for laymen. SBL is a scholarly forum so from the get go, they may discard it as not worthy of their time. One can determine this within the first five seconds of looking at your work. When I say it is not a scholarly paper, I mean it has no abstract, no references/ Bibliography to works of other scholars etc.
You must first start by establishing that, from your literature review (yes, you must do this first and show that you have surveyed the relevant literature), you have determined that there is a knowledge gap or an unresolved problem that you then propose a solution for. Define the problem you are trying to solve.
Your paper does not clearly indicate that you are aware of any related works and what shortcomings you have identified. This is critical in my view. And this is why I was asking you for references a couple of days ago.

2. Because of the above, your work is hanging "up there." It is not grounded on any other works - upon whose shoulders are you standing? Please note that a lot of work has been done in this field (Allegory and other literary decices in the gospels, literary allusions etc) by scholars. I am sure they are there. Open any book on literary/rhetorical criticism and you will find related works.
For example, Rhoads and Michie (Mark as Story), Elizabeth Struthers Malbon (Narrative Space and Mythic Meaning in Mark, 1986), Paul Duke (Irony in the Fourth Gospel, 1985), Scholes and Kellog, (Nature of Narrative), Upensky B., (A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form, 1973).

3. I think you use the terms "allegorical" and "literary allusion" rather loosely. These are key terms in your paper and you need to clearly define them and perhaps indicate (as a background) whether there is a history of other ancient writers using literary allusions in the manner you suggest Mark has - was Mark the first and only one to do this? You need to define these terms, or better yet, have other scholars define them for you. Are you coining these expressions? Are you saying nobody has studied this idea in the NT scholarship?
If Mark relied on Paul, are you the first one to discover this? Who else has made similar observations? What is the basis of the arguments? Linguistic? thematic? Literary?

4. You have to address related works that have already addressed these allusions albeit with a different interpretation and you have to refute them before you can advance your thesis. Here you will need to touch on Judith H. Newman, Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (1999) who explains them as scripturalization. You will also have to address the interpretations advanced by Joel Marcus (The Old Testament and the Death of Jesus: The Role of Scripture in the Gospel Passion Narratives, in John T. Carroll and Joel B. Green, The Death of Jesus in Early Christianity (1995), p. 205-233.) Crossan, John Dominic, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus (1998) As I indicate in my review of Sanders, these allusions to the OT can be interpreted as prophecy historicized, scripturalization, fictionalization, embellishment of actual history or a mixture. You have to address these, or show you are aware of them even if only in passing. Failure to mention them can be taken as a sign of ignorance - note that some of those SBL buggers may be exponents of these theories you dont find worthy of mention. Why should they pay attention to your theory?

5. You are an amateur so you cannot make certain claims or conclusions without scholarly support. You make several sweeping claims which is just unacceptable in any scholarly paper. Which scholars support the idea that Mark used the Septuagint and not the Hebrew scriptures? have there been problems/disputes in determining that or is it just obvious? You don't note any scholars or any works. Have you determined that the author of Mark couldn't read Hebrew?
You write "Understanding these references is key to understanding the Gospel of Mark." Says who? You?
"While most of the references to the Hebrew scriptures within the Gospel of Mark have been individually addressed before" Where? And decide on whether it is Hebrew Scriptures or Septuagint you want to refer to.

In a nutshell, you need to support your claims.

Best wishes.

Malachi151

Hey Ted, I asked about some of those issues before submitting actually. They said that this was a paper for an oral presentation so no citations were needed and that it should be written in a spoken form. They said that the paper should be as close to how the oral presentation will be given as possible. I think it was too long personally, but they, and Jeffrey Gibson, seemed to indicate that between 10 and 20 pages was appropriate.

Since it was for an oral presentation it makes working in supporting documentation more difficult.

Also, I lack the linguistic background to provide any really significant supporting analysis. If someone wants to refute my proposals based on linguistic analysis of best texts then they are free to do that, but I don't think that the assumption up front should be that since I am not using native languages that its all baseless.

Jeffrey Gibson

A good summary.

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

Can you quote anyone as actually saying that?

You missed (or misunderstood) the implications of the note I gave you that first time proposers had to submit their proposals in full, and not just an abstract of them -- which meant that documentation of your claims, as well as showing that you were acquainted with what's been already written on your thesis, was absolutely necessary.

As to the paper's length, I said 20 pages of text was good for the amount of time one has for presentation, but I did not say (so far as I can recall) that the text you'd read, let alone submit, should not be documented.

It's not an all or nothing deal. Besides that you could still speak briefly of who has said what about allegory, etc. in the body of your paper without making things "difficult" for an oral presentation.

Did you do any research at all into what papers presented at previous SBLs looked like?

But you are expected at SBL, and when you put yourself forward as a scholar as you do when you submit to SBL, to use the original languages in your paper and to do exegesis on the basis of the original languages in which the texts you exegete were written, not English translations of them. Otherwise you come off as naive and probably wrong about the parallels you claim exist between OT and NT texts, since your claims that there are parallels are not based upon a true examination of the texts you cite to see if they are really there.

And why shouldn't someone who sees that you do exegesis on the basis of translations, and does not cite relevant scholarly literature, not assume not only that that your comparisons are baseless , but that you are not a scholar and that you have no awareness of what's already been said on the topic on which you are writing. No scholar works with biblical texts they way you do. No scholar does what you have done -- especially in a paper to be presented at SBL -- i.e., ignores, let alone shows no awareness of, the previous scholarly work done on the topic of the literary genre of Mark and Mark's use of the OT.


If you'll go back and look at the archives, you'll see that I tried to tell you numerous times when you expressed an interest in getting your work on Mark published, that you needed to do -- and show within your paper that you had done --far more research on the topics of the genre of Mark and how Mark uses the OT than you were indicating that you had done, for this to happen; and that if you didn't do it, you'd never get your work published and you'd only end up you'd show yourself as extremely naive and uninformed on the issues you were making claims about.

Why didn't you listen?

Jeffrey

Ted Hoffman

I really laughed when I read this. At any rate Malachi, its quite simple to deliver an oral presentation while dropping names and relevant works.
At a personal level, I think your thesis is hastily developed and I am not sure you are properly aware of the difficulties that surround it (this is just an impression I have). But before I even criticize it, I would have been interested in reading a background of allegorization of historical events and what scholars have said on the topic - I am referring to allegorization by other ancient writers - this will help us evaluate your work - right now, you are like someone asking the readers - "do you agree or disagree?".
That really is important before we can evaluate whether an allegorical apparatus can actually be identified in Mark.
Or you can be bold and lay your reputation on the line and say only Mark did this and get on with it.