At least you were in graduate School for a while. I never went on to it. I was planning to become an Episcopal (Anglican) priest, and the seminary preferred undergraduate work in social sciences at that time ("It's all about praxis!" the Seminary ads in Christianity Today magazine would say). However, I lost my faith in senior year at college, which kind of nipped the Episcopal minister thingy in the bud, although financially I'd be better off than I am now. Here, protestant ministers & pastors and even Unitarian Universalist ministers receive, in salary and allowances (housing, travel, etc.), the equivalent of US $80,000-$100,000/year based on my experience auditing church payrolls for work.arnoldo wrote:I don't know what your saying since I dropped out of graduate school after gaining 15 credit hours. I did manage to take (and pass) Intro to Research so I vaguely remember some of the stuff the professors blathered about.[/u]DCHindley wrote:If Biblical criticism was compared to, say, eating establishments that dish out knowledge, it would come closest to a "Self Service" establishment. IMHO, the very infrastructure which trains and educates tomorrow's sacred Ministers, Pastors, and Priests (who comprise at least 80% of the students by graduate level, I would think), will skew the analysis by placing certain historical norms out of bounds so as not to tip the apple cart. Biblical critics, in general, have a vested interest in preserving the status quo WRT the critic's own preferred tradition. "You don't," they say, "bite the hand that feeds you!"
At least I managed to graduate with an undergraduate degree in Psychology, but I wasn't motivated to go into that direction. In those heady days (1970s) businesses were doing relatively well and wanted to broaden their markets at home and overseas, so a newspaper article in the employment section of the local paper suggested that liberal arts was an acceptable background for entering the business world. Boy they must have been smoking something strange in their meerschaum pipes in the private golf club smoking room.
I was not very well impressed by most major companies I ended up working for (mostly insurance carriers, but also a couple finance companies in the early days. Funny thing is, I now work for a "monopoly" worker's compensation insurance carrier (in the US these state owned insurance carriers are the sole recourse for WC coverage in the states of Ohio, Wyoming, North Dakota and Washington, but because of Ohio being a "rust belt" state, we still have many corporate headquarters and many manufacturing businesses, making us have maybe the second largest book of business in the country) has been the exact opposite, being very positive. Go figure.
What are you doing now, arnoldo?
Personally, I learned more about research from reading books like Magnus Zetterholm's The Formation of Christianity in Antioch: A Social-Scientific Approach to the Separation Between Judaism and Christianity London and New York: Routledge, 2003
Damn, lost part of my last draft of this, so I'll have to give the abbreviated version.
The Social Science model for understanding ancient Mediterranean cultures: Bruce J. Malina & Richard L. Rohrbaugh (Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels) and Malina (The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology) present terrifying, brutal and uncaring Mediterranean societies that we would find intolerable today.
Personally, I detect an ideological implication that we should be soooo glad that we have reaped the benefits of the ethically superior Christian social-gospel, and do not have to live in that kind of dirty smelly and oppressive world. So, everyone go to your mainline church of your choice, inhale the aroma of abundantly applied perfume and after-shave, and make the world a better place thereby. They believe that Mediterranean societies have remained basically unchanged since Jesus' time, so they study modern Arabs, Greeks, Anatolians, and Sicilians to come up with this model. I can't help but think of Albert Deissmann, who did something similar about a century earlier based on a steamship tour of the region (E.T. Light from the Ancient East), and Kenneth Bailey did more recently (his theory of "informal controlled tradition") based on his anecdotal (not scientific) comparison of the retelling of stories about 19th century Egyptian missionary John Hogg around campfires by modern Egyptian Arab Christian villagers and those relayed by his wife (daughter?) in a book after his death. The ideological implication is towards theological Liberalism.
Then there is the theory of "Itinerant Radical" origins to the Christian message, which has spilled over into study of the Didache. The stand outs are represented by articles in the mid 1995 & 1996 publications The Didache in Context and The Didache in Modern Research), Jonathan Draper, Kurt Niederwimmer, Stephen J Patterson, and above all Gerd Theissen starting in his case about 1973. He published two monographs in 1977 & 1983, (1978 E.T.s being The First Followers of Jesus: a Sociological Analysis of Earliest Christianity, The Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity, aka The First Followers of Jesus, and 1987 E.T. of Psychological Aspects of Pauline Theology). This theory requires that there be extreme social stratification with the vast majority crushed to death by the super-duper heavy socio-economic impact of Roman colonialism.
It is indebted to the socio-economic models developed by Marx & Engels, with some Max Weber thrown in so as to ground it onto some "solid" (although severely dated) sociological (= cultural anthropological) theory. This rampant speculation somehow does not jibe with what I used to read in Psychology and Sociology courses in college, and I think I can identify ideological implications that are Radical.
This idea has also energized folks interested in Q or Gospel tradition passing in general (like gas passing, I guess) such as Burton Mack, J D Crossan and even John Kloppenborg, who I admire greatly. In Birth of Christianity, Crossan tries to beef up this theory of widespread socio-economic pressure that crushes all in its way by yanking out of context statements from Gerhard Lenski (Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification, 1966) and John H Kautsky (Politics of Aristocratic Empires), which he very imaginatively fabricates into something he called the "Lenski-Kautsky" model. He also uses what he likes from G E M de Ste. Croix ("Karl Marx and the History of Classical Antiquity" in Arethusa 8), but leaves his more moderate work The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World without comment.
I went out of my way to read works by G. Lenski, J. H. Kautsky, his father (or grandfather) Karl Kautsky, Karl Marx (Capital), F. Engels, Albert Kalthoff, de. Ste. Croix, etc., to learn more about socio-economic theory, but I believe that I have learned more about "subsistence economies" from books by James C. Scott, especially The Moral Economy of the Peasant than the rest.
How this might relate to the OP (Josephus' portrait of David) is, like what happened to Steve Mason (or was it Shaye J. D. Cohen?), there are so many rhetorical variables to consider when evaluating what Josephus, or any historian ancient or modern for that matter, was "really saying", that we despair of ever learning if there is any truth behind the apologetic and defensive works of poor Josephus. If Josephus can be assigned a modern ideological perspective it might have to be a weird combination of anarchism and conservatism all at the same time.
DCH