Table Of Content·r
~. T E Iii R I .E B .
Structural
Exegesis
for New
Testament
Critics
by
Daniel Patte
Fortress Press
Minneapolis
COMPUTER-ASSISTED LESSONS
For individual or class use on any IBM and
IBM-compatible personal computer
These lessons provide interactive initiation to the structural exegetical
method presented in this book (four lessons) and exercises in structural
exegesis (ten lessons), that include exercises on John 4:4-42 and 10:1-18,
Luke 24:1-53, Thomas 29-50, a section of the Rule of the Community of
Qumran, and a passage of an early rabbinic text, the Mekilta.
For a more detailed description of these computer assisted lessons
and information about how to order them, write or call:
Duke University Press
Box 6697 College St.
Durham, NC 27708
(919) 684-6837
In Memory of
John A. Hollar
January 2, 1942-0ctober 20, 1989
STRUCTURAL EXEGESIS FOR NEW TESTAMENT CRITICS
Copyright © 1990 Augsburg Fortress. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in
critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without
prior written permission from the publisher. Write to: Permissions, Augsburg Fortress, 426
S. Fifth St., Box 1209, Minneapolis MN 55440.
Scripture quotations unless otherwise noted are from the Revised Standard Version of the
Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the
National Council of Churches.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Patte, Daniel.
Structural exegesis for New Testament critics / by Daniel Patte.
p. cm. - (Guides to biblical scholarship. New Testament
series)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8006-2396-7
1. Bible. N.T.--Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Structuralism
(Literary analysis) 3. Bible as literature. I. Title.
II. Series.
BS2377.5.P38 1989
225.6'OI-dc20 89-39161
CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
@JTM
ANSI, Z329.48-1984.
Manufactured in the U.S.A. AF 1-2396
94 93 92 91 90 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Contents
Editor's Foreword vii
Acknowledgments x
INTRODUCTION 1
The multifold theoretical basis of structural exegesis and the
quest for meta-theories 3
The multiplication of structural exegetical methods and the
quest for their interrelations 4
PART ONE: Initiation: Structural Exegesis of John 3:1-21
Chapter 1: Beginning a Structural Exegesis (Step 1) 9
Methodological considerations: The need for a complete
discourse unit 9
Exegetical example 1: John 4:4-42 and John 10:1-18 as
complete discourse (sub-)units 16
Exegetical example 2: John 3:1-21 as a complete discourse
unit 17
Conclusion: The theme of a religious discourse unit as
reflecting the author's faith 20
Chapter 2: The Formal Steps of a Structural Exegesis
(Steps 2, 3, and 4) 23
MethodolOgical considerations: Explicit oppositions of actions
as expressing the author's faith 23
The six steps of a structural exegesis of a discourse unit 26
Step 2. Identifying explicit oppositions of actions in John
3:1-21 27
Step 3. The convictions expressed by the subjects of opposed
actions in John 3:1-21 32
v
CONTENTS
Step 4. The convictions expressed by the efiects of opposed
actions upon receivers in John 3:1-21 41
Chapter 3: The Concluding Steps of a Structural Exegesis
(Steps 5 and 6) 47
Step 5. The pattern of the system of convictions expressed in
John 3:1-21 47
Step 6. Discerning the specific features of the discourse
unit 61
PART Two: Exercises in Structural Exegesis
John 4:4-42 and Luke 10:21-42
Introduction to Exercises in Part Two 75
Chapter 4: First Exercise in Structural Exegesis
John 4:4-42 79
Steps 3 and 4. The convictions expressed by the subjects and
receivers of opposed actions in John 4:4-42 79
Step 5. The pattern of the system of convictions expressed in
John 4:4-42 90
Conclusion: A comparison of the patterns of convictions in
John 4:4-42 and John 3:1-21 93
Chapter 5: Second Exercise in Structural Exegesis
Luke 10:21-42 99
Step 1. Luke 10:21-42 as a complete discourse unit 99
Steps 2, 3, and 4. Identification of the convictions expressed in
Luke 10:21-42 101
Step 5. The pattern of the system of convictions expressed in
Luke 10:21-42 113
CONCLUSION 119
The different faith-patterns of New Testament texts 119
A comparison of Johns and Luke's faith-patterns 121
Results of a structural exegesis 126
ANNOTATED SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 129
Structural and semiotic theories 129
Structural exegesis 132
vi
Editor's Foreword
In the foreword to Daniel Patte's earlier What Is Structural
Exegesis? I attempted in very broad terms to relate structural interpre
tation to the other primary modes of New Testament interpretation. I
should like to do the same in this volume, which is not simply a revision
of the earlier one but a reconceptualization of how to do structural exegesis.
My orientation is the fruitful tension and cooperation between historical
and literary methods.
Form criticism has been, to some extent, a literary discipline because
it has been concerned with the formal patterns in the pericopes of the
Gospels (or other New Testament literature). But I would judge that it
has been more strongly historical than literary because of its interest in
the development of a given unit or form, and in the influence of the setting
in life on the origin and development of both the form and content of the
units of the Gospel tradition.
Redaction criticism has likewise been both literary and historical, but
again I would deem the historical concern to have been dominant (certainly
in the "classical" redactional studies of the 1950s and 1960s), although in
some quarters redaction criticism has increasingly manifested a more
literary-critical approach. Redaction criticism is literary in its intention
to observe and analyze how the final author of a Gospel (or other document)
shaped and modified source materials (tradition) and put them together.
How does the author give expression to the theological interpretation of
Jesus through stylistic and compositional techniques? But redaction crit
icism is also fundamentally historical in nature because it separates tra
dition from the author's contribution-rather than looking at the text as
a unified whole-and assesses the connections and tensions between the
two; it investigates the historical relationship between author and the
author's community and the history-of-thought relationships among the
Gospels.
I believe that most form and redaction critics have operated, implicitly
or explicitly, with the assumption that the language of their texts primarily
exercised the referential function. The texts refer beyond themselves to
vii
FOREWORD
events, situations, conflicts, ideas-and meaning is not really available
apart from this reference. The more recent social historians and socio
logical exegetes of the New Testament make the same assumption about
the referential function of the texts.
The kind of "literary" criticism that pursues the quest for sources
behind the Gospels or other texts is really a type of historical criticism
because it is concerned with the temporal process through which the
Gospels came into existence. Aesthetic or formalistic literary criticism,
however, sees its texts primarily exercising the poetic linguistic function,
or at least throwing this function into relief. Language exercising the
poetic function attracts attention intransitively to itself and does not refer
it to some object beyond the text. Poetic language (using the term poetic
broadly to include narrative and various kinds of imagistic language) is
able to grasp attention in this way because the various linguistic elements
are locked into each other centripetally so that attention does not escape
easily to the outside. This internal organization makes the text an organic
unity and gives it semiautonomy. The text is grasped as a whole as people
read it, rather than as something to be analyzed (into tradition and re
daction), and meaning is seen to be a function not of the relationship
between text and historical setting but primarily of the union of form and
content in the text itself. Form is not a separable container for the content
but is itself the shaping or patterning of the content. All of this is to say
that aesthetic literary criticism is concerned with the surface structure of
the text, the manifest union of form and content.
Structural criticism is a mode of literary criticism, but its object is
not primarily the surface structure of the text. It focuses rather on the
relationship between the surface structure and the deep structures that
lie implicitly or unconSciously beneath, around, or alongside of the text.
Structural criticism wants to account for the larger implicit structure that
in some way generates the text under consideration. How and to what
extent does the given text manifest the reservoir of formal possibilities
that belong to literature as such? There is a sense in which structural
criticism is referential, but it does not derive the meaning of a text from
its reference to something nonliterary, that is, something historical, so
ciological, or ideational. It discloses rather how the text refers to the
reservoir of meaning possibilities envisioned by the text. I should like to
add that all "structuralists" cannot be pressed into the same mold, and
surely not all of them would agree with my brief formulation here.
As Patte emphasizes, historical and literary disciplines should not be
thought of as mutually exclusive. Structuralism has taught us that the two
must be kept distinct and unconfounded. This is because the meaning
that an item has in its own meaning system (its synchronic connections)
viii
FOREWORD
is not the same as the meaning it has as part of a historical process (its
diachronic connections). For example, the prologue of the Gospel of John,
which foregrounds the divine preexistence of Jesus, receives a part of its
meaning from its relationship to the story of the foot washing, which
belongs to the same larger narrative. But in the history of christological
thought, which we may see developing from one Gospel to another, the
preexistence of Jesus is a substitute for the virgin birth and baptism of
Jesus. The picture is fu'rther complicated by the fact that items that do
or might belong to the same diachronic process may be treated synchron
ically, as related to each other in the same meaning system. But this
carries us beyond the purposes of this brief foreword.
Deconstruction and reader-response criticism are the two develop
ments in literary critical studies that have had the most provocative effect
on biblical interpretation in the last decade. These two approaches often
influence each other and are practiced together, but it is not too inaccurate
to say that whereas deconstruction puts the emphasis on the slippery
tendency oflanguage itself to turn against itself, to fold in opposing thrusts
that "deconstruct" any coherent center, reader-response criticism focuses
on the creative role of the reader-interpreter in articulating the meaning
of a text.
There was a discernible tendency in the structuralism of the 1960s
and 1970s to understand the final goal of structuralist interpretation as
clarifying the logical and abstract deep structure beneath the text. That
is clearly not the final goal of Patte's present work. While he makes use
of underlying structures, he employs them as a means for dealing with
the surface structure, as a guide, in fact, for the close reading of the text.
His method complements reader-response interpretation by focusing on
explicit qualifications in the text rather than on the gaps in the text that
the reader must fill in from his or her own standpoint. The question of
the relationship of textual specifics to the construction achieved by the
reader will be differently answered by different people. The very fact that
Patte guides interpretation by means of a multiplicity of underlying struc
tures indicates that his approach is not incompatible with certain aspects
of the deconstructionist position; the multiplicity of structures generates
the interplay of a multiplicity of potential meanings. Yet he would not
want to say that there is no form or center to limit the absolutely free
play of meanings, since for him structures are constraints upon meaning.
His book should be read with close attention to both the biblical text
and the footnotes.
DAN O. VIA
Duke Divinity School
ix
Acknowledgments
This book evolved in the classroom at Vanderbilt University,
where I struggled to find an appropriate way to introduce my students
undergraduates, M. Div. students, and Ph. D. candidates-to the practice
of structural exegesis. They patiently studied earlier versions of this book.
This final version owes much to the several generations of students who,
through their questions and comments, forced me to clarify and system
atize the procedure.
Since this book and the computer-assisted lessons were prepared
concurrently, the book owes much to the insights, pedagogical acumen,
and critical comments of the Ph.D. candidates who helped me prepare
the computer lessons: Timothy Cargal, Martin McDaniel, Robin Mattison,
Vicki Phillips, and J elf Tucker.
The critical comments of Dan Via, editor of the Guides to Biblical
Scholarship, helped me further to clarify several important points and to
correct outright errors.
Finally, the style of this book owes much to the relentless editing
work of Pat Mundy, secretary of the Department of Religious Studies,
and to the invaluable guidance of John A. Hollar, Editorial Director,
Fortress Press books.
My thanks to each of them, as well as to Jacque Voegeli, Dean of
the College of Arts and Science, and Russell Hamilton, Dean of the
Graduate School, of Vanderbilt University, who provided the funding that
gave me time to write this book and provided the assistance necessary to
develop the computer-assisted lessons.
x
