How the "New Testament" Shaped Deaf People at St Saviour’s, Oxford Street: A Study in Reception History and in Reception Exegesis

Abstract

Within the burgeoning area of the Bible's reception history is a variant approach, termed "reception exegesis" by Paul Joyce and Diana Lipton. Investigation of an occasion of reception can generate new insights into the meaning of the biblical texts, they suggest. Introducing the results of a Leverhulme Trust Research Project on Britain’s first purpose-built deaf church to a scholarly readership interested in biblical reception, I show here how the New Testament—especially Mark 7:32–37—was used to construct the deaf people of Victorian London. Specific details of my argument will be compared with the Markan text as constructed by modern commentators in order to test Joyce and Lipton’s hypothesis. The article questions reception exegesis’s usefulness as a generator of long-term interest in biblical studies and proposes a different response to its difficulties, that biblical scholars dedicate themselves to developing a broad conception of reception history in order to generate collaborations across disciplinary boundaries while they are still in a position to do so.

What Jesus Did, Does and May Do in Future: Gospel Miracles, Human Augmentation, Transhumanism and the Future of New Testament Studies

“…I exhorted fellow New Testament scholars to rethink the assumptions behind their approach to these texts and to consider re-inventing themselves explicitly as 'reception historians', as investigators of the near-infinite range of scenarios in which the New Testament and its interpretation either had played or could play, a significant, even essential, role. This shift I saw as both eminently feasible and as one to be pursued with rigour, while time allowed (Lyons 2010).…”

“…Taking advantage of the publication of Joan E. Taylor's edited conference volume, Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and his Times via Monty Python's Life of Brian (2015), I further argued that traditional New Testament studies could also reasonably expect an intellectual pay-off from its willingness to liberate itself from its usual limits (Lyons 2016). While Jesus and Brian contains much that falls within the purview of the reception history I favour myself, most of its content is dominated by the notion of 'reception exegesis', an approach outlined and developed by Old Testament scholars Paul Joyce and Diana Lipton in their Blackwell's commentary on Lamentations (2013: 1-25) and helpfully summarized by the former in his foreword to Taylor's volume:…”

“…In an article entitled ‘How the “New Testament” Shaped Deaf People at St Saviour’s Oxford Street: A Study in Reception History and in Reception Exegesis’ and published in Relegere in 2016, I introduced and discussed an interpretation of the deaf man of Mk 7.32-37 that was published in 1874 by Richard Rowland Williams (1825–1879), an Englishman deafened through accidental exposure to vitriol at ten years of age (Lyons 2016: 178-80, 185-86). In contrast to modern exegetes who see the man as deafened late in life and restored through a miraculous physical healing to a previous-enjoyed life of hearing and speech – scholars such as Adela Yarbro Collins (2007: 370) and William L. Lane (1974: 266) – Williams saw the man as either deaf from birth or as deafened at a sufficiently early age that he had not yet gained a working knowledge of the local spoken language.…”

“…If the deaf man had either never heard nor spoken language before or had lost his hearing so early that he had never gained competence with verbal language, the terminology of ‘restoration’ is rendered deeply problematic; Veditz’s first use of the term to denote this miracle in the above quotation is fatally undermined by the second use, where he explicitly states that this particular healing was ‘not a mere restoration of a condition which had before existed’ (Veditz 1907: 27). In my 2016 article on how the New Testament shaped the deaf people of Victorian London, I referred to the man in Mk 7 as being augmented ‘to the max’ by Jesus, but did not define the nature of his augmentation or explore the meaning of that term in such a context (Lyons 2016: 185-86). The mind of the deaf man was instantaneously altered by the incorporation of Veditz’s ‘new and wondrous faculty’ within it, a transformative occurrence which provided him with these knowledges in a way never before witnessed in human history (or so the gospels imply).…”

“… 5. For a discussion of the assumptions these interpretations necessarily involve, see Lyons 2016: 182-85. …”