Who would have thought a book with the formidable title Modern Genre Theory: An Introduction for Biblical Studies could be readable and even funny? And, importantly, help us – and face it, ministers, read the Bible. Author Andrew Judd, lecturer on Old Testament at Ridley College Melbourne has set out to help us think through what the bible is.
“Is this book serious?” asked Peter Jensen, former Archbishop of Sydney, as he began a speech launching the book> “It is, after all, a text which begins with a story about the author moving into a room in a theological seminary, which he does not name, which must be near here. [Here, Jensen outs his own Moore Theological College.] One, having a fixed and good rule that there is no alcohol in the single quarters. I remember it well. Not abashed, Andrew Judd, in typical fashion, if you know Andrew, checked the regulations and discovered a loophole. There was no law against brewing beer in the dorm. Andy’s mates then proceeded to brew their own beer in an upstairs bathtub. The ensuing grog was even marketed with the warning ‘may cause ordination difficulties.”
Judd tells the story with a serious purpose – to criticise a home-brewed theory of genre called form criticism, which has distorted the pursuit of Bibible genres.
Helpfully, even earlier in the book, he tells us what a genre is. And uses the Christian satirical site Babylon Bee, “that used to be quite funny,” to make the point. Facebook decided one of their funny headline posts was fake news, got a Snopes researcher onto it, and blocked it.
Finally it was unblocked. As Judd has it, the villain in the story was genre. Facebook needed to recognise the genre of satire. And with this comes Judd’s mantra: “Genres are relatively stable conventions that writers and readers use to make meaning in certain contexts but not others.” As in the context of satire rather than hard news.
Back to the book launch: “You may be puzzled [that the book begins with the beer story], Jensen continued. ” “A book called Modern Genre Theory, published by Zondervan Academic no less, and endorsed by leading scholars on three continents, scholars from Durham, from Yale, from Sydney, and from Duke. It’s meant to be serious. It’s meant to be significant, it’s meant to be footnoted, it’s meant to be a veritable mountain of erudition…”
And here’s a comment from author Andrew Judd at the launch that captures why genre is important. “So many of our disagreements about what the Bible says start off life as disagreements about what the Bible is,” and then addressed his PhD supervisor, Liam Semmler, from the University of Sydney English Department, who was present at the launch. “And so your comment, ‘it really comes down to genre, doesn’t it?’ I don’t know if you remember saying that, but that became whole obsession.”
Asked if the early chapters of Genesis were written in mythological language, Judd cheerfully admits, “I think I skirt dangerously close to this issue and never kind of deal with it front on.
“I think it’s really important to distinguish between what’s being talked about historically and how it’s being spoken about. One way I put it in the book is that a portrait can be well drawn. So you can draw a picture of a real person in an artistic way, in a stylized way. The question of whether that person ever lived is sort of a different question to how it’s drawn.
“So when I talk about the artistry of the Bible, and I talk about the narrative techniques of the narrator or when we even talk about mythology in the neutral sense of here’s a story that shapes my understanding of who I’m in the world, that can be historically true as well.
“And I’m a big believer in both ends of this. The Exodus is a mythology because it shapes how Israelites think about themselves, and I believe it happened as well. In fact, I find it hard to believe that they could have been so shaped by if it hadn’t, but they’re separate questions.
“So I think one thing I don’t want to be heard doing in this book is by talking about the literary artfulness artistry of the text to somehow play that off against the truth. Andrew Shead, when he was teaching us here, said, ‘As evangelicals, we’re committed to the truth of the Bible, but not what type of truth.’ True in what way? What truth is it? You have to take the Bible on its own terms. What is it trying to say? … It’s a great question, one that I think about a lot as an Old Testament teacher.”
Modern Genre Theory: An Introduction for Biblical Studies Andrw Judd, Zondervan Academic, 2024