Abstract
The present chapter aims to report and justify the methods to be used and to give an account of the epistemic divide between Paul’s time and the present century. Achieving the second aim will consolidate why and how the methods used in this book are essential. Both of these aims are instrumental to the larger aim of this book, which is to demonstrate what Paul was teaching his original learners and how he sought to do so. They explain why and how the Pauline epistle to the Romans has been a pedagogic text in terms of its original function and setting.
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- 1.
Timothy (of Rom 16:21) would be an unusual case; see 2 Timothy 1:5. His grandmother and mother learned of Jesus possibly at about the same time. Yet, even Timothy could not have had a “purely Christian childhood environment”.
- 2.
Marsh and Willis (1995, pp. 73–12) have given a general review of “curriculum history” and “curriculum theorizing”. If one wishes a quick overview of the field of curriculum thinking after 1995, till 2016, one may read the “Introduction” of Morris (2016, pp. 1–20). For even more rigorous treatment about the curriculum, one may refer to Pinar et al. (1996) and McNeil (2015). It includes insights on understanding the curriculum as historical text, political text, phenomenological text, etc.
- 3.
These agonies of finding oneself at the inter-traditionary borders are indeed perennial as educational challenges. Serious learners at such “borders” of every epoch are equally faced with the needs to relearn how to reconstruct their past, reposition their present, and rechart their future in light of the new lessons they have learned from the teachings of Jesus, the Christ. These agonies are thus not imaginary. Huang (2006), for example, is a historical study of these “bordered-selves” in the context of Chinese tradition. This was when the Catholic epistemic vision about self, others, and the Divine effected upon the nascent groups of Chinese Christ-followers in the epoch between late Ming and early Qing dynasties in China.
- 4.
The distinction between “Jewish” and “Israeli”, for instance, was lost in Pelagius’s Latin commentary on The Epistle to the Romans. See De Bruyn (1998, p. 36).
- 5.
Seneca, for instance, has decried the insufficiency of Latin to be an abstractive and philosophical language when contrasted with Greek; see (2002, pp. 16–18). St. Augustine (2002, pp. 32–34) has observed that St. Jerome’s Latin translation has given priority to naturalness in Latin than to the semantic multiplicities of the Greek text. It has also caused, according to a letter of St. Augustine to St. Jerome, at least in one case, “Great unrest among the people, especially since the Greeks protested and bean to shout about falsification in a vituperative manner” (Lefevere 2004, p. 16).
- 6.
The authority of Jerome’s Vulgate indeed has a long history. The call to return to the Greek text of the New Testament was a movement started among Protestant academics in the nineteenth century. Among Catholics, Jerome’s L2-Vulgate is still the authoritative version. Botley (2004, p. 117), for instance, quoted Erasmus who said “There are some who [in the Renaissance, in c.1516], whilst they think themselves very learned men, are hardly aware that John did not write in Latin”.
- 7.
In Paul’s time, transliteration had a Greco-Roman bilingualism in the background. Hence, in whatever direction that transliteration might be taking place between Greek and Latin, the writer and translator (such as Paul) and his audience actually were sharing more or less the same sets of mythological and socio-cultural heritages of the Greco-Roman world. In later diachronic transliterations, there were, however, no such directly shared sets of lived beliefs and experiences. For the features of bilingual way of thought and feeling, see Pavlenko (2006, 2014) and Javier (2007).
- 8.
Pratt (1994, pp. 65–100) has a discussion on curriculum intentions. Typically, such intentions (p. 79) could be working towards curriculum objectives in terms of knowledge, skill, somatic, attitude, process, and experience. It is not difficult to see The Epistle covers all of these curricular aspects.
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Ho, O.N.K. (2018). Making Sense of a Religious Text: Methods and Socio-epistemic Divides in Reading and Teaching. In: Rethinking the Curriculum. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8902-2_2
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