2 - The social functions of irony

Summary

Chapter 1 closed with the remark that, with the emergence of sociological analysis and literary criticism as viable options within biblical scholarship, the horizons of biblical interpretation have been brought into a kind of balance. This point has been made before with specific reference to the Gospel of Mark. When William Lane offered his review of “The Gospel of Mark in Current Study” in 1978, he noted as promising both the sociological and the literary approaches to gospel narrative. Indeed, one would expect that there would already be fruitful dialogue between them. If that dialogue has not yet come, I suspect it is because these two disciplines are based on differing theoretical foundations, and because they have thus far offered competing interpretations of the text and its significance. Their vocabularies differ significantly, and the uses to which they put the text appear to be almost mutually exclusive. Sociological analysis has used the text as a kind of lens through which to focus its descriptions of the dynamic social factors which shaped primitive Christianity. Literary criticism in gospel study – and by this we mean primarily the New Criticism – has tended to reject that inquiry out of hand, and has instead focused its attention on the text itself, as an independent literary or aesthetic object.

It is my contention that the obvious differences between these two approaches may disguise their underlying similarities and their common interests.