An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
Okay, the rhetorical function of questions in the New Testament is not likely a topic that has often kept you up at night. In fact, you’ve probably not thought much about this question at all, and that’s why this book was written. I’m Fred Zaspel with Books At a Glance, and I’m talking today with Dr. Douglas Estes about his new book, Questions and Rhetoric in the Greek New Testament: An Essential Reference Resource for Exegesis.
Douglas, welcome – thanks for talking to us today.
Estes:
Thanks for inviting me to be here, Fred.
Zaspel:
Alright, I will admit I hadn’t thought much about the function of questions in the NT either, but I wasn’t long into your book before I realized the value and pertinence of the study. Just in brief, tell us what your book is all about, and what the contribution is that you hope to make.
Estes:
The goal of the book, really, was to survey all of the questions in the Greek New Testament, to look at them, and to give some type of analysis of each one. My goal here was to try to bring attention to a significant portion of the New Testament that has remained largely unstudied in the modern period. I was hoping to look at something afresh and something that would be important for New Testament studies.
Zaspel:
Are you aiming only at Greek students or is this accessible for a keen English reader, also?
Estes:
I think that it would be accessible to a keen English reader with a little bit of work on their part. I aimed it a little more towards Greek students only because I felt that to establish the rules of exegesis for questions, you really have to start in the Greek and work outward. But I think someone that had even baby Greek, or some exposure to it would be able to use it profitably. Especially when you get to the various case studies, I think that they will be able to follow those case studies. And I tried to write it in the most accessible way that I could, even though I know there’s a bit of jargon, as people like to joke with me, there is that in there, too. It’s as accessible as, hopefully, it can be.
Zaspel:
I think it is. I was in a chat with somebody on Facebook about this. I recommended the book and someone asked that question, and I said, yeah, I think it’s profitable for you. Just be careful, and read carefully. If you’re not a Greek reader, everything won’t be immediate, but I think it definitely is accessible.
This is a very unusual area of study. In fact, you mention something about this in terms of the standard Greek grammars in comparison to their treatment of the optative mood. Highlight that for us. And with that, then, just how did your own interest in this subject come about and develop? Was this part of your doctoral work?
Estes:
Yes, that’s a great question. One of the things that I realized when I was studying questions is how prevalent questions are in the Greek New Testament and yet how understudied they are. In comparison, you have things like the optative mood that is always studied to some degree in Greek grammar. I’m not attacking the optative mood or putting it down, it’s an important phenomenon, it’s interesting, but as a comparison there’s about sixty-eight optatives in the New Testament where in comparison there’s a thousand questions. So, it would seem like if you have a chapter on optatives in a standard Greek grammar you would want to have at least a chapter or two on questions. But yet that doesn’t often occur. Their weight and their importance is very much overlooked in the study of the New Testament.
As for my interest, it wasn’t my doctoral work, exactly; it actually came about as a result of thinking about different ways that Jesus speaks in the Gospels. We spend a lot of time talking about how he uses parables and different forms of languages, and I was kicking it around with some friends one day and we were talking about all the different things and I started thinking about questions. And I started thinking about how Jesus does use questions, but people don’t really spend a lot of time talking about it too much. Then I spent a couple of months just really doing a deep dive into it and I realized that to really understand how questions are working in the New Testament (again, I’m starting with Jesus’s words) you’d really need more than just a surface approach. You’ve really got to get into the Greek; you’ve really got to do some exegesis; you really got to do some heavy lifting, because it largely hasn’t been done. At least certainly not in the modern period.
Zaspel:
Just how pervasive are questions in the Greek New Testament? How many are there?
Estes:
Well, there’s about a thousand. And so, when you think about it, that’s about ten percent of the New Testament. The example that I use in the book is that if you were to pick up a book and every tenth or so word was stricken, redacted, or blacked out, you would understand what the book was saying, but you wouldn’t understand it sometimes very well. In fact, you might actually make some mistakes in your understanding of the book with that level of redaction. And so, if we don’t understand the questions that are being asked, if we just gloss over them, which is what most interpreters do, and commentators do in my experience, if we just gloss over them, and we don’t understand them, we don’t see their role correctly in the text. Then we’ve missed out on a big portion of the New Testament. Will we understand the New Testament without the questions? Yes. But will we understand it well? Yeah, but, you’re losing something, you’ve lost something in there.
Zaspel:
Talk to us about the logic of questions as opposed to the logic of propositional statements. You write that questions in the New Testament “influence the theology of the text, but they also influence the life of the reader through their persuasiveness.” Can you flesh this out for us a bit? And maybe you can explain the difference between what you call the logic of questions and the rhetoric of questions.
Estes:
If we think about it simply, the logic of the question is the way it is formed and the way that it’s asked in order to accomplish the purpose of the asker. Whenever someone thinks about something they want to ask, they have to . . . and we do this intuitively. We learn as small children how to ask questions and there’s lots of fascinating studies on how children acquire the ability to ask questions. But what happens is that in the language that we are given, we learn how to ask a question in such a way as to gain the answer or the response that we are looking for. So that’s the logic of the question. Now, in contrast to that, the rhetoric of a question is the way in which a speaker uses the question to influence others. For example, if I were to say, “what books do you like?” Okay, that would be one question. A second question would be, “do you like books?” And a third question would be, “you do like books, don’t you?” Each of those questions has different logic, and they also have different rhetoric. Maybe someone listening may say they don’t really sense a major difference, but I’m asking it in a vanilla way. So, let me do it differently. “What books do you like?” The logic and rhetoric of that is to elicit someone to say, “I like Tolkien,” or “I like Lewis,” or I like this, or I like that. But if I were to say, “you do like books, don’t you?” Of course, the pragmatics of that question is very heavy in my voice so that changes the rhetoric of what I am trying to say. It encourages someone to answer the question. If I say to someone, “you do like books, don’t you?” Their response is going to be, “well, yeah, of course.” So, the way that works in language is very subtle, and we learn as children how to respond. But the way that those things are constructed causes that to occur. When you have, in the Gospels or when you have in Paul’s letters, they are phrasing certain questions certain ways because they are asking it for certain reason. And if we don’t understand the reason why they are asking it, then we won’t understand what the point is they are trying to make. If Paul says, “what books do you like,” and we don’t get the difference between that and Paul asking, “you do like books, don’t you,” then we’ve kind of missed the logic and rhetoric of it.
Let me contrast that to statements for a second, okay? In contrast to the logic of questions, the logic of statements is mostly to inform. We might just say, “I like books.” And that’s important because statements have a huge and very important function in language, but the logic of statements is in many ways very different from the logic of questions.
The last thing you asked is how questions influence the theology of the text. I would say that they influence the theology of the text because on a very simple level, if the New Testament only wanted to inform people and not create dialogue with people, it would only include statements. As a way of comparison, we can think about the New Testament and we can think about a statement of faith or a confession that maybe a church or denomination uses today. If you look at the average statement of faith or confession, it’s just statements. We believe this, we believe that. And the reason is because that statement of faith is designed to inform. It’s a monologue. This is what we believe, you either accept that or you don’t accept it. But the New Testament is a lot more of a dialogue. And on a literary level, that’s what makes the New Testament far more persuasive than a statement of faith. When we ask questions and we have a balance between speaking, between sayings, stating, and asking questions, it creates dialogue, which creates interest, which creates thinking, which creates acceptance or, sometimes, rejection.
Zaspel:
So questions are designed not only to gain information but to direct thinking and to make a point, and that has obvious bearing on exegesis. Give us a sample or two to show how an understanding of this can help the interpreter.
Estes:
Yes, that’s exactly right. And that follows on from your last question, Fred, to be honest with you, because what happens is that when we ask questions, it allows that dialogue to occur and allows thinking to take place. Let’s take an example from the letters of Paul. In my way of thinking, Paul was out there preaching and teaching the Gospel, and when he sat down to write letters to instruct churches, those responses in those letters are shaped by his preaching and teaching ministry. It’s the same thing that any pastor would do today. They’ve been preaching on a subject for a while, and somebody asks them to email them an answer to something; their background is going to go to their years of preaching and teaching. And so, in those letters, Paul’s goal at times is to challenge other people’s beliefs. And a lot of times, or most of the time, to challenge someone’s beliefs, you can’t just always use statements. If a parishioner, or someone in my congregation were to come and ask me, “I feel this way about God. Is this a biblical view of God?” and my immediate response in my mind is, “not exactly,” if I make a lot of statements at them, it’s not going to be as effective, I don’t believe, as raising questions. So, you raise questions, you get people thinking. And, by the way, anyone with any oratorical experience in the Hellenistic world would have understood this because they used questions… I can’t prove this, but I would argue very strongly that they used questions more commonly in oral conversation and public speaking than we do today. So, Paul here is trying to get his readers to think. But this is the problem: Paul’s trying to get his readers to think, but a modern interpreter comes along and in most cases they don’t really look at the question as a question. Instead, they try to figure out what Paul is trying to say, like, what’s the theological statement behind this verse? That’s oftentimes what they are thinking, or, at least it appears that way if you just scan a bunch of commentaries on Paul. The reason that’s a little bit off is it would be a little like us going to a clear statement in the Bible, for instance where Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and trying to figure out what he is asking. But he’s not asking anything there – he’s making a statement. It’s a very clear statement. So, in the same way, if Paul is asking a very clear question, then if we try to figure out what he’s trying to say theologically from that question, we’d miss the point of what Paul’s saying. And if we’ve missed the point of what Paul’s saying here and there and ten percent of the time, then it starts to add up and we have to be very careful that we are not sort of interpreting what he is saying in a little bit of a wonky way that will lead us to, not heresy, but it would lead us to a little bit of impreciseness or maybe a lot of impreciseness in areas of our interpretation.
Zaspel:
You talk about a number of “categories” of questions in the New Testament. Can you highlight some of these for us? Perhaps you can include some samples.
Estes:
In my book I identified more than forty different categories of questions. Let me see if I can break this down real simply. I looked at both modern linguistics and ancient rhetoric to try to understand various avenues for understanding questions. I really wanted to be able to run the gamut of what we know about questions and not limit it to one field or one area. So, those forty categories basically fall out into three groups. They fall out into questions that are mostly influenced by the syntax of the question, basically how it’s constructed, maybe you could say its grammar. Secondly, the semantics of the question – is there a unique meaning, or is there a unique idea in the question? Then the third one is what we call the pragmatics of the question which means how it is asked, the effects of asking it and is that viewable in the text?
Some of these categories come from basic grammar, some come from linguistics, some come from ancient rhetoric. I just wanted to cover as many bases as possible. Let me give a couple of examples. One of the most common categories that occur is what’s called an open question. An open question is what I call the vanilla question because it is one that just seeks information. If I were to ask you, Fred, “where do you want to go for lunch?” That question is an open question, it’s a vanilla question because I am not, in the syntax of it, in the semantics of it, in the pragmatics of it, I am not trying to push you in any one direction. I’m just simply asking you where you want to go for lunch. And there are questions like that in Scripture. Those questions are really great for having people think through what their answer is. Because, hopefully, if I ask you, “where do you want to go for lunch,” you would think about that and not just respond, “well, wherever you want to go.” Although that tells me something about you if you responded that way. But hopefully that would start some thinking process in your mind and you would be like, “I had burgers yesterday, so I don’t want burgers today, and I had fried chicken last week but maybe that could…” etc. It’s designed to get one to think.
Let me give you another example. A slightly more interesting phenomenon is where you have a pragmatic type of question which is called an opposing turn type of question. Linguists have found that questions follow naturally an order of conversation. For example, if I ask you, “where do you want to go for lunch?” If you say, “Chick-fil-A,” that is a reasonable and acceptable answer. If you say, “I don’t want to go to lunch today,” that’s also a reasonable and acceptable answer. But if I were to say to you, “where do you want to go to lunch today?” and you were to say, “why are you asking me that?” or “what does lunch have to do with anything?” that is what we call an opposing turn question. Instead of following the course of the conversation and answering my question, you interrupt the course of the conversation and you ask your own question, which leaves my original question unanswered. A lot of times that’s considered rude, but people do it all the time in Scripture. That occurs quite regularly. When Jesus calls the disciples and asks them, “do you want to follow me?” in John 1, the disciples respond back to him with a question. They don’t answer his question and that question is just left hanging there. So that raises a whole question of what the disciples were thinking. Were they really dedicated to following Jesus or were they just going along with what he was proposing at the time, just seeing if their options were open.
Let me give a third and final example. There’s lots of different examples, but this one, instead of from linguistics, let me take this one from rhetoric. There’s something that I call, in the book, an aporatic question, or a question that is derived from an aporia. An aporia, basically, in Greek rhetoric was a statement that allowed the person to think about something that was much bigger than themselves. For example, Paul uses an aporatic question when he says, in Romans, “who will separate us from the love of Christ?” A lot of modern readers, I think, read that and say, “oh, yeah, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.” But the problem is that what Paul really means there or what Paul is really trying to ask is, he’s trying to really probe at us and pick at us and make us think about how great the love of Christ is. And ancient reader, I think, knowing that that was an aporia, would have stopped and paused. Or at least their culture would have encouraged them to stop and pause and be like, “wow! That is a profound statement!” But for us today, we don’t think about it in that way. We are not used to these rhetorical categories. We just go, yeah, nothing can separate us… But when we think about how great the love of Christ is, if we are reading the way Paul is speaking, there would be a long pause after that. That would cause us to just stop and think about that. And that’s what’s not occurring with modern readers because they are not as attuned to questions.
I’ll say this as a final point on this question. I talk about this at the beginning of the book, that after the classical period, some grammarians that came along kind of downplayed questions. And that downplaying of questions continued into the middle ages where questions were seen as secondary to statements. Everything is about facts and statements and of course that builds into the modern world and we have lost this art of asking questions and hearing questions that Paul’s and Jesus’s communities, the early church, people living in that time period, would be much more fluent with than we are today.
Zaspel:
There’s no question about it, that asking questions in the right way can direct thinking like nothing else can.
Estes:
Exactly.
Zaspel:
Before we sign off, give us an overview of your book and how you approach your subject.
Estes:
The format of the book is kind of as a resource book. It’s not necessarily something that someone would read from beginning to end, although you can, it’s set up that way, too. But we put it together in such a way that we figured people would flip through to the verse they wanted to look up, and that’s fine. It’s constructed along those lines.
Basically, in the opening chapter, I start with an argument for questions, why we should take questions seriously in our interpretation, why we should not just gloss over them. Then, the second chapter deals with lots of what you might call little hints for understanding questions. If a person asks me, “what’s the more difficult part of the book?” I would say it’s that section right there, because there’s a lot of technical information there that’s just background information that readers can read profitably. They are very short, everything is a page or two pages, but they are just little hints for helping people to understand a little bit deeper why the rhetoric or the linguistics of the question is the way it is.
Then I look at all the different categories divided up into three sections: the syntax, semantics, pragmatics. In every category I tried to give samples, not only of their logic, but also their rhetoric. And then I do at least one case study at the end of each category. Case studies are usually just a couple of pages where I look at a question and I explain to the reader why this question is probably considered to be in this category; and what they need to be aware of when they are interpreting this question; and how the author was probably trying to use it, based on its logic and its rhetoric.
At the very end I have a summarizing chapter about what questions mean and why they were used in the New Testament. In that area, a lot of it, as I’ve come to realize, is that the New Testament is trying to challenge us, to make us think, to engage in dialogue with us. This is the reason why ancient literature was written the way it was. It was very highly dialogical and unlike a lot of modern things, which is written more to inform. I come away really impressed at how much God wants to make us stop and think about who he is, rather than just saying who he is and having us check the box and be like, “okay,” and move on with our lives.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Dr. Douglas Estes about his new book, Questions and Rhetoric in the Greek New Testament: An Essential Reference Resource for Exegesis. It really is a one-of-a-kind resource for exegesis that all serious students of Greek will want to have. It will certainly sharpen your understanding of question passages in the NT, and we who teach and preach the NT will want to keep this book handy for frequent reference.
Douglas, congratulations on this genuine contribution to the study of the New Testament, and thanks for talking to us about it today.
Estes:
Great. Thank you, Fred.
