Distant Voices Drawing Near: Essays in Honor of Antoinette Clark Wire (Michael Glazier Books)

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Summary: Many voices...
Review: The book 'Distant Voices Drawing Near' is a festschrift done in honour of Antoinette Clark Wire, a scholar who, according editor Holly Hearon, strives in her scholarship to give voice to the voiceless and marginalised. The title of the collection of essays derives from one of Wire's own texts on Corinthian women prophets. The contributors to this volume include women and men who have each collaborated with Wire in some way over the past several decades of her career. Born in China into a missionary family, Wire's early experiences included traveling around the world during wartime, schools in many different locations, and interesting academic and church experiences, which culminated in her returning to China in the 2000s to teach, one of the first Western scholars to be invited there to teach in biblical studies.

After a brief biographical sketch penned by Wire's husband (together with Wire's sister Mary, and Robert Coote, one of her colleagues), the essays in this volume are divided into four primary sections - Women and Christian Origins; Placing Women at the Hermeneutical Center; Placing the Text in Context; and Cross-textual, Intertextual and Inter-Media Reading. The first section consists of three essays, by Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, Sojung Yoon, and Holly Hearon and Linda Maloney. In her essay, Schussler-Fiorenza claims that 'a critical feminist approach insists that historiography must also be constructive and create histories that aim toward a more just future.' This being said, she argues against seeing a mythological 'golden age' of Christian origins, but does see the revisioning with fresh eyes as an important step, deriving from one of Wire's own articles. Yoon and Hearon and Maloney follow this with specific examples; Yoon looks at the character of Phoebe from Romans, and Hearon and Maloney look at several examples of women as teachers, prophets, storytellers, and prominent people in their own right among the apostles.

The second section of essays looks at hermeneutical tools that can be used to bring women in texts into more relief. Gina Hens-Piazza addresses the character of Sarah, particularly focusing upon the incident of her laughter at overhearing the conversation of the visitors with Abraham as an example - Hens-Piazza states that the method of New Historicism that she uses 'attends to the cracks, to fleeting comments, to the underside of a story, and to signs of disarray latent in a work.' Mary Therese DesCamp looks at an extra-biblical text, the Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum of Pseudo-Philo, with the tools of cognitive linguistic research, and highlights ambiguities and contradictions relating to the foreign woman Jael. Finally, Luise Schottroff looks at the issue of purity and holiness for both men and women in First Corinthians through the lens of feminist hermeneutics, arguing that the Corinthian women were able to bring together issues of justice and holiness in a transformative fashion for the entire community.

The third section, 'Placing the Texts in Context,' has five essays, four from gospel images, and one from Hosea. Marvin Chaney looks at the 'promiscuous women' of Hosea's text as critique of the urban military elite using social science tools, referring to the scholarship of Phyllis Bird and Alice Keefe. Herman Waetjen examines the parable of the ten virgins from Matthew, discussing the difficulty of interpretation and application of the message: 'none is more ambiguous in terms of its origin and meaning', according to Waetjen. Hisako Kinukawa looks at the character of the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark's gospel through the tools of post-colonial analysis, relating the experience of teaching a class of diverse students, and for the first time Kinukawa taught in English. Ricahrd Rohrbaugh looks at the events with Nicodemus in the gospel of John, arguing that 'the function of language is not to reveal but to obscure' in this instance. Because we do not read the story as part of an alienated group, we miss the presence of anti-language here. Finally, Joanna Dewey looks at the issue of Jesus' crucifixion as an example of blood sacrifice, arguing against the imagery as one that is harmful for the church, and seeks to return to the early church's rejection of sacrifice as an example.

The final section of essays includes five essays designed to bring 'voices together across time and cultures'. Archie Chi Chung Lee combines Chinese poetry and the biblical text Lamentations in comparison and contrast for the will of God/heaven, and ambiguities and tensions in both texts and cultures. Robert and Mary Coote, drawing from Wire's work 'Holy Lives, Holy Deaths', analyse the gospel of Mark in relation to Homeric epics, arguing that Mark's dependence on Jewish scriptures is greater than on Hellenistic writings: 'Mark indeed practiced the Hellenistic art of mimesis, that is, mimesis of Jewish Scriptures.' Barbara Green compares the communities of the Johannine gospel and the Wisdom of Solomon, looking at the responses of the different groups to 'the challenge of the life, death, and Life of God's just one'. Eung Chun Park and Ruth Ohm Wright each look at the Acts of Paul and Thelca, Park looking at the text, and Wright examining recent archaeological finds of depictions of the characters from the text.

The essays in the text are interesting and insightful. They draw upon modern scholarly ideas and methodologies, as well as fitting in with the overall emphasis of Wire's own scholarly directions in her career. The book will be useful to those who are interested in feminist interpretation issues, new ways to explore biblical texts, and intriguing historical issues. The writing assumes basic familiarity with the biblical texts as well as the historical context of the Greco-Roman world, but is accessible to the educated non-specialist. The book would be useful in classroom settings, and for some advanced adult education programmes in congregational settings, too. This is a very good tribute to Wire, and a good example of the quality of scholarship being done in the field today.