► Listen on Amazon
► Listen on Apple
► Listen on Spotify
► Listen on YouTube
You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Jeannine Brown
I am Jeannine Brown. I teach New Testament at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota where I’ve been teaching full time for over 24 years. I am the David Price Professor of Biblical and Theological Foundations. I know that’s a mouthful, but tenured positions are often a big mouthful. I’m very grateful to have been with Bethel, my whole career, sometimes in St. Paul, sometimes in San Diego. Tim and I live in St. Paul. We have two daughters, two sons-in-law, two grandchildren and three grand dogs.
David Capes
Dr. Jeannine Brown, Jeannine, good to see you. Welcome back to The Stone Chapel Podcast.
Jeannine Brown
Thank you, I’m so glad to be here.
David Capes
You told us a little bit about yourself in the opening. Go a little deeper. Tell us a little bit more about yourself.
Jeannine Brown
I was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We live in St. Paul with the Twin Cities. So they’re very close. I did my undergrad work in Wisconsin. I’m a music therapist by trade. I like music. I liked helping people and those two came together in music therapy. And then I also did some part time work with InterVarsity Christian fellowship. And that got me interested in ministry and thinking, maybe I need to go to seminary. People encouraged me to think about that; people who were in seminary that I knew. So that brought me to Bethel Seminary, many, many, many years ago. I teach at the place that I got my Master of Divinity from. And I did my doctorate after that. I’m going to say I’ve been working in the gospels primarily, but now I’ve been doing more things in the New Testament letters, which I find very fun.
David Capes
Now your husband has a little bit of a musical ear as well, as I recall.
Jeannine Brown
He does. He’s a singer-songwriter, plays guitar, writes music, performs out and about. He’s a school teacher by trade, but does freelancing in the music area. He’s very, very talented. He’s got the poetic side of it.
David Capes
We ought to get some of his music on our podcast one day.
Jeannine Brown
Well, one of his albums is called Oh, My, and that is the song that I would recommend to you.
David Capes
We’re going to talk today about your book Embedded Genres In the New Testament: Understanding Their Impact for Interpretation. It’s a new book that just come out. I wanted to read just one of the many endorsements that you’ve gotten, and you got a lot. And this endorsement says
The best approach to the interpretation of any biblical texts begins with genre identification. In this book, Jeannine Brown polishes our genre sensitive lens, to help us detect changes that reveal genres embedded within other forms. This hermeneutical practice sheds light on layers of meaning within the world of the text that have thus far gone unnoticed. Brown is both clear and convincing.
Now that’s high praise.
Jeannine Brown
I recognize that voice!
David Capes
It was a delight to write that honestly.
Jeannine Brown
I liked your “polishing your genre sensitive lenses”. That was just lovely.
David Capes
That was your phrase, I think, wasn’t it?
Jeannine Brown
Oh, was it? Well maybe so! I mean, it has quotation marks around it. The genre sensitive lenses, but you used “polish”. You added to the metaphor.
David Capes
There we go. Let’s talk a little bit about it. It’s a great book. And for people who are interested in the gospels and reading the gospels, and reading any of the New Testament, there’s really good benefit here. So let’s begin talking about genre because not everybody’s familiar with that term. When you say genre, what do you mean?
Jeannine Brown
It’s the literary form of a whole work, the literary material that we’re reading. Is it a letter? Is it a gospel, as you mentioned, a narrative? Gospels are narrative. You can think about things we read today, a novel versus a historical account of something. Thinking about what we’re reading, literarily is genre. And I’ve been interested in studying genre for a long time. I just find it so enlightening to think about the categories biblical writers wrote in. Because the genres they had weren’t precisely the ones we have. So, we need to do some historical legwork to get a feel for ancient biblical genres.
David Capes
Now you moved it further by talking about genres embedded in other genres. How did that first dawn on you that that’s what’s going on in certain places?
Jeannine Brown
I had written a long essay in a book on genre and looked at literary theory, contemporary literary theory, rhetorical theory. People study speech writing and all sorts of interesting things and talking about those categories. I find it really helpful for my own thinking about what the different writings of the New Testament are. I was asked to do some lectures at Acadia Divinity College and these are the fruits of those lectures. I was thinking about a topic that would sort of jazz me. I don’t know if it jazzes anybody else. Embedded genres! Whoooo!
David Capes
No, it sounds pretty cool doesn’t it.
Jeannine Brown
Because I was in the middle of writing a commentary on Philippians in the Tyndale Commentary series, I was really just fascinated by the Christ hymn or Christ poem of Philippians 2: 6-11. And I was really convinced it was quite poetic. And there’s debate on that in scholarship. That makes it kind of fun when you’re debating back and forth. And I just said, this is beautiful as a poem. And when I finished the commentary, I knew I had more to learn, and more I wanted to do on the Christ poem. That got me started.
I thought, well, if I can do something there, then I’ll go to the other books that I’m more familiar with in terms of my own writing and research. And I do work in First Peter. I’ve done it all my career. I’m currently writing a commentary in First Peter, for the New International Commentary in the New Testament. And I knew that a quarter of that letter is a household code. You’ve got to account for that as an imbedded genre, because household codes had particular form in the ancient world, and they had particular pieces to it.
And if somebody deviates from those, like I think Peter does sometimes, we should know what that means. We know what it means by comparing it with what was expected. So that was my easy second choice. And then I did my dissertation on Matthew and I’ve written three commentaries on Matthew. I said, well, Matthew certainly is the third book. That worked because there are three lectures.
David Capes
Matthew is your middle name isn’t it! Is that possible? You’ve done a lot with Matthew, though.
Jeannine Brown
I have. And I thought, so what embedded genre are in Matthew? Working on my first commentary, I recognized a few riddles in Matthew, my second commentary, I saw a few more. And the third commentary there’s another one in there. I kept on finding more riddles in Matthew and I found them really intriguing. Well, how do riddles function? I picked up this great book by Tom Thatcher, on riddles in the gospels. Jesus the Riddler, is the main title. It’s so fascinating, how riddles function and how they function in narrative. That got me my third topic. And that’s been such a fun one to work with. And I found more riddles. I talked about in the book, I’m not looking to find a riddle under every rock. Because you can start looking for something and find it everywhere.
David Capes
Right. That’s part of the problem is scholarship, finding an idea and say, well, it’s just everywhere. But it’s not everywhere. But it’s in enough places to say there’s something going on here. The parables themselves seems to me to have a kind of a riddling tenor, don’t they? I mean, they’re not always self- evident.
Jeannine Brown
Right! Craig Keener calls them quasi riddles or something like that. He uses language that says they have a riddle kind of sense because sometimes you get the story on one level, but you don’t really get what the story is doing.
