Seminar 1
Lydia Lee, University of Aberdeen, ‘Not an Echo but a Reverb: Transformative Dynamics within Aesthetic Figural Interpretation’
This paper proposes an aesthetic model for interpreting intertextual echoes, drawing on Richard Hays’s intertextual method alongside Frank Ankersmit’s theory of historical representation. I argue that traditional one-to-one typological correspondences limit our understanding of scriptural interconnections by reducing rich textual relationships to linear fulfillment patterns.
Instead, I introduce the concept of reverberation: an intertextual echo that functions not as a direct mirror but as a layered resonance, where meaning emerges through a pluriform network of overlapping reflections. This framework reimagines intertextuality as a dynamic icon-to-icon relationship, rather than a fixed typological alignment.
I demonstrate this approach by analyzing Jesus’s title as the “beloved” son at his baptism in the Synoptic Gospels. Read aesthetically—as a mimetic depiction of divine phenomena—the title evokes and transforms earlier “beloved” motifs, with Isaac emerging as a central, though not exclusive, representative within this broader typological connection. By addressing reverberative intertextuality, this paper calls for an aesthetically attuned hermeneutics that invites deeper engagement with both textual and nontextual traditions.
Seminar 2
Aminta Arrington, John Brown University, USA, University of Otago, NZ, ‘The Foreigner Who Returned: Narrative Repair and Counterstory in the Healing of the Ten Lepers (Luke 17:11-21)’
Jesus often uses words and rhetoric in ways to interrupt conventional thinking about those on the margins, question assumptions concerning those who have been excluded, and present a new story about people with damaged identities. In the story of the Healing of Ten Lepers, Jesus uses a series of three successive questions to launch a counterstory concerning the Samaritan who returned to give thanks. Questions, in an oral culture, often carry the rhetorical peak of a passage; each of Jesus’ three questions has blunt rhetorical force on their own. But when asked successively, polar question—contrastive question—polar question, they ratchet up the intensity, leaving the counterstory self-evident and tangible, all the more powerful for it has remained unspoken: The foreigner is the most righteous of all.
By using counterstory in the work of narrative repair, Jesus offers up the ἀλλογενὴς, the outsider, the alien, as the one who, in his return for the purpose of praising God and declaring his gratitude, is, ironically, the ideal Israelite.
Session 3: Joint with Johannine Group
John Nelson, Independent Scholar, ‘The Next Quest for Jesus’ Physical Appearance’
The physical appearance of Jesus is more distinctive and recognisable than any other. Yet until recently, historical Jesus scholarship has largely overlooked the subject of Jesus’ physicality. This paper offers a critique of recent studies of Jesus’ appearance – including Joan Taylor’s ‘average-looking’ Jesus (2018) and Isaac Soon’s ‘little Messiah’ (2023) – and offers some further suggestions towards re-imaging Jesus’ physical appearance. Taking my cue from The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (2024), I propose that paying attention to the use (and absence) of physiognomy in ancient biography (Petrey, 2024) and insights from disability studies in the context of Jesus’ labour in ancient Galilee (Gosbell, 2018) offers two means to destabilise our cultural iconography of Jesus. By reading the Gospels’ silence on Jesus’ physical traits within its socio-historical and literary milieu, historians are enabled to think more sensitively about Jesus’ image.