10 Tips on Academic Job Hunting

Last week I had a conversation with a colleague that turned to how she got her current teaching job. Shortly after that, someone emailed me about advice on applying for a teaching job in biblical studies. Since we probably have a decent number of readers who are in PhDs or thinking about one, I thought it might be worth sharing what advice I have.

Disclaimers: I don’t have any particular expertise on this other than I got a job (for which I’m very thankful) and I have had a number of good friends also go through the ringer application process and get jobs. I can primarily speak from and for my own context of American evangelicalism. Jobs in U.S. state schools, research universities, non-confessional liberal arts schools, and overseas schools can be different animals and others are better equipped to talk about those. Finally, I don’t have any jobs to offer. Sorry.

1. Identify your real competition. The job market can often feel daunting because there are so many well qualified applicants out there, especially in NT. But the reality is, you aren’t actually competing with everyone for every job. You also aren’t competing for every job. In some cases you won’t be competing at all! The sooner you realize who your real competition is, the better. This advice comes from John Stackhouse and it helped me when I was thinking about doing a PhD. It gives some needed perspective.
2. Expand your networks now. Go to ETS. Go to IBR. Go to SBL. Meet with people at those venues to connect about their research and yours. The more people who know you, your gifts, your research, etc., the better. Who you know matters far less than who knows you. Yes, networking can be crass and shallow, but it doesn’t have to be. Learn to do it well.
3. Start applying now. It’s almost never too early. Even though many won’t consider you without a PhD in hand, it’s still helpful to get started on the process. It can be exhausting so starting early helps build up endurance for what may be a long haul.
4. Publish now. This is tricky because you want to put most of your energy into writing a great dissertation. But I think it can be very helpful to have an article or two under your belt when you send out an application. At the very least, you should present your research in academic forums.
5. Identify your “pluses.” This one comes from my boss and I think it’s increasingly true. Many schools today are looking for a professor+, someone who can teach plus do x, y, or z. That plus could be additional skill in marketing, enrollment, admin, advancement, online ed, library staffing, etc. The point is: think about what you have to offer beyond teaching. If you’re lucky, you won’t have to teach+, but more and more, teaching+ is going to be key.
6. Read The Professor Is in: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. into a Job. It’s mostly geared at secular teaching jobs, but it’s still helpful. Especially the part on writing a cover letter.
7. Know what matters in an interview. I know when I was job searching, I was most worried about whether I measured up academically. The reality is, if you get to the interview, they are probably not concerned at all about that; they want to know about your theology, your personality, your family, and a host of intangibles. I would also add, make sure that you interview your interviewers. You should be looking for red flags, rifts in the institution, financial woes, etc. If they ask if you have any questions for them, make sure you do. Read this from Mike Kruger for more on this.
8. Identify the unwritten doctrinal statement. This can be tricky if you don’t know someone on the inside, but I always say there is the written doctrinal statement and the unwritten one. The unwritten one is where a school puts its theological emphasis. Ask if they have a separate teaching statement or set of white papers or any other kind of clarifications for their faculty that you need to be aware of. Many confessional schools do and it won’t hurt to ask. Even if they don’t, you can bet they have things they care about that aren’t on the homepage. Try to identify those as best you can before taking the job.
9. Serve others. If you’ve finished a PhD, you’ve worked really hard and probably made a lot of sacrifices along the way. Especially if you did your degree to serve the Lord, it can be crushing not to get the teaching job you always wanted. If you’re not careful, it can make you bitter—at God, at the church, at your family. To avoid this, you need a robust theology of grace. God doesn’t owe any of us a job. It’s a gift that we have the ability, time, and resources to study. If we get a good job, that too is a gift (cf. 1 Cor 4.7). If your dream job is an undeserved gift, treat it that way now. In all this, be like Jesus: For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10.45).
10. What would you add?

Is Martha an Interpolation into John’s Gospel – A Note from the Editor

In a three-part guestpost “Is Martha an Interpolation into John’s Gospel,” Elizabeth Schrader has shared her research and in the recent week there has been a lively discussion with more than fifty comments (Peter Head’s magic threshold) added together. As the editor who invited Schrader to post, I want to thank her for sharing and for interacting with those who commented. The debate will likely continue.

Finally, I also promised to offer my own thoughts. I may make some readers disappointed, but I first have to admit that I have neither studied the textual problems in John 11, nor Schrader’s published work, in any great detail, and therefore I can only offer my preliminary thoughts here.

As I said in the introduction of the first blogpost, I think Schrader’s findings – the mere textual data – are significant. Some commenters have suggested that they are all random scribal errors. I actually have the feeling that it is a mix. Some are random errors, others are different types of general tendencies, e.g., to elevate the man Lazarus, or to downplay Martha, or possibly redaction by a scribe like in the case of P66 (I need to look more into that). This is all interesting and worth the research.

On the other hand, I think it is extremely problematic to harvest the textual tradition and try to find one grand thesis that explains all the textual changes, i.e., I disagree with Schrader’s overall explanation of the data – that Martha was interpolated in the story in the second century – and this would be an interpolation of a very different kind than the ending of Mark or the pericope adulterae (which I, along with most scholars, regard as the two major interpolations in the New Testament).

Origen Did Think Paul Wrote Hebrews

Hebrews written by Paul in GA 104

Last fall, when teaching Hebrews at the seminary, I did what one does when discussing authorship of Hebrews: I noted that tradition ascribes it to Paul, pointed out that it’s anonymous (but see here), showed why Paul isn’t the author, surveyed the alternate options, and then ended with Origen who says, “But who wrote the epistle, in truth God knows.” Once the standing ovation had died down, I moved on.

The problem with my presentation turns out to be the last part about Origen. The larger context of Origen’s comment is as follows:

But as for myself, if I were to state my own opinion, I should say that the thoughts are the apostle’s, but that the style and composition belong to one who called to mind the apostle’s teachings and, as it were, made short notes of what his master said. If any church, therefore, holds this epistle as Paul’s, let it be commended for this also. For not without reason have the men of old time handed it down as Paul’s. But who wrote the epistle, in truth God knows. Yet the account which has reached us [is twofold], some saying that Clement, who was bishop of the Romans, wrote the epistle, others, that it was Luke, he who wrote the Gospel and the Acts. (Eusebius Hist. Eccl. 6.25.11–14)

Today, a very good article on Origen and the authorship of Hebrews has been published in NTS by Matthew J. Thomas, arguing that I and so many others have misread this passage. Thomas instead shows that the right way to read this is not that Origen doesn’t know who authored Hebrews but that he doesn’t know who put pen to papyrus. Thus, exactly as he says, the thoughts are indeed the apostle’s but the actual composition is someone else’s. Thomas says that “while Origen suspects Hebrews’ composition to involve more than Paul alone, his surprisingly consistent testimony is that the epistle is indeed Paul’s.”

I read the article in an earlier draft and was convinced and had to revise my course notes accordingly. Next time I teach it, I will not be using Origen as evidence against Pauline authorship. (Hopefully I’ll still get the standing-o though.)

You can read the whole argument here.

Silvia Castelli Passes Her Viva on Wettstein

A hearty congratulations to Silvia Castelli who has just defended her doctoral dissertation on the subject of J. J. Wettstein (see here). I have read a bit of it privately and what I read was excellent (and well formatted too). I do hope it gets published. For now we extend a hearty congrats to her!

P.S. I am happy to announce the passing of TC-related thesis defenses on this space. Please let me know.

Photo from Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte

Is Martha an Interpolation into John’s Gospel? Part III

We have come to the third and concluding part of Elizabeth Schrader’s guest post concerning the presence or absence of Martha and Mary in John 11:1–12:2. The previous two parts are here and here. I am glad that I did not have to delete any comments to the previous part, and I look forward to following the final round.

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THE ONE-SISTER TEXTFORM IN JOHN 11

Some have suggested that I am collecting many various phenomena and positing one grand theory for basically anything aberrant I have found in John 11. For those who have gotten this impression of my work, I hope they might consider examining the cogent one-sister text form of John 11:1-5, which can be reconstructed using real readings found in just three weighty manuscripts (A*, P66*, and VL 6):

1 There was a certain sick man, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary his sister.
2 Now this was the Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick.
3 Therefore Mary sent to him, saying, “Lord, behold, the one you love is sick.”
4 But when Jesus heard he said to her, “The sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, so that the Son may be glorified through it.”
5 Now Jesus loved Lazarus and his sister.

I posit that this text form (found on page 381 of my Harvard Theological Review article, and justified by the analysis in the article’s preceding pages) may be both a plausible and defensible recovery of five verses of John 11, and is potentially representative of the “initial text.” I believe that all of the phenomena discussed in the previous post can be explained by an interpolation of Martha to the one-sister text form above (and its natural continuation). Although our tendency as a text-critical guild is sometimes to apply more and more complicated methodologies, none of us doubt that all manuscripts of John trace back to the initial circulating text. Thus it is not impossible that different portions of the initial text could have been preserved in different corners of the textual tradition. Since a coherent one-sister text form of considerable length can already be reconstructed (which lessens the likelihood of the variants’ randomness), I believe it is worthwhile to simply begin thinking through the exegetical implications of a “Lazarus and Mary” version of John 11-12, and any potential objections that might have arisen to such a text in antiquity.

Of course this does not mean that we should overlook the information that sophisticated methodologies can provide. The Coherence-Based Genealogical Method will hopefully shed additional light on the problems in John 11. I suggest that those working with the CBGM consider looking not just at relationships between individual variation units, but also at how the five problematic criteria I have isolated (see post #1) show up in related witnesses. As one particularly clear example, 157, 1344, 579, and 2680 are all closely related genealogically overall in John. However, these witnesses might variously display any of the five criteria that suggest Martha’s absence: 157 drops “Martha” in John 11:1 (Criterion 1), 1344 changes “Maria” to “Martha” in John 11:20 (Criterion 2), 579 uses two unexpected singular verbs and one unexpected singular pronoun at 11:3, 12:2, and 11:39 (Criterion 4), while 2680 simultaneously lists Mary first in John 11:5, omits Martha’s name completely from the same verse, and uses a singular pronoun at 11:19 (Criteria 1, 3, 4, and 5). Thus when we use the CBGM to look at this problem in John 11, let us note when several witnesses in the same genealogical group display problematic criteria in different ways. If a high concentration of different Maria/Martha problems occur in related witnesses, this could suggest that the phenomena originate with a one-sister text form, rather than that the phenomena are random scribal errors occurring independently of one another.

My hope is that the increased interest in this topic will lead to additional research on all of the abovementioned topics, so we can better understand the various textual phenomena appearing in the Lazarus story. I look forward to engaging with the responses of my colleagues.

Is Martha an Interpolation into John’s Gospel? Part II

Here we continue with Elizabeth Schrader's guest post in three parts concerning the textual transmission of John 11:1–12:2, specifically the presence (or absence) of the two sisters, Martha and Mary in the story. The first part was posted here and provoked a lot of reactions. I will personally try to stay out of the debate and instead add a few thoughts in a separate post when all parts have been published. In the meantime let's continue the discussion with focus on arguments (I had to delete some comments that did not).

THE MANY DIFFERENT TEXTUAL PHENOMENA IN JOHN 11

Some have already objected to my suggestion that Martha is an interpolation into John’s Gospel. Thus far there have been both public supporters and detractors of the theory, though the case has yet to be settled. I remain open to changing my position if others can present theories that persuasively account for all of the textual phenomena I have isolated in John 11. For example, dissenting responders must explain:

• Why Martha’s name drops out from so many verses in the manuscripts of John, while her name is stable in the manuscript transmission of Luke;
• Why there are five continuous verses of textual instability around Martha in our oldest surviving copy of John 11, Papyrus 66, where in 11:3 the scribe clearly splits one named woman into two unnamed women (a choice that cannot be explained by P66’s scribal habits);
• Why there is such extreme textual instability in both the order of names and who is named in John 11:5, especially in the Vetus Latina (we find an extremely rare phenomenon of the first person in the list being completely unpredictable, and neither sister is named in several important witnesses, including one Greek lemma of a Chrysostom homily);
• Why many ancient patristic quotations attribute actions to Mary that our Bibles now attribute to Martha (e.g. Tertullian giving Mary the Christological confession at John 11:27, or Chrysostom stating that Mary said the tomb stank at John 11:39);
• Why two of our most important manuscripts of John 11:1, P66 and Codex Alexandrinus, make the very similar change of “Maria” to “Martha,” and also use the masculine pronoun to say “his sister”;
• Why the name “Maria” is altered to “Martha” in several witnesses, whereas not a single surveyed manuscript of John ever alters the name “Martha” to “Maria”;
• Why the clearly accented dative feminine singular pronoun frequently pops up throughout the text transmission in John 11:4 (ἀκούσας δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτῆ), a reading that is also seems to be reflected in P66*;
• Why Martha is placed beside Mary Magdalene in second- and third-century documents like the Epistula Apostolorum and Hippolytus’ Commentary on the Song of Songs in ways that seem to diminish Mary’s authority (at the very same time period where documents like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip reveal that there were debates around Mary’s authority).

I agree that theories of the marginalization of Martha or scribal incompetence could explain (b), (d), (e), and (g). However I do not believe they adequately explain (a), (c), (f), and (h). Perhaps some scribes did drop Martha’s name at John 11:1 due to inattention; perhaps Tertullian’s (or Chrysostom’s, or Cyril of Jerusalem’s) memories of scripture were faulty when they said that Mary did things that Martha “should” do; perhaps Lazarus was occasionally moved to the top of the list in John 11:5 due to a desire to emphasize the male in the family; perhaps some scribes anticipating the anointing accidentally wrote that Mary served the supper at John 12:2, etc. etc. I realize that there is nearly always an alternate explanation for each of these problems individually; but the trouble is with the weight of these problems collectively.

This theory does not exclude the possibility that multiple phenomena may be occurring in the variations in John 11. For example, we see a bit of instability around Mary’s presence in John 11 (although this happens about five times less frequently than instability around Martha, and may simply be further evidence of a desire to emphasize Martha). Moreover, as Tommy Wasserman and Mary Rose D’Angelo have pointed out, the occasional dropping of the ἣ at Luke 10:39 can be seen as de-emphasizing Martha’s discipleship;[1] it is thus not impossible that there was a kind of “diminishment” of Martha happening at the same time as the early controversies around Mary Magdalene. Since multiple phenomena may indeed be at play in this pericope, we should do comprehensive studies of the various possibilities in each case. It may also be worthwhile to do studies of the individual scribal habits of the manuscripts displaying multiple instances of instability around Martha (beyond P66, these include Codex Alexandrinus, 357, 423, 579, 841, 884, 994, 2680, L17, VL 2, VL 6, VL 8, VL 15, and sa 5). It might be worthwhile to investigate the textual character of Chrysostom’s lemmas in Gr. Ms. 320 in St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai, the only extant Greek witness to name Lazarus first in John 11:5. However, since so many manuscripts display problems around Martha, we cannot chalk it all up to individual scribal habits. At a certain point we must ask whether the collective weight of all of the evidence might be related to the woman getting split in two in Papyrus 66 at John 11:3.

Moreover, the early interpolation of Martha can answer several questions that biblical scholars have been asking for generations, such as:

• why do Martha and Mary seem to live in Galilee or Samaria in Luke’s Gospel? (because they did not live in Bethany!)
• why don’t Martha and Mary have a brother in Luke 10? (Because Lazarus isn’t their brother!)
• why do Martha and Mary say the very same thing, first at John 11:21 and then again at 11:32? (because one woman was doubled!)
• why did so many early Christians, going all the way back to the third century, identify Mary of Bethany as Mary Magdalene? (because circulating texts of the Fourth Gospel encouraged them to do so in light of obvious parallels between John 11 and John 20!)

Therefore, due to both external and internal evidence, as of now I believe that the interpolation of Martha remains the simplest thesis for explaining the combined weight of these phenomena.

Notes
[1] See Tommy Wasserman, “Bringing Sisters Back Together: Another Look at Luke 10:41–42,” JBL 137:2 (2018): 439-61, at 457; Mary Rose D’Angelo, “Women Partners in the New Testament,” JFSR 6 (1990): 65-86, at 78-79.