Attempto

Attempto: "I strive after something, I attempt, I essay, try, make trial of; I solicit; assail, attack."

This is the University of Tübingen's motto, and I actually think about it more than you might suppose an outsider guest student who keeps to himself all the time would think about the motto of a foreign university. Specifically, I think about this when I consider my thesis, and the sheer unlikeliness of its eventual success. After all, the criterion for a successful doctoral thesis is that it has to "make a contribution to knowledge." The New Testament is itself a short book, and Paul's letters in their entirety can be read in one sitting. But the critical reflection and writing about them began almost as soon as they were initially written, and almost twenty centuries have accumulated quite a bit of secondary literature - loads of it, needless to say, by people way smarter than I could ever aspire to be, and even more of it in languages inaccessible to my monolingual americanized brain. No problem, though, right? I'll just pick a really specific theme. How about Deuteronomy in Paul's letters? After all, he only quotes the book maybe a dozen times or so. But when I tell people my topic, they look at me with jaw-dropped incredulity and say, "Are you really trying to do all the Deuteronomy material in Paul?" They say this not because they are buffoons (at least, as a rule), but because they know some of the six or eight monographs on individual Deuteronomy citations in Paul published within the last ten years. That's when I explain that my project is different because I'm doing something synthetic and comparative, something big-picture (bet you didn't realize that doing the Deuteronomy citations in Paul is 'big-picture', eh?). They nod and feign an oh-now-I-understand look, but the suspicion doesn't quite leave their eye. And when I lay awake at night thinking about my thesis, I share these suspicions, I hear the examiner's laughing me out of my viva, I see the cardboard box into which Julia and I will be forced to move, the interest on our student loans spiraling out of control...

I did a lot of the counting-the-costs kind of thinking before starting a doctoral program, which I think is the right thing to do. Do I have what it takes? Do I realize how much work this is going to be? Am I willing to sit for ten hour days of reading and typing? And of course Julia and I talked a lot about what it would take for us to do this as a married couple. Mostly, it's been about what I braced myself for. Except for one thing: I'm not sure I fully comprehended the emotional strain of being constantly evaluated. It started with the application process, but then once that was over, there were the scholarships, the book reviews, the seminars, the supervisory meetings, the book review requests, the article submissions, the conferences, the progress meetings, the confirmation of status, the viva. It does something to you after awhile. You read an article and have trouble taking in the substance because you wonder, could I have written this?  You meet someone at a conference and convince yourself they aren't really taking you seriously (recall my 'suspicious eye' comment at the end of the previous paragraph). You take it as axiomatic that any positive comment about your work reflects more on the generosity of the speaker than on the quality of what you've produced. 

No, New Testament study is not all fancy cars, tuxedos and cocktail parties. Come to think of it, it's not any of those things. Nevertheless, when I can block out my issues long enough to engage the matter of the text itself, I feel like the luckiest person in the world. I really can't believe that I get to spend my time doing this. And those are the moments that I think to myself, what if my thesis really does work? What if I make an actual contribution to the ongoing dialogue? Can I really do it? Attempto...

Here's the Theologikum, Tübingen's historic theology building where I am grateful to have an office:


My office:

Tübingen has its share of famous New Testament scholars. Just outside my door is the notice board for an emeritus professor whom I hope to meet while I'm here - he has been called the greatest living New Testament professor:

And two of the greats of previous generations lie in the cemetery just across the street. They lived in different times, and in some ways represent diametrically opposed approaches to the New Testament, yet they are buried within 100 meters of each other. I like to think of them as carrying on the argument: