WTS, Kisselgasse
1, D-69117 Heidelberg;
Office phone: 49-06221-54-3320; Fax: 54-3509;
Study phone in Rothenberg: 49-06275-919-660; Fax: 919-666;
E-Mail: Robert.Jewett@urz.uni-heidelberg.de or Jewett_Rothenberg@yahoo.com
EDUCATION
WTS, Kisselgasse
1, D-69117 Heidelberg;
Office phone: 49-06221-54-3320; Fax: 54-3509;
Study phone in Rothenberg: 49-06275-919-660; Fax: 919-666;
E-Mail: Robert.Jewett@urz.uni-heidelberg.de or Jewett_Rothenberg@yahoo.com
EDUCATION
EMPLOYMENT EXPERIENCE
PROFESSIONAL AND RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATIONS
HONORS, FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS
BOOKS
EDITORIAL PROJECTS
ARTICLES
STUDIES COMPLETED
WORK IN PROCESS
B. BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND CULTURAL CRITICISM
Truth in the Public Square: Political and Cultural Essays a collection of published and unpublished essays on American civil religion, the church, the academy, and the Messianic vision of world order
D. THE ROMANS ARCHIVE IN HEIDELBERG
A large bibliography of critical studies on Paul's letter to the Romans written from 1830 onwards has been assembled and many of the articles and monographs have been copied and gathered into a research archive now located in Heidelberg. The list of titles is presently more than 1000 pages long, single spaced, and will probably grow to 1500 pages when the project is compete. At present approximately 25% of this bibliography is available either in duplicated form in the files of the Heidelberg archive or in the monograph collection associated with the project.
The plan is to scan the entire bibliography and in cooperation with the university computer office, to place it on a website that would be available to students and scholars around the world. Since more has been written on Romans, verse for verse, than on any other biblical writing, or indeed, any other classic in the western world, and since only partial bibliographies are presently available, this project would provide a significant service. We hope that by 2004 the photographic scans of the bibliography would be available to scholars, and that by 2008 each item would be available in a version that could be downloaded and searched. In view of the thematic range of Romans, this bibliography would be useful to scholars in a number of fields.
Background and Development of the Project
The initial bibliography has been collected by Peter Lampe in connection with his book, Die Stadtrömischen Christen in den ersten beiden Jahrhunderten (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1987, 1989); English translation, From Paul to Vanentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries (Minneapolis: Fortress, forthcoming) and by Robert Jewett in connection with writing the Hermeneia Commentary on Romans since 1980, including a series of preliminary publications. The agreement to create a united research archive was made in 1995, to be located in Kiel where Lampe was serving as Professor of New Testament. When he was called to the chair in Heidelberg in 1999, an invitation was extended for Jewett to become a guest professor in connection with locating the archive here. An agreement on this was reached as Lampe negotiated his post with the university. The Evanston research archive was brought to Heidelberg in the summer of 2000 and was joined with Lampe’s archive in a renovated portion of the WTS building at Kisselgasse 1.
The bibliography had been collected in a variety of ways. Partial bibliographies found in monographs and previous commentaries were assembled. For example, the large bibliography assembled by Lampe was incorporated. The Wagner bibliography from Switzerland and the Ecole Biblique bibliography were collated with items found in New Testament Abstracts, major commentaries and the IZBG. Many items written prior to the 1920’s with the beginnings of Biblica’s surveys and 1950 with the inauguration of New Testament Abstracts had to be located in major university and national libraries. Many journals published between 1830 and 1920 have been searched year by year to ascertain the presence of relevant articles that had been overlooked in the scholarly discussion.
The scanning project is associated with the Forschungsstelle für die Wirkungsgeschichte des paulinischen Briefes an die Römer, attached to Lampe’s chair in Heidelberg.
with the commencement of a research grant for the bibliography project from the University of Heidelberg at the beginning of 2002, many of the technical aspects of the project have been researched and resolved; arrangements with the university computer center and the university library are in progress; the first staff persons were engaged; and the process of scanning with newly purchased equipment will begin later this spring.
The Need for a Comprehensive Bibliography on Romans
Romans is the only biblical book for which no comprehensive bibliography has been published; it remains the sole biblical writing on which a bibliographical article in the Theologische Rundschau article has never appeared. The reason for this is that the bibliography is so immense that no one has been able to master it. Helmut Koester reported in the early 1980’s that he was once given the assignment to write a review article on Romans literature for the Theologische Rundschau and that after a number of years the assignment was withdrawn. Commentaries on Romans written before 1920 referred mostly to other commentaries and only on rare occasions to other secondary literature. Current commentaries are routinely written on the basis of a small selection of monographs and articles that have been used by previous commentaries or that appear in recent publications. The same small sample of scholarly studies is recycled again and again in recent commentaries on Romans, which continue the tradition of citing mostly other commentaries. Potentially significant articles and monographs overlooked by earlier commentarier continue to be overlooked as new commentaries appear.
While it is self evident that reliable, comprehensive bibliographies are needed in every field, the crucial role that Paul’s letter to the Romans has played in theological development since the Reformation makes this an urgent desideratum. Now that computerized techniques of assembling bibliographies are available, and scanning techniques well developed, it is possible to break this deadlock and make this rich research available to scholars everywhere. Since so many of the items in the current bibliography that have been located through library and journal searches are available only in limited locations, they are available only to those with the means and time to travel. Most scholars and theological students around the world do not have such resources. The development of an on-line bibliography with the full texts of these studies will thus contribute to the productivity of scholars. Increased access to the scholarship of other nations and earlier generations will also encourage ecumenicity.
The Scope and Organization of the Bibliography
The Romans bibliography is organized in three sections: introductory issues; studies related to specific pericopes; and theological, thematic studies. In view of the range of the argument of Romans and its decisive role in ecclesiastical debate over the centuries, the latter section includes most of the important themes in biblical theology. The table of contents for the bibliography is attached.
Scholarly studies from all over the world are included. Since there is such a large polemical literature on Romans, only critical items of scholarly interest are included. For the most part such articles discuss the Greek terms and the historical and cultural background of the argument. Important theological studies are included but merely polemical articles defending ecclesiastical traditions are not. If all articles and books related to Romans were included, the bibliography would be twice or three times as large, and far less useful for scholarly work. Although Romans research in Europe and North America has long restricted its bibliographic interest to the North Atlantic, Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s commentary in 1993 listed hundreds of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American items for the first time, some of which predated the development of the bibliographic surveys in Biblica, New Testament Abstracts, and Internationaler Zeitschriftenschau für Bibelwissenschaften und Grenzgebieten. Fully one third of his commentary consists of bibibliography he gathered over the years of working in the libraries of Italy and Spain. Jewett has conducted similar bibliographic surveys in Switzerland, Scandinavia, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. The plan is for Lampe and Jewett to extend such surveys into the Netherlands and eastern Europe over the course of the next several years. Since scholarly assessments based on long experience with the critical interpretation of Romans is required for this work, it cannot be assigned to research assistants. Because scholarly items from the Orient and Africa are adequately covered by the survey resources of the 20th century, we do not plan visits to libraries there.
In view of the wide variations in journal and series abbreviations, particularly in studies from the early period, and to overcome the various traditions of providing only partial bibliographic references, a comprehensive table of abbreviations had to be created. In order to supply missing volume numbers and to distinguish between journals with the same name, the place and year of first publication has been sought and collated. For example Exp is used as an abbreviation for a journal in the UK and the US, and sometimes the volume number in coordination with the year can be employed to identify which is which; there are two ITK’s, one a Protestant journal from Bern and the other a Catholic journal from Rodenkirchen; there are two LumVie’s that need to be distinguished as LumVie(B) and LumVie(L); there are three potential MTS’s; two RB’s, RE’s and StTh’s; there are no less than 5 potential SB’s and TB’s. The attached table of abbreviations resolves all such confusions by assigning unmistakable abbreviations. As new studies are discovered, additional abbreviations will be added to this list. In the process, care will continue to be taken to overcome the cultural biases inherent in many widely employed abbreviation systems for journals and monograph series. The abbreviations used by the Harvard Theological Review, for example, routinely refers to French items with commonly employed Germanic abbreviations. So far as possible, abbreviations favored by cultural traditions are employed in the bibliography, and Siegfried Schwertner’s comprehensive listing of abbreviations has been used to avoid duplications. The extensive table of abbreviations in the currently appearing fourth edition of Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart will also be consulted. The current form of this emerging abbreviation system is attached.
Bibliographic items are listed in American style, with article titles in quotation marks and monograph titles italicized. Place of publication and the names of publishers are included, along with series titles, unitalicized, and relevant volume numbers. In order to overcome the provincialism implicit in the use of initials instead of full first and middle names, the names of authors are listed as on title pages but with bracketed completions. Thus Dodd, C.[harles] H.[arold]. This is required because of the multiplicity of names over the long period of the bibliography. When, for example there were three New Testament scholars writing at approximately the same time under the name of E. Fuchs, and when Smiths from all over the English speaking world appear in the indices, there is a need for bibliographic precision even though a considerable investment of research time is sometimes required.
The size of the archive when completed will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000,000 pages. The length of the articles currently listed is approximately 73,000 pages and of the monographs and commentaries approximately 1,800,000 pages. Languages appearing in the bibliography at present include English, German, French, Dutch, Afrikaans, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Russian and Japanese. It is anticipated that other eastern European languages will be represented when currently planned visits to Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania are completed. The participation of a wider range of scholars in the project will probably augment this total of linguistic traditions where important research has been done.
Copyright Issues
The use of scholarly articles and monographs by other scholars and students falls under the rubric of “Fair Use.” The Copyright Act of 1976: Section 106, passed by the U. S. Congress defines this as follows: "[T]he fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies . . . for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of
a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. . . .
The widely cited collection of essays edited by John Shelton Lawrence, Fair Use and Free Inquiry: Copyright Law and the New Media (Ablex Publishing, 1980, 1989) and the study by Kenneth Crews, Copyright, Fair Use, and the challenge for universities (University of Chicago Press, 1993) indicate that there is a wide consensus in Europe and North America on these rules for fair use. We intend to follow these rules by making the archive available only to theological students and scholars who register with the website and receive a password; by avoiding the duplication of works still in print; and by announcing with every transmission that the items in the archive are not to be used for commercial purposes.
Technical Dimensions of the Project
After investigating the market, we have decided to scan with a Zeutschel Omniscan 5000 TT that is capable of copying a DIN A4 sized page at the optimum scale of 300 dpi in circa 2 seconds per page. Approximately another six second are required for the computer program to process each image. This eight second interval coordinates well with the time required to place the page on the scanner so that the heading and footnotes are exactly copied, and double checking that this is done accurately when the page is printed. We have decided that a slower scanner, though less expensive, places too heavy a burden of useless waiting time on the staff, which can be demoralizing. In view of the large volume of scanning required in the project, a heavy duty scanner is necessary. The scanning process creates TIF files, which are exact photographic reproductions. Since the scanned pages require computer processing, we have decided to use ScanSoft Omnipage 11 software, which offers the best range of features, reliability, and speed of operation. At present Omnipage can deal with 18 modern languages, including Finnish, Polish, and Russian, claiming over 99% accuracy. The Omnipage files that are archived contain the image data and the coordinated text data which can be exported either together or separated in many formats. We will use PDF Image and text that can be employed in wordprocessing, in a format such as Word. The correction of this language file, which can be searched and used in word processing, will be undertaken by the doctoral and post-doctoral students and staff as the project develops. In view of the range of languages employed in a typical New Testament study, we anticipate considerably less than the initial accuracy achieved by Omnipage in texts written only in one language.
The scanned files are to be assembled and placed on a website, in some form of cooperation with the university library, with the memory system located in the university computer center. To maintain faith with the fair use regulations, each user would receive a permission number and would enter that number & password to access the archive. If we use the Heidelberg University Library system, no additional software would be required to process such passwords, and reliable access would be provided.