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New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995. 330 pp. $35.00.
The interpretation of speech acts, particularly those like 1 Corinthians, which occurred in other contexts and codes, is validly achieved by integrating the text with the sociocultural realities in which it originated. This is one of the great strengths of Dale Martin's work.
Yet, given the historicality of the interpreter, no hermeneutical effort can ever fully represent the dynamics that contributed to the production of the text. Every interpretation will be predetermined by the possibilities of inquiry projected by the reader, and consequently, a plurality of reconstructions and constructions will result. No final interpretation will ever emerge. While this hermeneutical relativity also holds true for Martin's ideological analysis of 1 Corinthians, the result of his study is a very learned, insightful, provocative, and skillfully argued book. It represents a new genre of commentary, working the text of Paul's letter like Umberto Eco's character Brother William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose, who construes all the possible signs of text and context in order to identify the perpetrator of the crimes being committed in an Italian abbey. According to Martin, all the conflicts expressed and reflected in 1 Corinthians are oriented to and determined by the ideological constructions of the body. The meaning...