So Much Information

I've heard it said that getting a PhD amounts to learning more and more about less and less until one knows everything about nothing. I've had several--may I say dozens?--of professors whose positions required them to get PhDs. I've gone back to see a few of the PhD theses they wrote, to discover that the thesis has been printed maybe three times and covers a topic so specific or obscure that no general publisher would touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Maybe this is the destiny of PhD theses. I suspect they serve a different function than the thrill of reading.

Recently I thumbed my way through a thesis entitled The Role of Zechariah 1-8 in the Development of Apocalyptic, by Steven R. Swanson (1982). I had a hold of the only copy of the two-inch thick tome in existence outside the University of Edinburgh. There was something earthy about reading the text, typed on one-sided archival paper by an IBM Selectric, complete with handwritten corrections. It brought me back to a time when writing was dirtier, and riskier, because the writer faced the page directly rather than enjoying the clean service of a purifying computer screen with its infinite second chances.

The thesis was exhaustive. I became drenched in a deluge of scholarly names and competing theories. My mind followed down rabbit trails as long as a two-line dependent clause into dead-end counterexamples. Conclusions stood, instead of on the bedrock of convicted certainty, on the loamy soil of differing authorities.

This is the purpose of PhD theses: to display how much information one has acquired, and how it all fits in. Nothing can be left out, if it's been published in peer-review. A book for the casual student might be titled, Grasping for the Thread, or A Foot in Both Worlds, or some other metaphor to evoke the excitement of a prophet (or prophetic school?) navigating the re-establishment of post-exilic cultic faith. (Oh my gosh, there I am doing it!) But this one isn't: the title is too honest, too gritty for common consumption.

But The Role of Zechariah 1-8 in the Development of Apocalyptic does not intend to suck the reader into the great drama of prophetic history. It seeks to display to a host of academically savvy examiners that the author has done his homework. This end--since Mr. Swanson is now a Doctor--it achieves. To the less academically savvy reader like myself, sometimes the forest gets lost for the trees.

Now I've read more about Zechariah chapters one through eight than I'll ever have time or will to use. But I know that the work's been done, the concepts have been thought out, and I have a Doctor to call if I ever get stuck on the interpretation of one of these chapters.

~ emrys