Pauline Autobiography: What I’ve Been Studying for the Last Year, Part 1

What have I been doing for the last year if not writing a thesis? In this and a following post, I’ll provide a very brief explanation and summary, with some reflection about the direction in which I could take this work.

In the religious studies department at McMaster University students of the MA program spend one year in seminars and have two options for their second year. They may either write a thesis or a project. Everyone knows what a thesis is. A project, however, is a review of research; the way I think about it is that it seeks less to advance “our” knowledge (but how often do MA theses succeed here?) than the particular student’s knowledge. I thought that maybe writing a project would be a “cop-out,” but my supervisor affirmed its possible advantages.

If I have a topic that has the potential to be a doctoral dissertation, the project provides, in effect, an extra year of full-time study on that topic. This is beneficial in our context especially since PhD students are encouraged to complete their degree within four years—including one year for course-work, one year for comprehensive exams, and two years for writing the dissertation. My impression...seldom does anyone actually finish in this amount of time. But the project can increase the likelihood.

(A point of observation, from what I know of the British and American systems, Mac’s PhD program falls somewhere between them. Across the Atlantic one typically begins on the dissertation immediately, has no mandatory course-work or comprehensives, and is given three years to finish. South of the border, on the other hand, PhD programs are often six years, including two years of course-work, comprehensive exams [?], and the remaining years for the dissertation.)

So what topic did I choose to research?

The title of the project was “Autobiographical Aspects of Paul’s Letters and Thought: A Review of Recent Research.” My interest in this topic sprang from the growing impression that Paul’s autobiographical texts served a strong ideological and rhetorical purpose and that they were characterized by similar themes and patterns that are found in Paul’s non-autobiographical texts. I wondered how these autobiographical texts had been used to help us understand two broad topics: Paul’s theology and the relationship of his experience to his thought.

In the next post I’ll provide a summary of how I went about seeking an answer to these questions and where I could take this research in the future.