2007-02-24

Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 11/WIFTA

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Added about a day after the original post:

Knew it would be a mistake to rush that last chapter. (wifta: ‘what i forgot to add’). Had originally intended to address Bauckham’s Theissen reference:

Certainly something happened when the traditions were appropriated by the writers of the Gospels, but it could not have been so discontinuous with the attitude of the oral traditions themselves. The nature of the traditions . . . shows that they made reference to the real past history of Jesus. The fact that this is stated in the excellent textbook The Historical Jesus, by Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, shows how far the mainstream of Gospel scholarship has moved . . . (p.277)

B’s reference to the gospels recording “real past history” is to pp.102-104 of Theissen. Here are a few quotations from those pages in Theissen: Continue reading “Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 11/WIFTA”


On Paul meaning The Small

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Blogs are for thinking as we go so here is a thought on the run —

We all know that the name of the leading apostle, Simon, was changed to Peter, to mean Rock. (Matthew 16:18) Early Christian literature, including the church’s interpretation of the Jewish scriptures, has much to say about the theological imagery of “the/a rock” and from this literature we can sometimes appreciate what the name Peter may well have meant among those early Christians.

Paul was clearly the leading apostle among the gentiles, and the name was, like Peter, not original. Saul the persecutor was known, after Acts 13:9, as Paul, but the author of Acts gives the readers no explanation for this name change. Continue reading “On Paul meaning The Small”