2007-01-17

R.I.P. F.F.Bruce on non-Christian sources vis a vis Doherty

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

by Neil Godfrey

I got carried away with my own comments on Bruce’s treatment of the non-christian sources. This morning I have reprimanded myself for straying from my original intent and made amends. I have gone back and revised each of the Bruce posts to include direct comparison’s with Doherty’s treatment of same.

Can’t wait to meet the next academic who is going to tell me or anyone else to “go to Bruce” the “sturdy” and “true” scholarly source on early non-christian sources!

I wonder if some just don’t like to be challenged to rethink their assumptions preferring for peer-pressure reasons as much as any other to lazily fall back on what “the majority of scholars” say.

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3 thoughts on “R.I.P. F.F.Bruce on non-Christian sources vis a vis Doherty”

pakeha says:

2014-02-13 09:57:55 GMT+0000 at 09:57

Out of curiosity, how is J. J. Bruce seen today in academic circles?

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Neil Godfrey says:

2014-02-13 10:05:27 GMT+0000 at 10:05

That’s a question you’d best ask on a New Testament scholar’s blog — Mark Goodacre or Larry Hurtado or any of the others.

A few years ago a liberal academic (I think he was/is an atheist) and New Testament scholar did recommend to me that I read J. J. Bruce’s discussion of the Testimonium Flavianum as the best overview of the question I could pick up. I really went out of my way to get a copy and when I did I felt cheated. It was nothing but a few paragraphs that could be reduced to about half a dozen dot-points. And he was offering me that to ‘rebut’ the pages and pages of details and argument from the other side of the question. I really wondered . . . .

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pakeha says:

2014-02-13 11:18:21 GMT+0000 at 11:18

Thanks for the heads-up, Neil Godfrey.

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