2007-02-03

Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses Ch 4/WIFTA

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by Neil Godfrey

More afterthoughts, oversights, erratum, from the chapter 4 posts:

4th Feb 07, 9.00 am Continue reading “Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses Ch 4/WIFTA”


Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 4b

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

by Neil Godfrey

Speculative digressions

Bauckham follows with a speculative set of digressions suggesting possible reasons why some names were more popular than others. Some, he suggests, were popular because they recalled names with anti-Hellenistic associations of liberation or conquest (e.g. Hasmonean names); others were popular for the opposite reason — because they jelled so easily with similar sounding Hellenistic names (e.g. Simon/Simeon)! Continue reading “Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 4b”


Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 4a

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

by Neil Godfrey

4. Palestinian Jewish Names

This chapter “temporarily steps aside from our investigation of the eyewitnesses” to explore a topic that “will usefully inform” that study when resumed (p.67). Unfortunately Bauckham does not clarify with any precision his terms here or offer cogently supported rationales for accepting some names and rejecting others from the lists he works with. I was left wondering if he was trying to establish a point about the gospels with tools that were simply not designed for the job. Continue reading “Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Chapter 4a”


Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Other, 1

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

by Neil Godfrey

Have updated my collected after-thoughts on my chapter 1 /WIFTA In brief, I remark that there is simply no such “phenomenon” as “named and unnamed characters” in the bulk of literary fiction and nonfiction stories that “cries out for explanation”. That an author does not name every single character making an appearance is simply to avoid the clutter of overburdening an audience with too much pointless detail. In the case of the first written of our gospels, Mark, it is clear that when the author does decide to employ a name for a character it is for the mnemonic/theological/message point of aligning an event with a name representative of that event. Thus in a healing of raising a girl “from sleep” we have the name “enlightened/awakened”, Jairus; in the restoring of a man from the shame of begging to following the royal “son of David”, we have the Son of Honour, Bartimaeus; and others I have also mentioned in earlier posts.

Meanwhile, another thought here: Continue reading “Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Other, 1”


The Myth of an al Qaeda Takeover of Iraq

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by Neil Godfrey

Related current article: The Myth of an al Qaeda Takeover of Iraq