2012-12-11

‘Is This Not the Carpenter?’ Reviewing chapter 11, Luke’s Sophisticated Re-Use of OT Scriptures

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by Neil Godfrey

Previous posts in this series are archived here. Another review of this chapter can be read at Aaron Adair’s blog.

I liked Ingrid Hjelm‘s chapter, “‘Who is my Neighbor?’ Implicit Use of Old Testament Stories and Motifs in Luke’s Gospel”, for several reasons:

  1. it presented the first cogent explanation I have ever encountered for why Luke’s genealogy of Jesus is so different from Matthew’s and why it avoided all mention of David’s son Solomon and the rest of the kings of Israel and Judah;
  2. it explained how a Davidic Messianic figure did not necessarily imply a worldly conqueror (at least not until the last days) but that the OT also contained a nonviolent priestly vision of David who united God’s people as a priestly, Moses-like figure;
  3. it showed how the Gospel of Luke is very much an extension of the same sort of literature that came to make up the Jewish Bible;
  4. it reminded me of the importance of the sacred meaning of numbers among biblical authors, something too easily overlooked today;
  5. it also indirectly prompted possible explanations for why Luke might have adapted and changed the Gospel of Matthew (if he did — but this is really a topic that belongs to another post entirely.)

(But it took some time to grasp what the chapter was about initially. It launches straight into a detailed discussion of details of Matthew’s genealogy and one is immediately wondering, “What the heck is this all about? Was an opening paragraph outlining her argument lost by an editor?” More likely, perhaps, it was cut and paste from other publications by Hjelm yet with insufficient re-editing to clarify the direction of the argument for readers completely new to her views. And there are several passages in the rest of the chapter that leave a reader unfamiliar with the contents of cited references bemused. (Only after tracking down online citations and catching up with some background reading was I able to make sense of some of Hjelm’s statements. Needless to say, some of her claims whose citations are not online remain obscure to me.) Unfortunately this chapter is not the only one in this volume that suffers from this sort of difficulty for those unfamiliar with some of the authors and ideas, — not to mention just a few too many typos. But as you can tell from my positive introduction it was worth making the effort to understand the flow of her argument.)

Ingrid Hjelm

Hjelm shows us that the author of the Gospel of Luke interpreted and reused the Old Testament scriptures as a template for his own Gospel story of Jesus in quite subtle and sophisticated ways that are foreign to the ways most modern readers have come to understand the OT. Luke (we’ll imagine the author’s name was Luke) viewed the David figure embodied in Jesus not through the stained history in the books of Samuel, but through the idealized portrait in the books of Chronicles where a priestly David is portrayed as a second Moses, and as such reunites Samaritanism and Judaism once again into the theological ideal of a new Israel.

(I use the term “Judaism” here instead of “Jews” because it is worth keeping in mind what that word “Jew” actually describes at that time: see Where did the Bible’s Jews come from? Part 1, Part 2. Hjelm even concludes that Luke was not the gentile convert most readers have assumed him to be, but a Hellenized “Jew”.)

What we see in the Gospel are reiteration and paralleling of the motifs and themes of the older Scriptures. If that sounds a lot like the sort of argument we have come to expect from Thomas L. Thompson, we should not be surprised to find Hjelm is also from the University of Copenhagen and Thompson’s name appears frequently in her list of publications.

There is, of course, much more to be written about the Gospel of Luke’s use of the OT — see, for example, Origin of the Emmaus Road Narrative and More on Luke’s Use of Genesis — but this chapter by Hjelm gives readers an excellent insight into the way the author used Scriptures. Hjelm concludes ambiguously on the question of the implications of Luke’s use of Scriptures for the narrative’s historicity. What really matters is that we understand and accept the nature of the Biblical stories and what they meant for their original creators and audiences.

Against Hjelm’s references to Samaritans as the heritage of Moses in this chapter one should be aware that Ingrid Hjelm clearly has a special interest in Samaritan studies (see her list of publications) and last year was awarded The Samaritan Medal for Peace and Humanitarian Achievement by the Samaritan community. At one point she justifies the pivotal reference to Samaritans as well as Jews as an allegorical interpretation (Moses represents the Samaritans and Elijah the Jews) by citing an earlier (2004) publication of hers.

42 = the meaning of life*, David & Jesus Continue reading “‘Is This Not the Carpenter?’ Reviewing chapter 11, Luke’s Sophisticated Re-Use of OT Scriptures”


Collins’ Eyewitness Source Citation

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by Neil Godfrey

Expository Times 121.9 (June 2010) 447-52: ‘Re-thinking “Eyewitnesses” in the Light of “Servants of the Word” (Luke 1:2)’

The previous post was based on John Collins’ article found via the above link online. I am posting this here because in my initial post my link to this site was not obvious and I only attempted to rectify that after many readers had accessed the article.


2012-12-09

What Did Luke’s Eyewitnesses See?

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by Neil Godfrey

The Gospel of Luke begins with words that many have understood to be an assurance that its narrative is based on the firsthand eyewitness testimony of those who had seen Jesus for themselves. Here is Craig S. Keener‘s rendition of Luke 1:1-2

. . . many have sought to complete a narrative of the acts fulfilled in our midst, just as those who were eyewitnesses and servants of the message have from the beginning transmitted them orally to us. (from the header to chapter 10, “The Gospels’ Oral Sources”, in The Historical Jesus of the Gospels, 139)

Keener captures the meaning Richard Bauckham imputes to the term “eyewitnesses” in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

The autoptai [eyewitnesses] are simply firsthand observers of the events. (p. 117)

Now . . . we have discovered how important was the notion of an eyewitness who was qualified to tell the whole gospel story by virtue of participation in it from beginning to end . . . . (p. 124)

John N. Collins, in a 2010 Expository Times article, ‘Re-thinking “Eyewitnesses” in the Light of “Servants of the Word” (Luke 1:2)’ on the other hand, has cogently argued that the term translated “eyewitnesses” in Luke 2 almost certainly means something quite different from this widely-embraced view, and after 2 1/2 years Richard Bauckham has still to find time to respond. One scholar who has noticed Collins’ article is Thomas L. Brodie. He cites it six times in Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus. (For info on John Collins see his details at the end of his review on Catholica.)

English: beginning of the Gospel of Luke
English: beginning of the Gospel of Luke (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Collins closely examines the context of the word for eyewitnesses in Luke 1:2 and concludes it refers to officers of long-standing in the Christian community. At this point it is important to recall the opening words of Luke’s preface:

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled [peplērophorēmenōn] among us, 2 just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, 3 I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you [NRSV]

Given that the opening verses are about literary activity, and the close association of the “autoptai” with “servants”, Collins further concludes that their role was related to the authentication of the documents accumulated from those many literary endeavours.

The word in question is found only once in the New Testament so there are no other biblical comparisons that can assist us with its meaning. The essence of Collins’ argument follows. (In all quotations the bolding is my own, not original.)

Eyewitnesses are also the Servants of the Word “From the Beginning”

First, Collins draws attention to the word order of the Greek. He sets out the above NRSV translation the following word order to reflect the Greek:

the from beginning eyewitnesses and servants being of the word

Servants and eyewitnesses are bracketed as a unit between “the” and “being/genomenoi“. It is clear that the two terms, eyewitnesses and servants, are to be understood as the one and same group with the same dual functions — eyewitnessing and serving — from the beginning. Continue reading “What Did Luke’s Eyewitnesses See?”


2012-12-07

Emperor Ehrman Walks Naked Through a Storyland Nazareth 4000 Years Old

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by Neil Godfrey

Updated with mostly typo corrections, 6:30 am, 8th Dec. 2012.
The Emperor's New Clothes - (2) - procession
The Emperor’s New Clothes – (2) – procession (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Perhaps many readers of Bart Ehrman are impressed enough with his public reputation to be confident that when they read his book on mythicism, Did Jesus Exist? (DJE?), they are reading yet another fine, erudite, devastating critique by a scholar who knows what he is talking about.

A few who have also read René Salm’s book, The Myth of Nazareth (MoN), on the other hand, will shake their heads in disbelief that such a distinguished scholar is exposed as intellectually stark naked when he writes about that book. Ehrman, once again, demonstrates for any who are prepared to look that he clearly has not read the book he is reviewing. He even makes a complete fool of himself with simplistic retorts that only demonstrate his utter ignorance of what he describes as “the highly technical field of archaeology”. Ehrman exposes himself as a very shallow thinker when faced with serious challenges to a paradigm he had always, by his own admission, taken for granted.

Let’s start.

The point of it all

Ehrman curiously thinks that Salm is arguing that if Nazareth didn’t exist then there was no historical Jesus, either:

The logic of this argument . . . appears to be that if Christians made up Jesus’s home-town, they probably made him up as well. . . Salm sees this issue as highly significant and relevant to the question of the historicity of Jesus. (DJE? pp. 191, 193)

But Salm’s argument is at no point so black and white and, contrary to Ehrman’s innuendo, does not simplistically assume that Jesus did not exist if Nazareth did not exist.

If Nazareth did not exist in the time of Jesus, then questions quickly arise: Why did the evangelists place him there? Was there something regarding his real provenance that they found objectionable? What was that provenance? If Nazareth was a persistent and recurrent invention in the gospels, then we leave the realm of error and enter the realm of elaborate fiction. This recognition would require a fundamental reappraisal of the Jesus story, and a paradigm shift in Christianity. . . . .

The implication is . . . irrefutable: if there was no Nazareth before his birth, then Jesus did not come from Nazareth. . . . .

It is not my intention here to question the conventional understanding of Christian origins, that a man by the name of Jesus . . . lived in Palestine in the early first century CE and inspired the religion we now call Christianity. . . . I restrict consideration to the archaeology of Nazareth, with the purpose of showing that the provenance of Jesus, as set forth in the gospels, is not historical.

He — whoever he was (or wasn’t) — certainly was not Jesus “of Nazareth” in Lower Galilee. . . . It remains to be determined why the evangelists found it necessary to invent such a Jesus.

(MoN, pp. xii-xiii, 148, 157-8, 308)

Nothing new, but everything anew

Ehrman mischievously implies that Salm is claiming to present new discoveries: Continue reading “Emperor Ehrman Walks Naked Through a Storyland Nazareth 4000 Years Old”


2012-12-05

Bart Ehrman’s “unture” claims about the Nazareth arguments

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by Neil Godfrey

1st edition cover design for The Emerald City ...
1st edition cover design for The Emerald City of Oz (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bart Ehrman has stridently insisted he really did read the mythicist works he reviewed in Did Jesus Exit? (DJE?) so we must take him at his word. And being a scholar we know he is a gentleman and therefore honest, so we must conclude, I think, that he was very tired or unwell and badly losing concentration when he read René Salm’s and Frank Zindler’s writings casting doubt on the existence of Nazareth. I can see little in common between Ehrman’s “representations” of their arguments and their actual works themselves. This post will point to some of the most incomprehensible discrepancies — incomprehensible, that is, IF Ehrman really did read Salm and Zindler with any elementary comprehension and attention.

(Earl Doherty chose not to address this question in his review #23 of Ehrman’s book because it is not a question he as examined and, as Ehrman himself says — p. 197 of DJE? –, whether Nazareth existed or not does not, of itself, decide the question of Jesus’ existence. Earl Doherty’s reviews of Ehrman’s DJE? have been updated, revised and collated as a Kindle e-Book on Amazon.)

Unture claim #1

Ehrman addresses the argument over the existence of Nazareth in pages 191 to 197 of his book. Curiously, Ehrman says the argument that Nazareth did not exist is “one of the more common claims found in the writings of mythicists” (p. 191).

It is?

It is not found in any of the writings of Earl Doherty nor, from what I have read, in any of the writings of Robert M. Price (though I understand he has made some mention of it on an audio session) or Thomas L. Thompson or Richard Carrier. I think G. A. Wells makes passing mention of it. Ehrman does not help us here because he footnotes not a single source for his claim.

Unture claims #2 and #3

As anyone who has read earlier analyses of Ehrman’s work on this blog would expect by now, Ehrman offers readers no citations, no evidence in support of his accusations. He simply makes them up.

Ehrman writes:

The logic of this argument, which is sometimes advanced with considerable vehemence and force, appears to be that if Christians made up Jesus’s home-town, they probably made him up as well. (p. 191)

I like that weasel-phrase “appears to be” — it is a favourite of James McGrath, too. It means one can always plead that one never made any accusations but only that your stupid words “appeared” to be stupid. Of course, as anyone who has read earlier analyses of Ehrman’s work on this blog would by now expect, Ehrman gives readers no citations, no evidence in support of his accusations. He simply makes them up.

#2 —

I had not even known that Zindler had written anything about Nazareth until I read Ehrman’s response to it. (Zindler’s main “mythicist” publication certainly does not discuss it.) So I looked it up. There is a copy online, Where Jesus Never Walked. Now Zindler’s article is rich with humour. At times he can be downright funny. Is this the trait that Ehrman interprets as diabolical “vehemence and force”?

#3 —

And here is how Zindler expresses the significance of the evidence against Nazareth existing in the time of Jesus. Observe that it is not quite how Ehrman says it “appears to be”: Continue reading “Bart Ehrman’s “unture” claims about the Nazareth arguments”


2012-12-03

More SBL Fallout from René Salm’s paper

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by Neil Godfrey

Slightly revised R.S's. parenthesis [That's illogical . . . facts unfettered], 6:00 am, 4th December, 2012

NOTE: See Rene’s comment #5  below, titled “Clarification by Dr Avalos” for corrections to some of the detail in this post: 

René Salm has posted the following:

I discovered Ehrman’s blog yesterday (http://ehrmanblog.org/rene-salm-at-the-society-of-biblical-literature-meeting/) and found that he and his readers are “outraged” at my being invited to SBL. He writes the following (my comments and emphases added):

———

Rene Salm at the Society of Biblical Literature Meeting

Several people have sent me private emails asking why René Salm was put on the program at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting, given the fact that he is not a scholar and has no credentials in the field [Credentials are evidently indispensable evidence of scholarship. . .–RS].   For those of you who don’t know, Salm has written a book claiming that Nazareth did not exist in the first century, so that Jesus couldn’t be there.  He argues this in part because he doesn’t think Jesus existed and so wants to discredit the Gospel stories by saying the Christian authors made the whole thing up.  [The Nazareth myth stands on its own. Second guesses on why I wrote the book are irrelevant and often wrong.]

Several scholars (well, everyone who mentioned it to me) were outraged that Salm was allowed to be on the program.  This meeting is of a learned society and is to be for scholars with established expertise.  It is not to be a venue for people without qualifications to spout their wild theories.  Salm claims that those who oppose him have a theological or religious bias against his views, but this simply is not true.  EVERYONE who is an expert opposes his views – Jewish, Christian, agnostic, or other.   There is not a single archaeologist of ancient Israel that gives him the least credit.  [That’s because they know on which side their bread is buttered.] That doesn’t make him wrong.  But it does mean that if he wants to argue that every real scholar is in error, he should get some credentials first. [That’s illogical. Because all the credentialed archaeologists have thus far been wrong, therefore I also should get credentials? Presumably in archaeology? Everybody is entitled to an opinion, both the credentialed and the non-credentialed. The difference is that the credentialed academic has one hand on the facts and one hand on a paycheck, while the non-credentialed layperson is free to pursue the facts unfettered.]
In any event, I thought it might be worthwhile to reprint here what I say about Salm’s book in my book Did Jesus Exist? Apologies for those who have read this already. I have removed the footnotes here, but you can find them in the original. . .

——–

This was followed by Ehrman’s “part 2” on me and the SBL. I don’t feel comfortable paying money to his blog and voicing my opinion there, and may simply react on my own MP blog. Of course, my lack of pertinent credentials is a pretext. The tradition would surely be just as opposed to me if I actually had a PhD. My goodness, I think it would be even more upset!

Another curiosity: Ehrman is himself  a member of the SBL “Metacriticism of Biblical Studies” unit. [Rene Salm has since corrected this — see Comment #5 below] He’s known about my upcoming talk for a long time, as Avalos hashed out the SBL roster of presentations via emails to the whole list (about two dozen members) over the last twelve months. It’s curious to me that Ehrman did not say something when it could have made a difference, but waited until after the fact to voice his displeasure and to raise the issue of some SBL impropriety.

FYI, here are the members of the Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship section from their email addresses:

HectorAvalos
james.linville
zeba.crook
R. Raphael
kenneth atkinson
reedrw
william.arnal
alex botta
kurt noll
f. fzindler
stephanielouisefisher
earldoherty
barnasha
steve.a.wiggins
jstiebe
p.davies
thomas thompson
Philippe Wajdenbaum
alenzi
bart ehrman
robert price
james.crossley
Willi Braun
rene salm
J METZGER
c martin
elliott still
b c landau

The Metacriticism section is not a fully formed “unit” but is in its first year of trial status by SBL. [Rene Salm has since corrected this — see Comment #5 below] Complaints from scholars of Ehrman’s stature could well scuttle this auspicious but fledgling ship. . . I plan to contact Avalos on this shortly. [See comment #5 below for corrections made since that contact with Dr Avalos.]

If I’m banned for lack of credentials it means little to me, as I have no plans to speak there again. But I think the whole SBL would have to formulate a new policy because right now any member (credentialed or not) can give a paper as along as s/he’s invited by a “program unit.” Nevertheless, this is a discussion that needs to happen. Scholars should ask themselves why a lot of good work is currently being done outside the guild (Price, Doherty, Zindler, myself, etc.) and a lot of bad work inside of it. Continue reading “More SBL Fallout from René Salm’s paper”


2012-12-02

New Understandings of the Old Testament: Jacques Cazeaux

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by Neil Godfrey

This post is a continuation of a protracted series on the views of Philippe Wajdenbaum whose doctoral thesis, arguing that a good many of the Biblical stories and laws were inspired by Greek literature, has been published as Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible.

Several of the more recent posts have examined challenges to the traditional view that most of the Biblical books were composed during the late years of the Kingdom of Judah, in particular during the period of the Babylonian captivity, with a few latecomers in the Persian era. That conventional understanding has largely been based on an evolutionary model that sees the literature incorporated into the Bible being the result of a long process of oral traditions, variant traditions being mixed and matched by early editors with competing religious biases, and with later redactors putting finishing touches to certain books or the collection as a whole. Recent scholarship has seen explorations into the possibility the Bible was a very late composition, even later than the Persian empire, and even that the major historical portion of it, Genesis to 2 Kings, was composed by a single author. There have been an ever-increasing number of publications comparing that historical portion with Greek historical literature, in particular with the Histories of Herodotus and even later Hellenistic histories (e.g. Sara Mandell and David Freedman; Katherine Stott; J.W. Wesselius; Flemming Nielsen; Russell Gmirkin).

Jacques Cazeaux

The next few posts in this series will look at the contributions of several scholars who have led this new perspective on the Old Testament literature and whom Wajdenbaum discusses in Argonauts of the Desert: Jacques Cazeaux, Philip R. Davies, Niels Peter Lemche, Thomas L. Thompson. I may add a few posts discussing other names along the way, and sometimes supplement Wajdenbaum’s descriptions based on my own readings of their works.

Unfortunately I have read nothing by Jacques Cazeaux, though the French titles of some of his books do certainly intrigue me and I’d love to follow them up. Till then, I rely on Wajdenbaum’s synopsis of his views.

Jacques Cazeaux Continue reading “New Understandings of the Old Testament: Jacques Cazeaux”


2012-12-01

Sowing Doubt That an Emotional Paul Authored Galatians

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by Neil Godfrey

jerpaulM. Weinfeld can argue for OT books from Joshua to 2 Kings were produced by a Deuteronomic school, K. Stendhal can argue that the Gospel of Matthew was produced by a school “of St Matthew”, (and I’ll be posting again on reasons to believe “Luke” was part of “a school”), ditto for the Johannine writings, and Philip Davies can argue that the prophetic books of the Old Testament (Isaiah, Micah, and the rest) were produced by scribal schools who wrote in dialogue with one another, so why can we not imagine the possibility that the letters of Paul, all of them, were also produced by a school (or schools) rather than a single individual, whether that individual was attributed the name of Paul in honesty or duplicity.

It’s just a thought-experiment. I am willing to take it up because I think that the argument that Paul really wrote certain letters because they reflect a certain personality and loose way of thinking are naive and circular. Not that I reject the historicity of Paul. I don’t. But I don’t “believe” in his historicity, either. I simply don’t know. I find a lot of merit in Roger Parvus’s argument that the name Paul was attributed to hide the identity of an earlier first century author of several of the letters. I can acknowledge Earl Doherty’s argument against the letters being composed in the second century by Marcionites. Then again, Bruno Bauer who disputed the historicity of Paul was no dim-wit, either. Moreover, I am always conscious of Patricia Rosenmeyer’s study of ancient letter writing that demonstrated that the most realistic touches in letters are not necessarily signs of authenticity. And many if not most scholars, it seems, are quite willing to admit that at least some of the letters written in Paul’s name belong to a Pauline school of some sort. So I’m open to the question of the provenance of the letters attributed to Paul.

But probably every commentator on Paul’s letter to the Galatians I have read has gone along with the assumption that that letter’s expressions of frustration, anger, hostility are sure signs of a personal author’s personality quaking through the pages. Clearly none of them read Rosenmeyer, but let’s leave her work on epistolary fictions aside for now. Let’s look instead at an observation Thomas Brodie has made in Birthing of the New Testament.

That’s the kind of man Paul was

Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State, once said he liked to rattle people’s cages, because seeing someone rattled helps you meet the real person. So when Paul suddenly becomes angry in Galatians and calls the people stupid (literally, ‘mind-less’, without nous, a-noetas, Gal. 3:1) you feel this is the real thing. And when he repeats it a little later the effect is even stronger: ‘Are you so stupid?’ (Gal. 3.3). OK, so that’s the kind Paul was. (p. 141, Beyond the Quest)

That’s the verdict of most of us who have read Galatians. But Brodie then introduces a challenge.

He suggests that if we look more closely at Galatians, and then cast our minds back over what we have read in the Old Testament books, in particular Jeremiah, and take a fresh look at that book — in particular in the Septuagint or Greek version, we will see something very similar. Jeremiah also calls the people mindless, then repeats the accusation for intensified effect (Jer. 5.21, 23).

Galatians is not raw emotion. It contains a rehearsed literary adaptation of ancient Jeremiah.

Jeremiah in Galatians Continue reading “Sowing Doubt That an Emotional Paul Authored Galatians”