Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Another Freethought Blog to cite, this time Jon Cavaz writes a neat introductory piece on Gospel Genre highlighting the ahistorical character of the gospels:
Gospels as Legendary Biographies
I’m of a different opinion but my views are probably more technical and interested in nuances of little relevance to most of the real world. Check the Genre of Gospels, Acts and OT Primary History: INDEX if you want to get into the inner belly of what has been covered here so far.
I am posting this as a sort of appendix to Tim’s Bowling with Bumpers or How Not to Do Critical Scholarship. Unfortunately time prohibits me from expanding on the chart anyone interested in the relationship between the Gospels of Luke and John can read the author’s (Keith L. Yoder’s) own full account at From Luke to John: Lazarus, Mary, and Martha in the Fourth Gospel. The chart is taken from Keith’s presentation at that site. Keith has other interesting papers on the relationship between Luke and John at his site, Selected Works of Keith L. Yoder, and much more. He’s a Research Fellow at the University of Massachusetts with a special interest in applied statistical analysis and biblical studies. So if you’re interested in arguments for/against interpolations and intertextuality have a look for more articles there.
|
Element |
Luke’s Mary and Martha |
Luke’s Rich Man and Lazarus |
Order |
John’s Raising of Lazarus |
John’s Anointing of Lazarus |
|
1. “Village” |
10:38 |
√ |
11:1 (30) |
||
|
2. “Mary, Martha, sister” |
10:39 |
√ |
11:1 (5) |
12:2-3 |
|
|
3. Mary “sitting” |
10:39 |
11:20 |
|||
|
4. Mary “at the feet” |
10:39 |
11:32 |
|||
|
5. Jesus is “Lord” |
10:39 (40,41) |
√ |
11:2 |
||
|
6. Martha “serving” |
10:40 |
√ |
12:2 |
||
|
7. Martha speaks first |
10:40 |
√ |
11:21 |
||
|
8. Mary silent/shadow |
-All- |
NA |
11:32 |
-All- |
|
|
9. Incipit “a certain” |
(10:38,38) |
16:19,20 |
√√ |
11:1 |
|
|
10. “Lazarus” |
16:20 |
√ |
11:1 |
12:1 |
|
|
11. Lazarus “died” |
16:22 |
√ |
11:14 (21,32) |
||
|
12. Lazarus silent/passive |
-All- |
NA |
-All- |
||
|
13. “lifted up his eyes” |
16:23 |
√ |
11:41 |
||
|
14. “and said, ‘Father’” |
16:24 |
√ |
11:41 |
||
|
15. “five brothers” |
16:28 |
NA |
-All- |
||
|
16. Petition to raise/send back Lazarus |
16:28,30 |
√ |
11:41-43 |
||
|
17. Petition denied/granted |
16:29,31 |
√ |
11:41,42 |
||
|
18. Resulting disbelief/belief |
16:31 |
√ |
11:45 |
Luciano has written a new post — Vridar Response — responding to my response — What I want as an atheist a human — to his post — What I want as an atheist. (Should I explain that with a diagram?) It’s been a very busy day and I haven’t had a chance to read Luciano’s response yet, apart from his opening paragraph:
I enjoy being a morning bird. My writing isn’t extremely well-known, but I get the occasional response and sometimes I manage to be awake as they are published. Today is one such day. My post about what I as an atheist, “wanted” was seen by Neil Godfrey of Vridar, and got a response from him. I really liked his response but there are certain things that I think deserve a response. The ending is directly addressed towards Neil, but as usual I welcome any comments and or thoughts on the post and hopefully on a greater discussion about skepticism and atheism. I want to respond to individual bits and pieces before responding to the overall post (the last few paragraphs are where I respond to the overall post). So with that little bit of context, let’s get started!
I look forward to reading what he has to say, but till I get that chance some readers here might like to check out his comments and comment there, here, before I do.
Note: I wrote this post back in February of 2012. I just never got around to adding a nice conclusion and finishing it. I offer it up now as a way to kick-start my blogging habit again.
I suck at bowling. I’ve tried. Heaven knows I’ve tried. I even bought a pair of bowling shoes, had a ball drilled to fit my hand, the works. Didn’t matter. I still stink.
But hang on — help is on the way. There’s a surefire method for keeping your ball (if not your mind) out of the gutter. They call it “Bumper Bowling.” Just toss the ball down the lane and you’re at least assured of knocking down the seven or the ten pin.
In our “losing-is-too-hard” culture, which simply delays the age at which children learn that the world is a lonely, cold, hard place, we don’t want anyone to suffer the pain of failure, so we reward any effort. No more tears at the bowling alley. Any errant ball is gently kept on its course to the pins thanks to a set of railings, or in some cases, a gaudy pair of inflatable tubes.
Of course, my problem isn’t landing in the channel, it’s missing the easy spares. So while the bumpers keep the very young, the weak, and the infirm from getting skunked, it won’t assure them of a decent score. Unless, that is, they start handing out strikes for knocking down eight or nine pins. “Close enough, Tyler! High five, Brianna!”
Pity poor John. If you wanted to explain Christianity to someone who knew nothing about it, wouldn’t the Gospel of John be the first thing you’d show him or her? It’s just so “right.” Jesus knows who he is from the very start. His disciples immediately know he’s the Messiah, even before they become disciples. “Peter, come quick! We have found the Messiah!”
And then there’s all that wonderful stuff in the discourses. “I go to prepare a place for you. In my father’s house there are many mansions.” That’s unforgettable. It’s sweet, poetic, and comforting.
But when it comes to historicity, the Gospel of John is the beautiful child who can’t throw, can’t catch, and runs like an eggbeater. From the very start, commentators on John’s gospel said it was a “spiritual gospel.” That’s like when your grandma cocks her head to one side and says, “Oh, bless his heart. He tries so hard.” Continue reading “Bowling with Bumpers or How Not to Do Critical Scholarship”
This post follows on from (a) the discussion that took place in the wake of my Atheism without the extras, please post and (b) as a direct response to another Atheist+ (Freethought Blog) post that has recently been published by Luciano Gonzalez: What I Want As an Atheist. I really hope before reading the following you read Luciano’s post (I have modeled my own post on his paragraph points) or even the earlier discussion on this blog. So here’s saying Hello to Luciano — thanks for your post, and I hope you can appreciate my response even if you don’t agree with it.
–o0o–
As an atheist who takes his atheism, like his right-handedness, for granted, I rarely get involved in discussions about my beliefs. If one were to ask me “What do you want as an atheist?” I would agree with Luciano that it is a silly question and probably reply, “to be free not to believe in any gods.”
I used to be something of an anti-theist. That was in my first flush of leaving my coffin of religion behind and when I was still struggling to come to terms with what had happened to me (and the pain I had caused others) in all those fantasy years. Religion was a baleful influence in the world and its purveyors needed to challenged or excluded from activities that they were using to promote their ‘good works’ propaganda to the public.
I lost that angry antagonism after I came to terms with myself and my own experience with my past destructive cult experience. A huge help in that direction (among a number of sources of assistance) was psychologist Marlene Winell’s book, Leaving the Fold. I not only came to understand why I had got mixed up with the outfit in the first place, but most importantly, I learned to forgive and accept myself. And from that position I found myself forgiving and accepting others, too. I understood where other religious people were coming from and even felt for their situations.
I was not interested in supporting groups dedicated to attacking religious cults. Such attacks only fueled the persecution syndrome of the cultists themselves. The harm done within cults is enough to prise out defections. What is important is that such members who begin to question their beliefs have support, and that’s what I was very keen to offer. (I have described some of my activities at this time several times before: for those not familiar with the story, it involves newspaper advertising, community group meetings, etc. – and eventually even this blog.)
What do I want? Continue reading “What I want as an atheist a human”
What is the context of that comment? Distinguished Professor Richard Horsley is talking about the practice of Jesus scholars to take individual sayings out of the gospels and attempting to “excavate” their origins instead of studying the gospels as literary works.
One of the first and most basic responsibilities of historians is to critically assess the character of their sources. Literary and rhetorical analysis of the sources is necessary to discern how they may be used for investigation of historical events, actors, and circumstances. Historians would not separate individual statements or short anecdotes from a source, categorize them by key words or apparent subject matter, and then seek the meaning of each statement by itself or assess the likelihood that particular anecdotes provide reliable attestation of actual historical incidents. (p. 9)
Historical Jesus scholars are very well aware that the Gospel are not regular histories but documents composed for the purpose of promoting faith in a wonder-working and resurrected Jesus. They therefore work with the assumption that if they extract certain pieces from such documents and subject them to “historical tests” they can arrive at some approximation of the “real historical Jesus”.
Jesus scholars recognize the “rhetorical” perspective of the Gospels. But precisely because the Gospels express the Easter faith of the “early Christians,” these scholars attempted to cut through or move underneath them by focusing on individual sayings (and stories) as their sources (or “data”), thus treating the Gospels as mere containers or collections. Work in other sub-fields of New Testament studies and related fields, however, is making this view of the Gospels untenable. (p. 9)
Horsley explains the process on the preceding page:
[T]he meaning of a saying depends on its meaning context, from which it cannot be intelligibly isolated. By extracting the sayings of Jesus from their literary context, Jesus scholars dispense with the only indication available for what that meaning context may have been. The analogy drawn recently that scholars are “excavating” the Gospel sources for Jesus such as Q or even “excavating Jesus” may be more telling than they realize. This suggests that the sayings are precious artifacts that must be excavated from the piles of dirt and debris in which they have become buried. Then, like museum curators of a generation or two ago, interpreters of Jesus arrange those decontextualized artifacts by type (“apocalyptic” or “sapiential”) and/or topic (children, meals, kingdom, wisdom), like fragments of lamps, vases, and pots in museum cases. Individual sayings of Jesus may be precious artifacts to the scholars who sort them out and categorize them. As isolated artifacts, however, they do not have or convey meaning, and they beg the question of context. The result is Jesus as a dehistoricized “talking head,” devoid of life circumstances.
With their various “databases” of atomized Jesus sayings isolated from any meaning context, the Jesus scholars then supply the meaning context themselves, often from the constructs of New Testament studies. It has become standard among critical liberal scholars, for example, to isolate Jesus’s admonition on what (not) to take for a/the journey from its immediate context in the “mission discourses” in both Mark 6:8-13 and Q/Lk 10:2-16. But what can this isolated saying about staff, sandals, bag, and so on mean in itself? Evidently nothing. So liberal interpreters recontextualize the saying in the modern scholarly construct of an itinerant vagabond lifestyle that Jesus was supposedly advocating to his individual disciples. (p. 8)
It is no different with scholars who work with memory theory in an attempt to reach back to the supposedly earliest “interpreted saying”.
I’ve addressed this point several times before — see, for example, Gospels As Historical Sources: How Literary Criticism Changes Everything — so it is interesting, even encouraging, to see the same point being made by one of the more prominent biblical scholars today.
