Neil Godfrey

2011-01-14

Followup on Questionnaire for the Deconverted

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by Neil Godfrey

Three months ago I posted links to a questionnaire for atheists and other sceptics who had deconverted from religious faith. See /2010/10/09/questionnaire-for-sceptics/

Rick (the author of that questionnaire) has followed up with a request for feedback on his restructured Teologye.com website. This is the site where he had placed the original questionnaire, and it now maturing into something much more than when we last looked at it. One of Rick’s goals is to publish the results of the questionnaire on this site.

He would appreciate feedback on the site so has asked me to share this with blog-readers.

The not so great Islamist menace

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by Neil Godfrey

The following is from Alcanaanite’s Blog (Monzer Zimmo has kindly allowed me to re-post it here)

Dan Gardner: The not so great Islamist menace

Posted on 2011/01/06 by Alcanaanite

Two millennia ago, there was a Jewish Palestinian from Nazareth by the name of Jesus who once said: “The truth will set you free.” Sooner or later, the truth will reach people, and those who know it will be free; free from fear, free from hate, and free from vengeance.

Yesterday, January 5, 2011, Dan Gardner wrote a revealing article in the Ottawa Citizen, in which he introduces the truth to his readers about terrorism in Europe. There is nothing more compelling than the truth; facts, numbers, comparisons, and putting things in perspective. Gardner does it eloquently in his easy-to-read article.

Excerpt:
“The European Union’s Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2010 says that in 2009 there were “294 failed, foiled, or successfully executed attacks” in six European countries. This was down almost a third from 2008 and down by almost half from 2007. So, in most of Europe, there was no terrorism. And where there was terrorism, the trend line pointed down. As for who’s responsible, forget Islamists. The overwhelming majority of the attacks – 237 of 294 – were carried out by separatist groups, such as the Basque ETA. A further 40 terrorist schemes were pinned on leftist and/or anarchist terrorists. Rightists were responsible for four attacks. Single-issue groups were behind two attacks, while responsibility for a further 10 was not clear. Islamists? They were behind a grand total of one attack. Yes, one. Out of 294 attacks. In a population of half a billion people. To put that in perspective, the same number of attacks was committed by the Comite d’Action Viticole, a French group that wants to stop the importation of foreign wine.”

For the full article, click on the following link:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/great+Islamist+menace/4060885/story.html Continue reading “The not so great Islamist menace”

2011-01-13

The occult art of constructing the historical Jesus

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by Neil Godfrey

While I was a believer I was fascinated by speculations that someone well-read in the Bible might conjure up by linking verses together in a way that no-one seemed to have thought of before. For example, someone might “prove” that Jesus was a well-to-do middle-class businessman by noting that he

seemed to have a particular house in Galilee that he regularly visited — so it was probably (therefore surely) his own house
was a carpenter and son of a carpenter and carpenters then were stone-masons and highly skilled in a range of tasks including stone masonry (and being perfect he would have been very good at whatever he did)
and he had a fine linen cloak of one piece of such quality that Roman soldiers preferred to gamble for it rather than tear it up among themselves

This is all nonsense, of course. It takes ambiguous data out of its original contexts and extrapolates from it to create a fiction. For example,

the gospels do not unambiguously affirm that Jesus owned a house, and there is no indication at all who owned the house, or the arrangement he had by which he came to be found there from time to time; one senses middle-class westerners reading their own life-styles into Jesus here.
The mere fact that he or his father was a “tekton” (translated “carpenter”) does not allow us to make any judgment about how successful he was financially; again one detects a western businessman making the judgement.
The cloak story was expressly said to have been a fulfilment of prophecy, so the odds are stacked against the likelihood that this was historical.

One gets a strange sense that one is merely reading a more sophisticated or well-informed version of this same speculative process when one reads Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History by Dale C. Allison. Continue reading “The occult art of constructing the historical Jesus”

2011-01-12

Why Jesus chose the Twelve: Dale Allison’s exegesis

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by Neil Godfrey

The Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles. Russian, 14th century, Moscow Museum.

Dale C. Allison in his recent book, Constructing Jesus, believes that we can learn, or at least “confirm”, what Jesus taught about the “end of the age” by looking at the careers of the Twelve Disciples/Apostles.

He begins by discussing various opinions about whether or not Jesus really did call twelve disciples at all, and if so, whether or not they constituted a formal institution of church leadership. I will look at that discussion in the next post.

So given that Jesus did indeed call “Twelve” as an ongoing institution, Dale Allison asks what was he thinking. Why did he do this?

This seems a strange question to ask if one is interested in a serious historical inquiry into the origins of Christianity. We simply don’t have any evidence to tell us what Jesus was thinking.

But Allison’s discussion is interesting because it does demonstrate for us laypeople just how biblical scholars work. They are not doing historical research by sifting the evidence. They are doing biblical exegesis. And this makes sense, since they are for most part “theologians”, not “historians” in the same sense as the likes of Arnold Toynbee or G. R. Elton or Eric Hobsbawm. Continue reading “Why Jesus chose the Twelve: Dale Allison’s exegesis”

2011-01-10

My home town hit by flash flood today

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by Neil Godfrey

I had thought my home town, on top of a mountain range, would be immune from the flooding that has hit so many other areas. Still trying to accept the following scenes. It’s not the steadily rising waters that have hit other places, but a flash flood that went as quickly as it came, even washing away cars in the main street, and it all happened so suddenly that some were unable to escape with their lives. I’m now living in Melbourne way down at southern end of Australia away from the flooding, but still own a house only only ten minutes walk from several scenes pictured in the linked news story. Naturally am concerned about everyone there, especially people I know, but still mostly trying to take in scenes and tragedy the city has never seen before. Devastating.

Seven dead as raging torrent swamps Toowoomba (ABC news story)

and the Video of a rescue of one lucky fellow

2011-01-09

Does the Ascension of Isaiah have any potential relevance for the study of origins of the Christ myth?

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by Neil Godfrey

They say there is none so deaf as he who will not hear, and when it comes to Christ myth arguments there are biblical scholars who, despite their public protestations otherwise, regularly demonstrate an apparent inability to engage seriously with mythicist arguments.

Once again a biblical scholar who has been informed on his blog why he is mistaken for assuming (he has apparently never read Doherty’s most comprehensive book) that Doherty is fallaciously taking a late second-century text and using it as evidence for the matrix of emerging Christian thought in the first century. Despite being informed of his error, he continues to repeat his claim that the Ascension of Isaiah is a late document and therefore without the relevance that Earl Doherty ascribes to it.

I am a little surprised that even a doctor and professor should repeatedly publicly advertize his ignorance of the facts and the scholarship surrounding the Ascension of Isaiah.

I would like to recommend Doherty’s book as containing an excellent introduction to the Ascension of Isaiah in a 4000 plus word section from pages 119 to 126. Of course much of this is a detailed examination of the earliest layer of the text (first century), but there is also an examination of the history, origins and rescensions of the various manuscripts and layers of text within each.

This section will inform readers that the Ascension of Isaiah document we have today has come to us in three main manuscript lines, Latin, Ethiopic and Slavonic. Readers will learn something of the variations among these lines, the backgrounds to their various redactions etc.

They will also learn that the earliest document was probably a Jewish sectarian tract that was later the subject of redactions by later Christians.

They may further be interested to be informed of Michael Knibb’s case (Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, v.2, p. 143-176) for the earlier Jewish work behind the Ascension being dated to the end of the first century — given the time needed for the Nero redivivus myth to gain traction. Continue reading “Does the Ascension of Isaiah have any potential relevance for the study of origins of the Christ myth?”

Thoughts on Dale Allison’s thoughts on memory and historical approaches to the study of the Gospels

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by Neil Godfrey

Having just read the first chapter of Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History by Dale C. Allison I can finally comment on what surely strikes most people as a curious statement to come from someone who claims to be a historian. In reviewing Allison’s opening chapter McGrath claimed that Allison was contending that

Even fabricated material may provide a true sense of the gist of what Jesus was about, however inauthentic it may be as far as the specific details are concerned.

This certainly does capture what Allison writes of his approach to finding “the historical Jesus” in the Gospels.

Allison considers the results of a wide range of studies on human memory and considers what these must mean for the accuracy of the Gospels, given the assumption that the Gospels are records of what was passed down about Jesus via fallible memories of those who had met him.

Allison even writes:

All this is why fictions may contain facts; an accurate impression can take any number of forms. Even a work as full of make-believe as the Alexander Romance sometimes catches the character of the historical Alexander of Macedon. Similarly, tales about an absentminded professor may be apocryphal and yet spot-on because they capture the teacher’s personality. The letter can be false, the spirit true. (pp. 13-14) Continue reading “Thoughts on Dale Allison’s thoughts on memory and historical approaches to the study of the Gospels”

2011-01-08

The rights and wrongs of Spong on the Gospels

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by Neil Godfrey

Having covered Spong’s arguments for most of the Gospel narratives being “midrashic literature” (with one or two more posts to come) it is time to toss in some qualifiers and state my own views. I’ll anchor my thoughts around Mark Allan Powell’s review of Spong’s arguments. (The review is less securely but more cheaply accessed from here.)

There can be very little doubt that the Gospel authors did create their narrative details out of Old Testament texts.

What critics object to is the idea that entire narratives and most narrative details found in the Gospels are fabricated this way.

Spong himself insists (without argument, only by assertion) that there was some historical underlay to the Gospels. Jesus really was crucified, for example. But his silence before Pilate and his words on the cross are artfully woven by the author into the narrative from Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22. Continue reading “The rights and wrongs of Spong on the Gospels”

2011-01-07

Fiction in ancient biographies, histories and gospels

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by Neil Godfrey

the Gelati Gospels MSS — Image via Wikipedia

If the Gospels were written as “biographies” of Jesus, or were meant to be read as “history”, does this mean that we can expect to find only factual details in them? Or if not entirely factual, must we give the benefit of the doubt that beneath a certain amount of exaggeration there must have been some kernel of literal truth?

It ain’t necessarily so.

Dale C. Allison M. Grable Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Early Christianity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. In his recent book, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History, he includes a discussion of recent scholarship on the genre of the gospels and what genre means for the question of whether we can expect to find fictional tales in the gospels.

The question has force, says Allison, because the gospel authors appear to have been “far more interested in the practical and theological meanings of their stories than in literal facticity.” (p. 442) Continue reading “Fiction in ancient biographies, histories and gospels”

2011-01-06

Delivering the Modern Believer From the Tyranny of Literalism (& Historicism)

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by Neil Godfrey

I have been posting on John Shelby Spong’s (and his late mentor Michael Goulder’s) understanding of how the Gospel narratives were created “midrashically” out of the Old Testament scriptures. I should emphasize that my posts come with my own slant, and that Spong himself has no doubts at all about the historicity of Jesus Christ.

Spong argues that the Gospel authors were creating narratives to express their interpretations of Jesus. What this means is that someone like the original author of the Gospel of John created a Wisdom figure of Jesus to express what Jesus meant to him. That wisdom figure is a literary creation. I would say that any resemblance to a real historical figure is “imaginary,” meaning it is constructed entirely within the imagination of the reader/author and out of the materials found in the Old Testament (and sometimes other literature). A figure or event found in a literary text is surely a literary figure or event. Whether this literary person coincides with another real historical person is a question that must inevitably be decided on grounds other than the mere existence of the literary person in partisan texts. But our techniques for distinguishing who is historical and who is not and who might-be-sort-of when it comes to tales of King John, Robin Hood and Saint George seem to fly out the window when it comes to Bible stories.

(Surely this is all straightforward and not a sign that I am somehow intimate with the Woman Folly as the Christian gentleman Joel Watts charmingly asserts in his post pinged-back to here.)

But a couple of Spong’s books did influence me some years back, so it’s time I caught up with sharing some of his own words in driving home some basic truths about the Bible. They are taken from pages 234 to 245 in Liberating the Gospels, with my own subheadings, formatting and emphasis.

The seductive lure of the Vivid and the isolation of Vivid’s chaperon Continue reading “Delivering the Modern Believer From the Tyranny of Literalism (& Historicism)”

2011-01-05

Liberating Jesus from the letter of the Gospel narrative

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by Neil Godfrey

John Shelby Spong wrote Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes: Freeing Jesus from 2,000 Years of Misunderstanding to open the way for educated moderns to understand that the authors of the Gospels did not think they were writing literal history (e.g. Jesus did not literally walk on water, ascend to heaven, etc.), but rather that they were writing symbolic narratives based on Old Testament stories and sayings in order to convey what Jesus Christ meant to them. This form of writing was, Spong explains, a traditional method of Jewish storytelling. Expressing meaning through well-known images and episodes in earlier books was more important than recording literal history. (I explained this method in a little more detail in an earlier post.)

This post looks at Spong’s reasons for rejecting the historical details of most of the Gospel narrative about the last hours, or the Passion, of Jesus. I need to emphasize that Spong is not seeking to undermine faith, but to make faith more accessible to modern audiences who find (quite rightly, he says) a literal interpretation of the Bible to be in many ways offensive to modern knowledge and values.

My own interest has nothing to do with undermining or opening up faith. Such decisions are personal ones that go beyond intellectual exercises. Everyone has their own life to live, and we are all the products of our own genes and experiences. (I will be active if I think I can help minimize abuse or harm that some faiths bring about, but that is another matter again.) My interest is strictly in exploring and understanding Christian origins and sharing insights and information with others with similar interests. That sometimes includes exposing what I see are the fallacies of “knowledge falsely so-called” and of its public practitioners.

The Beginning of the End Continue reading “Liberating Jesus from the letter of the Gospel narrative”

2011-01-04

That Curious Criterion Classically Illustrated

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by Neil Godfrey

Not long after addressing that “curious criterion” of biblical studies that holds that the less likely something seems to be in the Gospels, the more likely it is to have been historically true, I unpacked a carton of my books that included The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright in Dialogue, and found in there a classic example of that curious criterion in action.

Actually it is a slight oversimplification to describe this criterion the way I did in my opening line. More “strictly”, it is summed up by the incredulous claim: “I can’t see why anyone would make it up.” Surely claiming authenticity for any data on the grounds that one “can’t think of a reason it would have been made up by anyone” is the nadir of intellectual laziness. When taken to its extreme, it can be used to prove the most sensational claims of the miraculous. And that is exactly where Bishop and Scholar N. T. Wright does take it. He is referring to the Gospel of Luke’s account of the resurrected Jesus appearing to his disciples and breaking bread and eating bread and fish with them:

If you have an empty tomb and something’s happened to the body, and then if the apparitions are not just apparitions, such as you have when somebody you love has just died, but actually involve some extraordinary physical things. You know, according to Luke 24, there must be a broken loaf lying on the table somewhere which they didn’t break — somebody did that — and so it’s not just eating broiled fish. There’s a bunch of physical phenomena going on, and this is where the stories are so odd, as well as these kind of paraphysical phenomena — I don’t think anyone could have made up these stories, actually, I think they’re so bizarre — and that’s part of the point. . . . (pp. 37-8, my emphasis)

Historians (not theologians) generally treat bizarreness as an indicator of fiction, and the more bizarre the more likely to be fictitious.

But N. T. Wright is “a leading New Testament scholar” whose work is certainly discussed with all seriousness by other scholars as diverse as (“liberal”) John Dominic Crossan and (“independent”) Maurice Casey. Continue reading “That Curious Criterion Classically Illustrated”

2011-01-03

How Joseph was piously invented to be the “father” of Jesus

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by Neil Godfrey

This post continues from the previous one about John the Baptist’s parents. It’s a sharing of my reading of John Shelby Spong’s Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes . . .. I covered in that earlier post the rationale for searching the Old Testament scriptures for an understanding of the Gospel author’s choices of names and narrative episodes.

Spong begins his discussion of Joseph by reminding readers how “shadowy” he is in the Scriptures. Much legend has accrued around him since the Gospels were written, but the New Testament has very little to say about him at all.

The earliest Christian evidence

Neither he nor Mary appears at all in Paul’s writings.

At the very least, we can state that to the degree that Paul represented Christianity in the fifth, sixth, and seventh decades of this common era, there was no interest in Jesus’ origins or his parentage at that stage in the development of the Christian story.

. . . Paul’s writing gives us no indication that he had ever heard of or had any interest in the miraculous birth traditions. (p. 202)

Spong emphasizes the indications in Paul’s letters that Paul thought Jesus’ birth was quite normal. He points to Galatians 4:4 (“born of a woman”) and Romans 1:3 (from David “according to the flesh”). Others have noted, however, that one does not naturally refer to anyone’s birth as being “of a woman” or “according to flesh”! I would expect to get strange looks if in any conversation I managed to explain that I or anyone present was “born of a woman”! That such apparently obvious truisms are made explicit does raise questions about the intent of such phrases in Paul’s letters. But I’ll continue here with Spong’s explanation.

The next Christian evidence Continue reading “How Joseph was piously invented to be the “father” of Jesus”

2011-01-01

Where Did John the Baptist’s Parents Come From? Reading the Gospels “with Jewish Eyes”

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by Neil Godfrey

The names of the parents of both Jesus and John the Baptist were arguably created from the imaginations of the Gospel authors working on Old Testament passages for inspiration. The names were fabricated because of the theological messages they conveyed. There is no evidence to indicate that they were handed down from historical memory.

This is not a “mythicist” or “atheist” argument. It is the result of scholarly research by an Anglican vicar and an Episcopal bishop.

Both have published scholarly reasons for believing that the names Mary and Joseph, the parents of Jesus, and Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist, were carefully selected by early Christians on the basis of their ability to convey particular theological meanings. Goulder and Spong describe this process as “midrash”. Spong explains what he means by this:

How to read the Gospels as Jewish books

[T]here are stories in the Gospels that are so deeply reminiscent of stories in the Old Testament that one might inquire as to the reason for their similarity. Was that accidental or coincidental? Or does it point to something we might have missed? . . .

In a deep and significant way, we are now able to see that all of the Gospels are Jewish books, profoundly Jewish books. Recognizing this, we begin to face the realization that we will never understand the Gospels until we learn how to read them as Jewish books. They are written, to a greater or lesser degree, in the midrashic sytle of the Jewish sacred storyteller, a style that most of us do not begin even now to comprehend. This style is not concerned with historical accuracy. It is concerned with meaning and understanding. Continue reading “Where Did John the Baptist’s Parents Come From? Reading the Gospels “with Jewish Eyes””

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https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=145080#p145080
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Editor, An English Edition of Bruno Bauer’s 1843 Christianity Exposed
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Steve Ruis on Delay in Vridar blog posting…. another reason: “Excellent! One of my teachers once taught me some priceless wisdom, namely that you can’t give what you don’t have.…” May 12, 15:54
James Faubel on Delay in Vridar blog posting…. another reason: “I recommend you do a Google Search for the pdf entitled “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sönke Ahrens. I…” May 11, 23:39
Eileen on Jesus, Enfant Terrible in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas?: “I agree with the analysis here. These passages make Jesus out to be more like a hero of Greek mythology…” May 7, 12:44
Thomas Worthington on “That’s what it means to be a Jew” — interviewing a West Bank settler: “The situation that Ari faces is that he is worshipping a fictional character from a book as a god, and…” May 6, 11:11
Neil Godfrey on “That’s what it means to be a Jew” — interviewing a West Bank settler: “What do you mean by “sooner they get started”? “Get started” on doing what, exactly?” May 4, 02:09
Neil Godfrey on Simon of Cyrene: once more on the ambiguity of the crucified one in the Gospel of Mark: “Your explanation, however, introduces a story, with characters and motives and actions, that are entirely fabricated and nowhere a part…” May 4, 02:08
Samarasinghe A. on Simon of Cyrene: once more on the ambiguity of the crucified one in the Gospel of Mark: “My take on ‘Simon of Cyrene’ – Mark’s narrative from beginning to the end is about the victorious forward march…” May 4, 01:45
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Dan Gardner: The not so great Islamist menace

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The Beginning of the End Continue reading “Liberating Jesus from the letter of the Gospel narrative”

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The earliest Christian evidence

The next Christian evidence Continue reading “How Joseph was piously invented to be the “father” of Jesus”

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How to read the Gospels as Jewish books

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