Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Category: Biblical Studies
The biggie. Much work needs to be done on the children of this category. These need to be greatly reduced in number.
Should this category include the ancient history of Palestine-Judea, including second temple era and Bar Kochba rebellion and rise of rabbinic culture? If so, should Biblical Studies itself be renamed in some way?
Ulrich Berges has conveniently outlined a history of scholarly interpretation of the Servant Songs in Isaiah 40 – 55, concluding with his own reasons for understanding the Servant who suffers yet saves as a literary personification of a prophetic community in the restored Jewish province under the Persian empire (SJOT, Vol.24, No.1, 28-38, 2010). The following is an outline of Ulrich Berges’ article. I have questions about some of the premises upon which Berges relies, and have additional questions about the possible relevance of the literary developments in evidence here for later Gospel narrative traditions, but I try not to let any of these personal thoughts interfere with my outline of Berges’ article here. The Isaiah Servant songs have always been of special interest to me, and I assume someone else without access to academic online journals will find some interest in these notes also.
Developments in the exegesis of the so-called Deutero-Isaiah corpus
The first to challenge the idea that Isaiah wrote the entire book bearing his name was Ibn Ezra in the 12th century.
I am genuinely grateful to Neil for allowing me to present on his blog a series of posts explaining my theory about the letters commonly attributed to Ignatius of Antioch. It should be understood that his permission does not imply that he concurs with the theory or any part of it. These posts will be a condensed, revised version of the main arguments contained in my self-published book “A New Look at the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch and other Apellean Writings.” In particular I will argue
(1) that the seven Ignatian letters that comprise the ‘middle recension’ were originally letters written by Peregrinus c. 145 CE,
(2) that he was an Apellean Christian i.e. a follower of the ex-Marcionite Apelles, and
(3) that later, towards the end of the second century, the letters were modified by a protoCatholic Christian.
By way of preliminaries I would first point out that the kind of scenario I am proposing for the letters should not be dismissed out of hand. The authenticity of the letters has been questioned by many in the last three hundred years. And it is a fact that there exist versions of them that are acknowledged as spurious by all (e.g. the longer recension of the letters) and that early Christians at some point composed entire Ignatian letters that all scholars recognize as spurious (e.g. the letters of Ignatius to Mary; and to Hero; and to the Tarsians). It is likewise a fact that already in the second century many Christians, with perhaps the best of intentions, were engaged in less-than-straightforward literary efforts. Christian pseudepigraphical writing was not rare and even produced works that made it into the New Testament.
The scenario I am proposing for the Ignatians is similar. I am proposing that some letters written by Peregrinus were later reworked, so that the lofty sentiments they contain would be safe and suitable to inspire other Christians facing persecution by the state. Peregrinus was, for a time, very popular with his Christian brethren and he composed a number of written works for them. But eventually he was caught in an infraction for which they expelled him. He abandoned Christianity and embraced the Cynic discipline. So, if any of the writings of this near-martyr were to later be salvaged for use by the protoCatholics, his name would have had to be removed from them and their true provenance disguised. I maintain that his name was removed from some letters he wrote and replaced with the name of a martyr mentioned by Polycarp in chapter nine of his Letter to the Philippians: Ignatius.
I want to also point out that my theory should not be summarily dismissed on the grounds that a 145 CE date of composition for the original letters is clearly too late. Eusebius, in the fourth century, was the first to claim that the letters were written in the reign of Trajan (98 – 117 CE). A number of scholars have recognized that his dating is untrustworthy, and that the letters should be dated later. To give some recent examples: Allen Brent says “we can…, if we like, place Ignatius’ work towards the end of Hadrian’s reign (AD 135)” (p. 318 of his 2006 book “Ignatius of Antioch and the Second Sophistic.” And Paul Foster, in his “The Writings of the Apostolic Fathers” (2007), placed the composition of the Ignatians at “sometime during the second quarter of the second century, i.e. 125 – 50 CE, roughly corresponding to Hadrian’s reign or the earlier part of Antoninus Pius’ period in office” (p. 89). Timothy Barnes, in a 2008 article in ‘The Expository Times,’ concluded that the letters were written “probably in the 140s” (p. 128). And Richard Pervo, in his “The Making of Paul” published in 2010 says “A date of c. 130 – 140 is the preferable date for Ignatius” (p. 135). Earl Doherty too, in his “Jesus: Neither God Nor Man,” does not have a problem with dating the letters to the third decade of the second century. (p. 296). So I am hardly alone in abandoning the Eusebian date.
Finally, I want to acknowledge upfront that my Ignatian theory is basically a combination and development of ideas first put by others. Daniel Voelter, in his “Polykarp und Ignatius und die ihnen zugeschriebenen Briefe,’ proposed that Peregrinus was the author of the letters attributed to Ignatius. And Josephe Turmel, in his “Lettres d’Ignace d’Antioche,” (written under the pseudonym ‘Henri Delafosse’) argued that the original author of the letters was a Marcionite. Alfred Loisy, in reviewing Turmel’s theory, agreed but specified that he seemed to be a moderate Marcionite such as Apelles (“un marcionite assez mitige sur certain points… tel Apelles” – “Remarques sur la Litterature Epistolaire du Nouveau Testament,” p. 168). It occurred to me that Apelles held a number of quite distinctive doctrines and that, if indeed the letters were written by Apelles or a follower of his, traces of those doctrines might still be detectable in them. My decision to follow up on Loisy’s suggestion was the first step in the development of my theory. Continue reading “THE LETTERS SUPPOSEDLY WRITTEN BY IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH”
Some academic jargon is nothing more than the modern equivalent of a sorcerer’s mumbo jumbo — designed to awe while hiding the fact that there is really nothing meaningful on offer at all
Updated 5th July to add link to Richard Carrier's post taking Hoffmann to task.
R. Joseph Hoffmann has let a crotchety side to his nature show as he publicly attempts to humiliate a younger scholar who, in exchanges with the aging don, has exposed a dint of mediocrity in his intellect.
The casus belli is, at least on the surface, the place of Bayes’ theorem in historical Jesus studies.
Now Hoffmann’s writing is surely more renowned for its thick overlays of esoteric intellectual jargon and rhetoric than for its content. The reason is pure mathematics. More people can read his posts than can understand them. (Stanislav Andreski wrote that this sort of intellectual jargon as the modern equivalent of earlier efforts to bamboozle the uninitiated and impress the elite: various uses of medieval Latin, witch-doctor mumbo-jumbo, etc.)
But on the positive side, one does get a sense that he is thoroughly enjoying himself as he shows off his verbal wit, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone has a right to enjoy themselves (or “oneself”, as I am sure the don would prefer me say).
But what the hell is he trying to say when he burgeons like a Baroque artist doing abstract?
I’m sure he won’t like any attempt at simplification, but then why would any biblical scholar be bothered with a blog like mine when the guild does not even consider it to be an honest discussion of the Bible and Christian origins anyway.
It has been seriously asserted (mainstream biblical scholars should be taken seriously) that it would be “a miracle” if an ancient author, not living in Palestine, ever wrote a nonhistorical narrative about a nonhistorical Jesus that was set in real Palestinian towns and with characters bearing the names common among Palestinians.
Mind you, the same intellectual grants that most of the narrative in the Gospels is a mythologized overlay of whatever was a genuinely historical reminiscence. (Scholars even say the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels is not the historical Jesus but a “Christ of faith” who is, let’s be honest, a myth.) But we are left to understand that no such mythologization could possibly have extended to place or people names! They would have been sacrosanct from the beginning and remained so until the tale was finally set down in writing. Only then did various literate authors feel free to change some of the personal names and places. So disciples’ names vary, as do the locations of Jesus’ resurrection appearances. But a biblical scholar can publicly inform us that the “authenticity” of the personal and place names is itself a reliable indicator that the narrative can only derive from a genuine historical reminiscence.
Of course it is always possible to rationalize such differences. Dr James Crossley has said that he is perfectly happy to use conservative and evangelical arguments because statistically they must have something right and even Bart Erhman shares with James Patrick Holding an appeal to the same lack of imagination to insist that Jesus was definitely historical. So we find both scholars and anti-intellectuals using the same types of rationalizations to escape the consequences of their logical fallacies: Jesus cleansed the temple twice, Jesus was anointed twice, Jesus chose replacement disciples as some original choices inconveniently died off during his short ministry, a redactor could not make up his mind about two versions of the miraculous feeding so included them both, and so on.
It’s a frustrating article. One looks in vain for details of who developed the software, under what funding program they did so, and any other associations of the developers and funders. But one does read that a certain Michael Segal of the Hebrew University’s Bible Department was NOT involved in the project! But I suppose the “Israeli” label in a headline speaking of the Bible does have power to attract attention among many bible believers.
We read of the program:
The program, part of a sub-field of artificial intelligence studies known as authorship attribution, has a range of potential applications — from helping law enforcement to developing new computer programs for writers. But the Bible provided a tempting test case for the algorithm’s creators.
How could the Bible possibly provide a “test case” for law enforcement applications? Is a scholarly construct of criteria for priestly and yahwist identifiers in OT texts to be used as verification tool to determine real life criminal guilt?
Bart Ehrman says ‘If you want to make up a story about the Messiah, will you make up the story that he got squashed by the enemy and got crucified, the lowest form of execution in the empire? No! If you’re going to make up a story about the Messiah, you’d make up that he actually overthrew the Romans and he’s the King in Jerusalem now…Why didn’t [early Christians] make up that story? Because everybody knew Jesus was crucified…this is why Christians had the hardest time convincing people that Jesus was the Messiah.’
What pathetic drivel is capable of coming from the pens of some biblical scholars! This is a rhetorical question that is advanced as a substitute for an argument. There is no argument. The evidence actually belies the very assumptions upon which the rhetorical question is grounded. Continue reading “The worst historical Jesus “argument” of all”
A week ago (22nd June) I posted a draft list of points one might expect a historical Jesus hypothesis would explain or predict. I have still to make the time to work on that list along with some suggestions that were posted to it. But here is a similar list for what might be seen as the strengths of the mythical Jesus view:
A mythical Jesus theory
1. Would expect to find either no account of the eye-witness or authoritative transmission of words and deeds of Jesus in the early record, or vague/contradictory/politically-theologically-tendentious (only) accounts of such a transmission to fill the gap between Jesus and the earliest written accounts; Continue reading “Strengths of the mythical Jesus theory”
Roger Parvus has published a fascinating study of the letters of Ignatius and proposes that they originated from one who belonged to the breakaway group from Marcionism that was led by Apelles. Towards the end of his book (A New Look at the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch and Other Apellian Writings) he addresses the similarities other scholars have observed between the Johannine and Ignatian communities, and suggests that some of those “little contradictions and oddities” in the Gospel of John may also reflect an Apellean origin. (Hopefully I am not stealing too much of his thunder with this post, since I am hoping Roger will be able to argue his case for himself. But a touch of eagerness to write up at least little bit of one facet of his book has got the better of me here.)
I won’t write up much of the detail in the book in this post — just enough to share with others some of the details one can easily read over in John’s Gospel yet fail to notice the contradictions, and the implications of the contradictions, in some of the most familiar passages. Familiarity has a lot to answer for.
This is not an attempt to argue for a particular reading or redaction history of John. That would require much more serious depth. The point of this post is simply to show the possibilities of questions, of alternative understandings, relating to the origin of the Gospel of John from a not widely encountered perspective. Continue reading “Lifting the rug on heresy in the Gospel of John”
In my previous post I quoted John Taylor where he referenced chapter 5 of Dionysus: Myth and Cult by Walter Friedrich Otto. That chapter is titled “The God Who Comes”. It is about this distinctive characteristic of the god Dionysus — that, unlike other gods, he comes to mankind visibly, that is, “in the flesh”. That post pointed to a strong theological or religious meaning that such a “historic presence” promised for ongoing and future intimate relations (even entering into the persons of devotees now) in the cults of both Dionysus and Jesus.
For those who are too impatient to read that chapter online (it is available in its entirety on Google books) here are a few excerpts.
One could almost substitute “Jesus” and “Gospel of Mark’ or such for Dionysus and his narrative in the following discussion and one would continue to nod in assent with all that is said. Jesus is far from the violent figure towards humans that Dionysus is, but one reads commentaries on Mark speaking of the “violence” with which Jesus enters “history”, with his overpowering of demons and in other ways suddenly turning the world upside down. The same commentators speak of the urgency with which Jesus acts and demands responses from those he encounters. Continue reading “The God Who Comes”
Theologians draw out spiritual lessons from the tale of God sending his Son in the flesh, performing miracles and teaching truths incomprehensible to most, and then dying and returning once again to heaven so he can be with many more followers here and now who do understand and appreciate his fleshly advent. The same theologians even explain history in terms of this theological drama. Followers of Jesus were so shocked by the unexpected demise of their hero on the cross that they feverishly set about fabricating this spiritually meaningful tale to compensate for their disillusionment by restoring among themselves a new faith and hope for a future life.
The possibility that that spiritually meaningful story might have been the original source of the tale of the historical advent of Jesus seems not to occur to them. (No, I am not saying the story was fabricated overnight ex nihilo. All stories and genres have their antecedents, and such antecedents to the Gospel story and genre are a lot more in evidence in the record than we are conditioned to quickly acknowledge.)
As anyone who has read a good book on the theory of evolution will appreciate, the strength of the theory lies in its
explanatory power, and
predictive ability
Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish is one such book. Shubin explains simply and elegantly how evolution explains both the fossil record and genetic patterns across all species, and even how the same theory enables paleontologists to know where to look for certain kinds of fossils.
Let’s outline what a rough draft of these two tests might look like when applied to (a) the theory that Jesus was historical, and (2) the theory that he was a myth. Only have time to begin work on the first one this post.
I’m sure there is much more that could be said than I outline here, but a rough draft has to start somewhere.
That’s a brilliant piece of wisdom that is lost on many of us from time to time because a certain familiarity with habitual ways of thinking prevents us from seeing that we sometimes really do just make up our own facts — or at least just accept “facts” that others have simply made up for us.
The words come from The Uncensored Bible by Kaltner, McKenzie and Kilpatrick after they have presented an original argument that explains that bizarre episode in Exodus where God is said to meet Moses on his return to Egypt and tries to kill him, following which his wife Zipporah circumcises her infant son, tosses the foreskin at Moses and accuses him of being a bloody husband — after which God leaves him alone. This, at least, is one way the passage is translated for us. But as the authors explain, the original is riddled with so many unlinked pronouns no one can be really sure how to translate the passage, let along make any sense of the story.
A suicidal Moses
The occasion of the opening passage — “You aren’t allowed to make up your own facts” — is the explanation of Pamela Tamarkin Reis. She suggests the confusing phrases are not intended to be understood literally but are idiomatic expressions. They indicated, Reis says, that Moses was contemplating suicide. He had presented himself until this moment as an Egyptian fugitive of high standing, but on his return to Egypt after being called by a voice out of a burning bush, he had to face up to his being a Hebrew and one with a slave people. His wife, Zipporah, mocked him by performing a circumcision on their son in contempt. Continue reading “The fallacy that invalidates historical Jesus studies, conspiracy theories and creationism”
In the process of moving recently I discovered one of my long-boxed copies of a history book researching the lives of renegade leaders of small bands generally considered to be Robin Hood type bandits. What is interesting about this particular field of history, and that is worthy of note among those interested “how history works” in fields other than among theologians and other biblical scholars studying the historical Jesus, is the way the historian treats literary evidence of legendary tales of famous outlaws.
The earliest figure in the literature referenced is Robin Hood himself. But the historian does not discuss Robin Hood as a historical figure at all.
For the purposes of this book Robin Hood is pure myth. As it happens, though ballads about him go back to the fourteenth century, he was not commonly regarded as a hero until the sixteenth century. The question whether a real Robin Hood existed, or what medieval English bands were like in the greenwoods, must be left to experts in the history of the Middle Ages. (p. 46, Bandits, 2000)
Some scholars (e.g. S.G.F. Brandon) have opined that Jesus was something of a revolutionary or rebel leader; others (e.g. Thomas L. Thompson) that he was “a messiah myth” (the link is to an earlier post of mine listing the mythical traits of gods and kings of the Middle East).
Other scholars (e.g. Robert M. Price) have compared the Gospel narrative elements of Jesus against the various functional components of folk tales as extracted by Vladimir Propp.
One nonbiblical historian who, to my knowledge, has never written a word about Jesus, has written about a certain type of rebel leader, however, and compared the realities with the myth or legend that has universally attached itself to these sorts of people. Eric Hobsbawm has researched the phenomenon of social banditry (from China through Europe to Peru), or the Robin Hood types of figures. His list of characteristics of the “noble image” that attaches itself to these figures is interesting.
It bears a striking resemblance to the qualities of the kings and gods of Thompson’s messiah myth traits as much as to the heroic human outlaw. If the same qualities attach themselves to both the human outcast and a mighty god or king of another, much earlier, era, then one is entitled to suspect we are looking at some deeper psychological need/attraction at work here.
In my previous post I quoted John Taylor where he referenced chapter 5 of 
