Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Category: New Testament
Mostly straightforward but still some questions arise. Where does New Testament end and Church history and question of Christian origins, also certain roles of Marcion, begin? (Marcion’s argued influence on NT should be included here; also evidence of early readings found in Fathers like Tertullian.) Relevant manuscript discoveries and analysis belong here, including histories of their later copying.
In a recent post I discussed the ways Reason (or Logos) for the Stoic philosophers had a similar role or function to Christ (also a Logos) in Paul’s letters.
For both the Stoic philosopher and the Pauline Christian, the moment of conversion, when a person became “a new creation”, “in Reason or in Christ” and with “Reason or Christ in” them, and they being “in Reason or in Christ,” was when they were blessed with a “spiritual grasp or full insight” into the very nature and meaning of Reason, or Christ crucified and resurrected. This conversion moment when the neophyte attained a higher wisdom beyond that of “the natural man” also catapulted him or her into a new set of values and shared life and new identity with fellow believers.
Paul’s notion of Jesus Christ was indeed a technical concept about a single act God had performed for the salvation of believers. I use the word “technical” to stress a point, even though there was a strong emotional attachment to this “technical” stunt by God. Continue reading “What did Jesus Christ mean to Paul and his readers?”
One New Testament scholar has written that Jesus’ real life was lived out just like a real Greek tragedy. Jesus’ travels, works and sayings, all his life, just happened to all follow a sequence and specific eventfulness that had all the appearance, to anyone who was observing, of working out just like a drama on a Greek tragic stage! I will return to this otherwise interesting NT scholar.
Thomas L. Thompson‘s The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham is recognized as having been the wedge that dislodged the dominance of Albright‘s influence on Old Testament studies. Albright had argued that the Bible was basically true history from the Patriarchs through to the Babylonian captivity. Thompson’s critique went beyond the specific archaeological evidence itself, however. He went to the heart of the way (Albrightian) biblical historians gratuitously assumed that the biblical text was essentially a historical record of Israel. The Bible is first and foremost literature, and it is as literature that it must be first understood. A little basic literary analysis is enough to explain many of the details of the Bible stories.
In a recent post discussing a book by Sheffield scholar David Clines I quoted the same core historical principle:
It is indeed usual for practitioners of biblical literary criticism to insist that the literary must precede the historical, that we must understand the nature of our texts as literary works before we attempt to use them for historical reconstruction. . . . But [in the case study of Nehemiah] the literary and historical have been so closely bound up, historical questions being raised — and sometimes answered — in the very process of asking the literary questions.(From David J. A. Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help? 1990. p. 163)
Paul raises a problem for those who take for granted the historicity of Jesus on the strength of the existence of the NT canon. He rhetorically asserts that Jews in his own day had no chance of hearing about Jesus unless they hear a Christian preacher inform them about him.
The standard response to this problem for historicity is that Paul is only speaking of Jews in the Diaspora. But this standard response is offered without reference to the context of Paul’s statement, and when one does take a look at that context, one quickly sees that the response is ill-informed. Paul is definitely speaking about all Jews, even especially those based in Palestine!
Steven Carr has raised this question a number of times with those arguing for the historicity of Jesus and has met with scorn, accusations of being abusive, silence, or the standard “Paul was talking about the Diaspora Jews.”
I am posting here to draw attention to the context of Paul’s statement, and the ignorance of the response that he was referring to Diaspora Jews only:
How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? (Romans 10:14)
Anyone who treats the Bible too seriously as history needs to take time out to read Jason and the Argonauts, or the Argonautica, composed in the third century BCE by Apollonius of Rhodes. They could also read a lot of other ancient literature, epic poetry, tragic dramas, Hellenistic novellas, to find a more grounded perspective for the Bible as literature, but here I focus on the Argonautica.
Book 1 — this links to Seaton’s translation of the first of the four books of the Argonautica.
It opens with a prophecy that sets the action in motion. King Pelias had been warned that he would be murdered at the behest of a man he saw approaching with one sandal. It just so happened that Jason happened to have lost one sandal while crossing muddy waters when he came to King Pelias to enjoy a banquet. Pelias could hardly kill him on the spot for losing his sandal, so sent him on a mission (to a distant land to retrieve a golden fleece) from which he believed he could scarcely return.
So begins the action. And it is not just an ordinary adventure of ordinary folk. It is to be a tale of famous deeds by some of the most renowned of ancient heroic names. And the plot is driven by prophecies from the gods and their agents. This is the stuff of ancient epics, dramas and novellas. Continue reading “Bible and the Argonauts: Chapter 1”
How do we account for Christianity growing out of Judaism yet being so unlike Judaism? Part of one possible answer lies in the recognition that there was no normative Judaism as we understand it prior to the destruction of the Temple in the year 70. Noncanonical Second Temple writings such as the Book of Enoch point to the existence of Jewish sectarians who had radically different ideas about contemporary Temple practices and priesthood, cosmology, the law, wisdom, even the angelic world and Godhead prior to the rise of rabbinic Judaism following the destruction of the Temple. Margaret Barker and others have noticed quite a few distinctively Christian ideas resonating in some of these early books such as the Book of Enoch and that came to be sidelined by later Jewish rabbis. We know, of course, that the Book of Enoch is even quoted in New Testament writings.
This post continues earlier ones taken from a 1981 Journal of Biblical Literature article by George W. E. Nickelsburg, “Enoch, Levi, and Peter: Recipients of Revelation in Upper Galilee”. (Note, though, that I am not reproducing many of N’s details. This post is only a selection of the points he makes.)
It considers the details of Peter’s commissioning as the Rock of the Church in the context of narratives found in Enoch and their adaptations again later in the Testament of Levi (pre-Christian version). Peter emerges as a possible replacement to the High Priest of the Temple, which was, of course, doomed to destruction. The story of Peter and his role in the Gospel of Matthew, at least, grew out of that branch of Jewish religion that opposed the Temple practices and drew upon writings such as the Book of Enoch that did not make it into the rabbinic and later Christian orthodox canon.
I suspect the narrative was composed long after the temple’s destruction, and is an etiological tale to explain how the Church is now the new Temple and Kingdom of God with the Jews having been punished be destruction, slavery and scattering.
In my previous post I cited a “Distinguished Scholar”‘s textbook summary of Middle Platonic ideas that formed part of the background to early Christianity. I continue this post with a discussion of the philosopher who introduced ‘demonology’ into Platonic philosophical views during the century preceding that of Paul and the earliest Christians.
In an earlier post I quoted translated passages from two Middle Platonist authors given prominence by Everett Ferguson, Philo and Plutarch, that depicted their particular views of cosmology and the place of demons in the universe. That post upset some readers who appeared to take exception to the posting of evidence from primary sources that lent support to the discussion of Earl Doherty in his publications arguing that the Jesus originated as a mythical construct. A significant part of Doherty’s discussion focuses on the way certain Middle Platonic views informed the intellectual background to the New Testament epistles.
I would prefer to take more time to explore literary relationships before going too far with the assumptions in these for oral traditions.
When I get time to digest some of these more, I would like to compare them with other studies that place Acts very late, and our canonical form of Luke also late. By late I mean the latter half of the second century, from the time of, or even very soon after, Justin Martyr. Continue reading “More on Luke Being the Last”
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.
(From a scholarly review of a chapter of a book discussing historical methodology)
Is there anything in the method outlined there (or better yet in the books cited if readers know them well or have time to consult them) that is not in keeping with the practices of historians working on the historical figure of Jesus? Or is there any point at which this survey and summary (or the method set forth in the sources the article cites) is at odds with what most historians do? I ask because mythicists regularly claim that what scholars investigating the historical Jesus do is different from what mainstream historical study does.
In those books cited in that Wikipedia article, and that are appealed to in order demonstrate that biblical historians use the same methods as nonbiblical historians, appear gems like the following:
The author of a historical source may be God, as well as man. Hence the distinction between divine and human sources.
The procedure of critics who reject the possibility of miracles is manifestly unscientific.
I know of course that most mainstream biblical historians do not openly admit to the supernatural when dealing with historical inquiry, but the fact that an associate professor of religion is blithely confident enough to make such a claim about books he obviously has never read and only thinks he understands demonstrates just how out of touch some biblical scholars are with the historiography outside their own ivory tower. This was a key point in Scot McKnight’s chapter on historiography in his Death of Jesus, and which I discuss in relation to key names in nonbiblical historiography that he sees as relevant for biblical scholars. The scholar who refuses to address this is the one who responded with the ignorant remark about sources for methodology on the Wikipedia article.
(I know I know. Someone said this is like shooting fish in a barrel with a shotgun. Let’s move on.)
“Whoever, though not a specialist, invades the province of any science, and ventures to express an opinion opposed to its official representatives, must be prepared to be rejected by them with anger, to be accused of a lack of scholarship, “dilettantism,” or “want of method,” and to be treated as a complete ignoramus. This has been the experience of all up to now who, while not theologians, have expressed themselves on the subject of the historical Jesus. The like experience was not spared the author of the present work after the appearance of its first edition. He has been accused of “lack of historical training,” “bias,” “incapacity for any real historical way of thinking,” &c., and it has been held up against him that in his investigations the result was settled beforehand . . . . .
“The author of this book has been reproached with following in it tendencies merely destructive. Indeed, one guardian of Zion, particularly inflamed with rage, has even expressed himself to this effect, that the author’s researches to not originate in a serious desire for knowledge, but only in a wish to deny.”
The so-called “resurrection” of Attis cannot be compared with the resurrection of Jesus because all Attis ever managed to do was avoid bodily corruption, grow his hair and raise a single finger. With this assertion Dunn completely ignores and gives his middle finger to Price’s arguments about the relevance of pagan resurrections to the Christian myth.
Dunn’s attempt to rebut Price by slashing away at straw men also involves claims so muddled and contradictory that one can only assume that he is confident enough of his scholarly status to assume that most readers will thoughtlessly nod their heads to anything at all that sounds critical of the Christ-Myth theory.
Dunn’s raising of Attis’ finger follows directly from his attempt to contrast Jesus with pagan creations on the grounds that Jesus challenges the world about “sin” and calls for “suffering” and “rejection by the world”.
Continuing a series of responses to Dunn’s response to Price’s chapter on Jesus mythicism. (See Historical Jesus: Five Views for all related posts.)
It is quite “interesting” to regularly run across remarks in web-land about how “spot on” Dunn’s criticism of Price’s chapter is, and how so many “fully agree with everything Dunn says.”
I can only imagine most readers who say these sorts of things never read Price’s chapter and Dunn’s together. Or if they did, they are swayed by Dunn’s status as a scholar — and their own eagerness to find anything to rebut a Christ-Myth argument — to swallow everything he says and forget the many many instances where Price’s own words belie so much of what Dunn writes.
In this post I look at
an instance of Dunn saying that Price “ignores” evidence that he does not ignore at all but discusses explicitly
an instance of Dunn leading readers to think Price resorts to ad hoc claims of interpolation to sidestep contrary evidence, when in fact he does not
where Dunn argues that the Bible’s claims of supernatural appearances are evidence for the historical Jesus
and where Dunn even manages to argue that the absence of a detailed description for a supernatural appearance of Jesus strengthens the case for the historicity of Jesus against Jesus mythicism.
Dunn attempts to rebut Price’s assertion that there is “no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources” (p. 62):
Now to make this claim, [Price] must dismiss the evidence that Josephus gives as well as the Jewish tradition, which marked Jesus as a sorcerer — evidence he does not discuss but that shows up in major second-century sources that debate Jesus. (p. 101)
I don’t know how Dunn defines “secular sources” but I thought secular refers to something nonreligious. I would not have thought of the Babylonian Talmud or Justin Martyr’s writings as “secular”. But leaving that aside, I fail to see how anyone could be impressed by Dunn’s reply to Price here. Continue reading “Dunn on Price (4)”
Christ, meaning Messiah, is, of course, not a proper name but a title, like King or High Priest.
Yet Paul’s letters use Christ as if it is a proper name for Jesus.
Dunn writes in response to Price (The Historical Jesus: Five Views) what is well known to all scholars:
As often noted, the fact that Christ was more or less a proper name (Jesus Christ) by the time of Paul (within twenty to twenty-five years of Jesus’ death) must indicate that messianic status had already been ascribed to this Jesus for such a long time that the titular significance of Christ (Messiah) had largely faded. (p. 96)
What is more rarely discussed is the possibility that Jesus, meaning Saviour, is also a personal name that originated as a title. (I know Jesus/Joshua is a common personal name; this post is addressing the happy coincidence that it was bestowed on the one who epitomized its meaning in the Christian myth and narrative.)
