Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
One of the more informative biblioblogs that I generally appreciate is Michael Kok’s The Jesus Memoirs: The History and Reception of the New Testament. Lately Michael Kok has been posting “course materials” setting out in easy-to-read summaries the basics of the various New Testament books. I have been unable to keep up with all of them … Continue reading “Do we have evidence of oral traditions as sources for the gospels?”
In the last installment, we covered oral tradition. As I look over the post now, I see that I missed several opportunities to add the adjective, “rich.” Biblical scholars love to write the words “rich oral tradition.” How, you may ask, do they know such details about something based mostly on conjecture? Watch out! If you keep asking questions like … Continue reading “Bart Ehrman: Jesus Before the Gospels, Basic Element 4: Genre”
All four canonical gospels . . . supply us with the general picture of Jesus as speaker of authoritative and often disturbing words, and not as reader, writer, or head of a school tradition. Insofar as he is featured as a prophetic speaker and eschatological teacher, moving from one place to another, surrounded by listeners and engaged in debate, the gospels will have retained a genuine aspect of … Continue reading “Jesus the Oral Performer: Questioning an Oral Tradition behind the Gospels”
Some New Testament scholars have difficulty with the term “midrash”. Goulder stopped using it because of this, though his student Spong has not followed his lead here. I continue to use the term as generally as Spong does because Jewish scholars themselves, especially a number who are specialists in midrashic and Jewish literary studies, use … Continue reading “Why Gospel Fiction was Written as Gospel Truth — a plausible explanation”
Most of us understand that the Gospels are theological narratives and do not report literal history. At the same time, probably most critically inclined readers believe that those theological narratives are ultimately inspired by historical persons and events. Their authors (or those responsible for their source information) are so “spiritually overwhelmed” by the inexpressibility of … Continue reading “How Historical Imagination Destroys the Gospels”
Part 8: Attacking the foundations: The “uniqueness” of the gospels A meeting of the minds The form-critical consensus about the nature of the gospels had begun to crumble by the 1970s. No clear new way forward had emerged, but discontent with the current consensus was clearly growing. By the start of the next decade, the … Continue reading “The Genre of the Gospels: How the Consensus Changed (Part 8)”
R. (Rabbi?) Joseph Hoffmann’s “semi-sincere New Year’s resolution for 2013 is to be nicer to the mythicists”. I’m touched. He explains the reason for his semi-sincere change of heart. It is not the ghetto-dwelling buggers‘ fault for carrying diseased ideas. The fault lies with his fellow scholars who have fed them “stammering indecision, deconstruction, conspiracy-theories, … Continue reading “The Gospels Assure Us (Relatively) That the Hoffmann Jesus Is True”
This post concludes Thomas Brodie’s critique of the role oral tradition has played in Biblical studies, especially with respect to accounting for the Gospel narratives about Jesus. It is taken from chapter 6 of The Birthing the New Testament: The Intertextual Development of the New Testament Writings. Even if a hypothesis is unclear in its … Continue reading “Oral Tradition Is Unnecessary to Explain the Gospels”
As signalled in a comment on my recent post on the single authorship of Genesis to 2 Kings, I have decided it best to back-track a little before continuing that series and posting a little on how oral tradition came to be a ruling paradigm among Biblical scholars and why an increasing number of scholars, … Continue reading “Oral Tradition Behind Gospels and OT: Unfounded, Unworkable and Unnecessary”
One of my first posts on this blog asked why the Gospel of Mark was not more often interpreted in a way we would normally interpret any other form of literature. I was referring to Frank Kermode’s discussion of the Gospel of Mark in The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. This post … Continue reading “Why are the Gospels so believable?”
6th August: expanded “the trial” comparison into “The face to face confrontation of secular and religious leaders“ Comparing other rabbinic midrash with the Gospels In my previous post I covered Galit Hasan-Rokem’s comparisons of some early Christian and rabbinic midrash. In this post I comment on Hasan-Rokem’s discussions of other tales in the midrash of … Continue reading “Messiahs, Midrash and Mythemes — more comparisons with the Gospels”
Sara Mandell and David Noel Freedman give us some valuable tips on how to read the pagan Greek work of “History” by Herodotus much of the biblical history of Israel (Genesis to 2 Kings) and the Gospels in their 1993 volume The Relationship Between Herodotus’ History and Primary History (Genesis to 2 Kings). Among several … Continue reading “How to Read the Gospels”
A number of biblical scholars have insisted that the historical Jesus narrative makes far more sense as an explanation for the rise of Christianity than the Christ myth alternative. At the same time one observes that historical Jesus scholars are often preoccupied attempting to explain two central pillars of the historical explanation that they concede … Continue reading “Double implausibility of the historical Jesus narrative”
I believe that few “serious scholars” (as they say) see any reason to attribute the first couple of chapters of the Book of Genesis to historical reality. Few actually see any reason to attribute its claims that God fashioned the world in 6 days and created Adam from dust and Eve from his baculum. But … Continue reading “Gospels and Genesis as historical documents”