Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Recently an interesting collation of observations on thematic and literary similarities between New Testament narratives and wider Greek literature was posted by commenter John MacDonald. I’ve set his points out again here (with only slight editing) for those interested. (John’s more complete comment can be read here.) Some of the parallels are actually less to … Continue reading “New Testament in the Greek Literary Matrix”
I have just completed reading one scholar’s work that does argue that Paul spread Christianity throughout the Greek world by means of such a movement and have begun another that argues the same with respect to Jesus. 1. James C. Hanges James C. Hanges, author of Christ, the Image of the Church and Paul, Founder of Churches, stresses … Continue reading “Was Christianity Born from a “Pentecostal” Movement?”
. Continuing the series on Thomas Brodie’s Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery, archived here. . Brodie is analysing John Meier’s work, A Marginal Jew, as representative of the best that has been produced by notable scholars on the historical Jesus. Having begun by identifying the two key problems of … Continue reading “Making of a Mythicist — ch 17 . . . Did Jesus Model Himself on Elijah?”
Anthony Le Donne has published works arguing for a new type of historical study, one that draws upon memory theory, to be applied to the Gospels. He and a number of scholarly supporters believe this new approach can open up a more valid way of approximating the historical Jesus behind the Gospels. In the opening … Continue reading “A dichotomy fallacy in historical Jesus studies”
The previous post in this series set out the evidence that there are correspondences between the canonical Acts of the Apostles and Euripides’ famous play Bacchae. This post continues presenting a lay version of classicist John Moles’ article, “Jesus and Dionysus”, published in 2006 in Hermathena. Do the allusions to the Bacchae and the Dionysiac … Continue reading “The Point of the Dionysiac Myth in Acts of the Apostles, #1″
Craig S. Keener has written a book 869 pages long entitled The Historical Jesus of the Gospels. The primary aim of this book is to investigate how much we can know from the best sources available, and to offer examples of how these sources provide us more adequate information about Jesus than many scholars think … Continue reading “Scholars Rationalizing and Paraphrasing the Christian Myth”
First let it be clear where I am coming from. This is not an attack on any scholar or the scholarship of theologians in general. It is an attempt to address what strikes me as very muddled thinking in many works about the historical Jesus. That is not a denigration of the scholars in question … Continue reading “Historical Jesus Studies As Pseudo-History — Bart Ehrman’s Jesus As a Case-Study”
First let it be clear where I am coming from. This is not an attack on any scholar or the scholarship of theologians in general. It is an attempt to address what strikes me as very muddled thinking in many works about the historical Jesus. That is not a denigration of the scholars in question … Continue reading “Historical Jesus Studies As Pseudo-History — Bart Ehrman As a Case-Study”
The Gospels often portray Jesus in stories that remind readers of Moses or Elijah or other Old Testament heroes. Some scholars of the historical Jesus attribute these narratives to creative fiction. The authors have taken a story about Elijah and adapted it to convey a similar one about Jesus. The point of this pious fiction … Continue reading “Is Jesus portrayed as “a type” like Alexander or Obama?”
Here is a stock criticism of the Gospel accounts of Jesus by sceptics generally and mythicists in particular: The historical Jesus is swallowed up by myth. Look at the framework of his Gospel story: virgin birth, facing Satan in the wilderness, transfigured on the mountain, resurrected from the dead. Without these mythical motifs Jesus is … Continue reading “Scholars undermining scholars on questions fundamental to historicity of Jesus”
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”. … Continue reading “The God Who Comes”
The complete set of reviews to date is archived on this blog here and also on the Jesus Mysteries Yahoo Discussion Group. In this chapter of Jesus Potter Harry Christ Derek Murphy argues that Christianity began as a mystery religion formed as a Jewish synthesis of Greek and Egyptian mystery cult traditions. It had different … Continue reading “Jesus Potter Harry Christ – chapter 8. Did Christianity begin as a Mystery Religion?”
Bruce Louden is Professor in the Languages and Linguistics Department at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has written several works on Homeric literature and I am sharing here a small extract from his latest, Homer’s Odyssey and the Near East. Louden is a classicist, and what he writes here is similar to … Continue reading “Jesus: a synthesis of five traditional mythical figures in ancient myths”
Continuing my review of Jesus Potter Harry Christ. All review posts are archived here. (Updated 1 hour after original posting) I found this chapter one of the most interesting so far because of the questions and possibilities it raises. In my youth I was a keen amateur astronomer but knew much less about the northern … Continue reading “Jesus Potter Harry Christ, ch.6: Meeting Satan Again for the First Time”