Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
All posts reviewing Nathanael Vette’s Writing With Scripture are archived at Vette : Writing With Scripture With thanks to T&T Clark who forwarded me a review copy. I have come to a turning point in my reading and review of Nathanael Vette’s Writing With Scripture. I first learned of the book on the Biblical Criticism … Continue reading “Clarification of the Thesis — a review of Writing with Scripture, part 8”
All posts reviewing Nathanael Vette’s Writing With Scripture are archived at Vette : Writing With Scripture With thanks to T&T Clark who forwarded me a review copy. I was fascinated by Nathanael Vette’s (NV) discussion of the highly probable influence of the story of Esther on the Gospel of Mark‘s account of the death of … Continue reading “How Queen Esther Influenced the Fate of John the Baptist — a review of Writing with Scripture, part 7”
This is the second post in my review of Nathanael Vette’s Writing With Scripture: Scripturalized Narrative in the Gospel of Mark. The series is being archived at Vette: Writing With Scripture. For a richer understanding of the creative literary world that gave rise to our Gospel I highly recommend reading these reviews of Vette’s work … Continue reading “Creating New Stories from Scripture — a review of Writing with Scripture, part 2”
I wrote in the previous post that certain New Testament scholarship comes across as trying to establish the historicity of this or that detail in the Gospels by relying upon a naive reading of the text and concluding that if we cannot trace the event to some other literary influence then, by default, it is … Continue reading “A side-note on evidence for “scripturalized tradition” behind the gospels”
I bear glad tidings of good news. Karl Ludwig Schmidt’s magnum opus has finally been translated into English. The publication date is 2021, but I became aware of it earlier this month. The translator, Byron R. McCane was also responsible for the highly readable The Place of the Gospels in the General History of Literature, … Continue reading “K. L. Schmidt’s The Framework of the Story of Jesus: Now in English!”
Hello again everyone. It’s been too long since I’ve posted here. One of the reasons for my absence was that I have been working my way through several new works in other languages that I have had to scan and translate mostly “by machine” as I go. Reading one work led to several more and … Continue reading “Historical Research: The Basics”
As noted in a recent post, John Dickson [JD] wrote a lament over a significant number of Australians doubting the historicity of Jesus. Such a state of affairs was “bad news for historical literacy” in this country, he said. The thrust of his article suggested that more Australians should be mindful of what is found … Continue reading “Round Two. On John Dickson’s Response”
Reviewing The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel by Helen K. Bond. (In which I finally get around to reading Bond’s The First Biography of Jesus.) After the initial trickle of “Gospels Are Biographies!” books, we might have expected a flood of works exploring the implications of such a designation. After all, when … Continue reading “Mark: The First Biography of Jesus? (Part 1)”
A comment by VinnyJH has led me to rethink and plan to add a paragraph to my recent post on Nazareth. Of course, Nazareth is a significant factor in the historical Jesus debate. True, it is not necessary for Nazareth to have been settled to support Richard Carrier’s “minimalist historical Jesus” figure that he uses … Continue reading “Once more on Nazareth, Relevance and Salm versus Carrier”
In his review of the GRC eConference on the historicity of Jesus Richard Carrier wrote with respect to the claim that the town of Nazareth did not exist in the early first century CE There is no good case to be made that Nazareth did not exist as a town in the early first century, … Continue reading “Is the Nazareth Question Important? A Response to Richard Carrier”
3. The Incarnation of the two forms of the Torah, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah Nanine Charbonnel stresses the Jewishness — the “Jewish rootedness” — of the interpretations that have been discussed in this series of posts. In the words (translated) of Jacqueline Genot-Bismuth, The principle of the dissociation of the Message and … Continue reading “Jesus: Incarnation of Written and Oral Torah. part 3 of 3 (Charbonnel contd)”
The “again” in the title harks back to another time I responded point by point to Tim O’Neill’s erroneous declarations: Bad History for Atheists #1, #2, #3, #4 Continuing here to respond to the youtube presentation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_hD3xK4hRY — previous posts: #1 (wrongly saying it pays academics to find “different” and “new” or “contrarian” arguments), … Continue reading “Getting History for Atheists Wrong (Again) — #3”
Here is the final post discussing the introductory chapter of Rivka Nir’s The First Christian Believer: In Search of John the Baptist where she sets out her case for the John the Baptist passage in the writings of Josephus being a forgery. For readers with so little time, the TL;DR version: The baptism of John that … Continue reading “John the Baptist — Another Case for Forgery in Josephus (conclusion)”
We have been following Nanine Charbonnel’s view that the Jesus character we meet in the gospels was constructed entirely from ancient and well-understood Jewish literary-theological methods. In other words, the gospel figure of Jesus is most economically explained as a literary-theological construction of the evangelists (authors of the gospels) and that there were no oral … Continue reading “The Jewish Origin of the Incarnation: continuing Nanine Charbonnel’s Jésus-Christ, Sublime Figure de Papier”