Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
This post inaugurates what I hope will be a long-running, informative (albeit tongue-in-cheek) series. In it, we’ll attempt to shine some light on the inner workings of the New Testament scholar’s brain. There is no reason to doubt . . . New Testament scholars fall back on stock phrases when they’re pushing a weak argument, … Continue reading “How to Think and Write Like an NT Scholar: Part 1”
. The above exchange is the message of Chris Keith’s opening chapter of Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity. My “idiot’s guide” is a tad unfair to Käsemann, however, since he did have willing accomplices and Keith mentions Norman Perrin and Reginald H. Fuller as guilty of formalizing more criteria of authenticity. The above … Continue reading “The Rise and Fall of Criteria in Jesus Studies: Chapter 1 of Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity”
Morna D. Hooker cried out in the academic wilderness forty years ago against the validity of “authenticity criteria” — criteria of coherence, criteria of dissimilarity, in particular, but also of embarrassment, multiple attestation, etc — then being used to supposedly uncover the historical Jesus. Her reflections on the state of play since that time are … Continue reading “‘I told you so!’ Why Criteria for Historical Jesus Studies Don’t Work”
Richard C. Carrier in a chapter entitled “Bayes’s Theorem for Beginners: Formal Logic and Its Relevance to Historical Method”* conveniently lists seventeen “representative” criteria that have been developed by various scholars in an effort to determine the historicity, or what could be established as truly historical, about Jesus. Many of them are presumably taken from … Continue reading “How (not) to decide the historical facts about Jesus”
Today while catching up with what materials qualify as research for funding purposes in Australian universities (my new job requires me to refresh my memory on all this stuff) I came across an exclusion clause that should mean that no Historical Jesus book like Crossan’s or Casey’s should qualify as a research output of a … Continue reading “Grounds for excluding historical Jesus studies from university research”
In his newly published Jesus of Nazareth, one of Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey’s criteria for deciding if a Gospel detail is truly historical is that the passage “contains nothing that the early church would want to make up”. Though I have read very many works of history, I never heard of this as a rationale … Continue reading “Nothing the Early Church Would Want to Make Up?”
A review of Dale Allison’s forthcoming book, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History, illustrates both in its post details and subsequent comments how far removed Historical Jesus studies are from the way history is practiced in other (nonbiblical) fields. These comments of mine on this review address starting assumptions of the reviewer problems left hanging … Continue reading “Games Historical Jesus Scholars Play”
First of all, let’s apply sound historical method, that of biblical historians which is no different, so biblical historians assure us, from historical methods practiced by any other historians. So to begin with, we will dispense with that cynical, hypersceptical, anti-supernaturalistic, post-Enlightenment hermeneutic of suspicion, and follow the dictates of the progressive, pre-Enlightenment (middle-dark age?), … Continue reading “Historical proof that Isis healed more than Jesus”
I place “review” in quotation marks because Associate Professor of Religion of Butler University James McGrath simply avoids addressing Dr Robert Price’s arguments. I used to think McGrath was not very bright, but I have recently come to understand that he is as subtle and smart as a serpent when it comes to those twisting … Continue reading “Observations on McGrath’s “Review” of Robert Price on Mythicism”
The historicity of Jesus’ baptism is asserted on grounds that the event would not have been told unless it were true, because it implies views of Jesus that no Christian would invent: that John was up till that point superior to Jesus, and/or that Jesus had sins to be buried in the Jordan River. This … Continue reading “Why early Christians would create the story of Jesus’ baptism – and more evidence the gospels were very late”
Updated 8th June with postscript Dr James McGrath has an interesting take on Joseph of Arimathea in that he interprets his first appearance in the gospel record as one of the many Jews who were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus — and his burial. Only in subsequent gospel narratives is his character evolved into … Continue reading “Joseph of Arimathea – recasting a faithless collaborator as a disciple of Jesus”
If Craig Evans had been in my class when I was a high school history teacher and if he handed in his essay on “Criteria for evaluating the Gospels” (as published in his Fabricating Jesus) I would have liked to have given him fair marks for his description of some of the criteria, but would … Continue reading “‘Fabricating Jesus’, Craig Evans Fabricating Scholarship — Marked F pending . . .”
Spong in his new book, Jesus for the Non-Religious: Recovering the Divine at the Heart of the Human (2007), lists four reasons that he claims leave no doubt about the historicity of Jesus: No “person setting out to create a mythical character would [ever] suggest that he hailed from the village of Nazareth . . … Continue reading “(revised) Spong on Jesus’ historicity: John the Baptist and the Crucifixion”