Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
The previous two posts in this series: Why Christianity Happened — Toward a Secular Approach to Christian Origins Why Christianity Happened – The Secular Approach, 2 The Necessity and Problem of Bias in Christian Origins Studies James Crossley (Why Christianity Happened: A Sociological Account of Christian Origins (26-50 CE)) examines the role of bias in … Continue reading “The Secular Approach to Christian Origins, #3 (Bias)”
James Crossley is to be highly commended for attempting in Why Christianity Happened: A Sociohistorical Account of Christian Origins (26-50 CE) to adapt to the study of Christian origins approaches taken directly from history departments. The task of explaining how Christianity began has generally been the preserve of theologians many of whom (according to scholars like … Continue reading “Why Christianity Happened — Toward a Secular Approach to Christian Origins”
You have the right to remain silent Over on The Bible and Interpretation web site, James McGrath once again takes up his jousting lance to do battle against the big, bad mythicists. He raises an interesting point: If we were to combine a number of recent and not-so-recent proposals related to Jesus, we could depict him … Continue reading “Some Thoughts on the Nature of the Evidence and the Historicity of Jesus”
If Maurice Casey’s book Jesus: Evidence and Argument Or Mythicist Myths? were about Jews or Gays or Blacks or the Disabled he and his publisher may well be charged with inciting hatred against “the other”. Mythicists are portrayed as all alike, they are all psychologically twisted and motivated by evil intent, their faults are never … Continue reading “Maurice Casey’s Mythicist Myth Busted”
Richard Carrier has written a critical review of Maurice Casey’s Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? See Critical Review of Maurice Casey’s Defense of the Historicity of Jesus. It’s in depth. Over 20,000 words. So most of us will want to schedule more than one sitting to complete it. Carrier begins with an overall … Continue reading “Richard Carrier’s Review of Maurice Casey’s Jesus“
Genre can be a highly fluid concept. In studies of Gospels I’ve noticed that discussions of genre sometimes overlap with intertextuality. Moreover, we may conclude that an ancient narrative belongs to the genre “history”, but once we learn what “history” could mean to the ancients we quickly move into discussions about the place of fictional … Continue reading “Genre of Gospels, Acts and OT Primary History: INDEX”
It seems the topic of the day is Amanda Witmer’s article in The Bible and Interpretation, Jesus, the Gospels and History. It covers many points I have addressed often enough here, and that others have addressed at length, so I will refer only in brief to some of these arguments in my little contribution to … Continue reading “Amanda Witmer on “Jesus, the Gospels and Historicity””
This is my response to James McGrath’s post, Mythicist Language is Designed to Make Lies Sound Truthful. Is McGrath really saying that a mythicist argument by Brodie is actually a set of “lies”? If so, that underscores the very point I have been making about how censorship works in academia — and McGrath is himself … Continue reading “McGrath: The Facts Are Such “Minor” Details. Impressions Rule!”
Continuing from Part 2 of this series. . . . In the previous post we followed the way theologians accommodated themselves to the challenges the natural sciences presented the belief in the infallibility of the Bible. They didn’t find it too difficult. After all, the Bible has very little to say about the structure of … Continue reading “The Day Theologians Reacted with Great Seriousness — Use and Abuse of the Bible, Part 3”
I have been posting on the works of several scholars who argue that the Old Testament scriptures were composed much later than traditionally thought (Thompson, Davies, Lemche, Wesselius, Wajdenbaum) but there remains much more to be written about their arguments, and more published scholars to draw into the same net (Nielsen and Gmirkin are two … Continue reading “The Books of Moses — Unknown 300 years Before Christ?”
This post is a continuation of a protracted series on the views of Philippe Wajdenbaum whose doctoral thesis, arguing that a good many of the Biblical stories and laws were inspired by Greek literature, has been published as Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible. Several of the more recent posts have … Continue reading “New Understandings of the Old Testament: Jacques Cazeaux”
This post recapitulates earlier posts on the Documentary Hypothesis and introduces Philippe Wajdenbaum’s case for comparing the Bible with Classical Greek literature and finding the biblical author’s (sic) sources of inspiration there. Late last year I wrote Who Wrote the Bible? Rise of the Documentary Hypothesis. That post outlined the milestones towards the DH as … Continue reading “Collapse of the Documentary Hypothesis (1) & Comparing the Bible with Classical Greek Literature”
Before continuing with Book Two of Laws, there is a major theme in Book One that I ought to have included in the previous post as a significant point in common with one of the primary biblical themes. Both Plato and God emphatically stress the importance of testing the character of their people. The purpose … Continue reading “Plato’s template for the Bible”
Emanuel Pfoh‘s chapter in ‘Is This Not the Carpenter?’ raises the questions that I think get to the very heart of what the “historicist-mythicist” divide over Christian origins is really all about. It’s a favourite of mine, and once again like another favourite that I’ll mention again in this post, comes from an anthropological perspective. … Continue reading “Why Historical Knowledge of Jesus Is Impossible: ‘Is This Not the Carpenter?’ chapter 5”