2014-10-27

The Fictions of the Laws of Moses, Hammurabi and the Gospel Jesus

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by Neil Godfrey

The following words were written by a scholar of the Bible.  To what historical scenario of the Bible do you think the words were referring?

The fact that so many scholars work with the “historical” hypothesis does not make it the correct one. 

Bible scholars can get away with saying things like that about books in the Bible as long as they are not talking about the Gospels. Some even question the entire historical basis of David and Solomon. But the Gospels are sacred windows opening out to the historical details of Jesus Christ. Not that critical scholars for a moment think that the narrative details themselves are historically accurate; they apply various methods in efforts to divine traditions, memories and sayings that supposedly lay behind those stories.

The author of the above words also wrote in the same chapter:

This particular thesis [that the text is describing genuine historical events] is protected from critical scrutiny because we lack the means of corroborating the historical reconstruction . . . 

I am skeptical about the conventional approach not only because its results are beyond the reach of examination. The problem is also that the approach too readily assumes that the texts straightforwardly lend themselves to historical . . . analysis. 

That is, the author is expressing disagreement with the practice of merely assuming that the contents of an ancient text are informing us about a genuine historical past. The problem with this assumption is that we have no way of corroborating the supposedly historical account. Is it possible that what we are reading was not written as historical memory at all? How can we tell? Continue reading “The Fictions of the Laws of Moses, Hammurabi and the Gospel Jesus”