2012-08-13

‘Is This Not the Carpenter?’ — A (Very, Very) Strange History of Minimalism

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by Neil Godfrey

The opening chapter of Is This Not the Carpenter? is “A (Very, Very) Short History of Minimalism: From the Chronicler to the Present” by Jim West of the unaccredited Quartz Hill School of Theology (West has said he believes accreditation is “a scheme and a scam”) that is a “ministry” arm of the Quartz Hill Community Church.

When I first read Jim West’s article online in 2010 (before it was edited as part of Is This Not the Carpenter?) I was very surprised indeed. I responded with a blog post, The Refreshing Honesty of Jim West. Here is a section of his article/chapter that I quoted then:

Most “histories” of Ancient Israel and Earliest Christianity are simply examples of circular reasoning. Many historians use the Bible as a historical source; they reconstruct a history which is often nothing more than a recapitulation of the biblical telling; and the Bible is affirmed as historical because of the history so constructed. Similarly, the life of Jesus, for instance, is gleaned from a reading of the Gospels. Said reconstruction is named a ‘history of Jesus’ life.” That “history of Jesus’ life” is then utilized to prove historically the life of Jesus as described in the Gospels. One need only pick up John Bright’s “History of Israel” or Joseph Ratzinger’s “Jesus” to see circularity in action. True, ancillary materials are added to these histories (on the very rare occasions that they are available) – but these only reinforce the circularly circumscribed reconstruction.

As I mentioned in my initial response, Jim West has distorted the meaning of “minimalism” to sustain the conceit throughout his article/chapter. Minimalism is not, primarily, a denial of the value of texts for historical information. They certainly are valuable as historical sources. The question is what the “hard evidence” of archaeological finds and external controls can inform us about the nature and value of the texts as historical sources. Are their narratives true accounts of what happened or are they creative literature that is best explained as the ideology (or theology) of a people, time and place that can only be pinpointed with the aid of other sources external to those narratives?

Jim West’s point is that the authors of our biblical texts were not interested in historical reconstruction or recording. To illustrate, he points to the author of 1 Chronicles changing 2 Samuel’s account of God (Yahweh) causing David to take a census of Israel into Satan being David’s motivator. The author, we thus can see, was doing theology, not history. Continue reading “‘Is This Not the Carpenter?’ — A (Very, Very) Strange History of Minimalism”


2012-08-11

‘Is This Not the Carpenter?’ — Introduction

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by Neil Godfrey

What is the significance of the title of this book edited by Thomas L. Thompson and Thomas S. Verenna. The subtitle is “The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus” — “of the Figure of”, not “of Jesus”. Perhaps that helps guard the book from being seen as too bluntly opening up the Christ Myth question. The main title comes from Mark 6:1-6 —

And he went out from thence; and he cometh into his own country; and his disciples follow him.

2 And when the sabbath was come, he began to teach in the synagogue: and many hearing him were astonished, saying, Whence hath this man these things? and, What is the wisdom that is given unto this man, and what mean such mighty works wrought by his hands?

3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James, and Joses, and Judas, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended in him.

4 And Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.

5 And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them.

6 And he marvelled because of their unbelief. And he went round about the villages teaching.  (ASV)

Now the themes latent in this passage and that are drawn out in this introduction are the same ones that led me to launch one of my very first diffident attempts to explore questions of historicity in an academic forum in 1998: Re: Jesus the Carpenter? in Crosstalk. Fourteen years later I am reading the same question, with the same implications for the historicity of the exchange between Jesus and his neighbours, being raised not by an amateur outsider in an open scholarly forum but by scholars in a book so prohibitively expensive that it is beyond the reach of the general reader — and with a clear warning that I am not to reproduce any of it for wider sharing, without even the usual allowance of short passages for reviews.

Nonetheless, this Introduction chapter has been available online since 2010 at The Bible and Interpretation — even complete with its annoying “itinerate” typo.  (And given that it is already online I trust I have a right to quote passages from it here.) So you can go there and read what Thompson and Verenna write for themselves or stay here and read what I say they write, with some of my own commentary. 😉 Continue reading “‘Is This Not the Carpenter?’ — Introduction”


2010-12-23

“Is This Not the Carpenter? The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Athena Scorning the Advances of Hephaestus. Pa...
See the introduction linked in this post for the relevance of this image. Image via Wikipedia

The introduction of Thomas L. Thompson’s and Thomas Verenna’s edited volume, Is This Not the Carpenter?A Question of Historicity has been published on The Bible and Interpretation.

The first essential step in any historical inquiry

This is a heartening introduction to the essential basics of valid historical methodology that has been very fudgy in the field of historical Jesus studies. The first thing any historian needs to grapple with when undertaking any inquiry is the nature of his or her sources. While probably most biblical scholars have acknowledged that the Gospels are theological narratives that depict a “Christ of faith” rather than a “Jesus of history”, there has at the same time been an assumption that that theological layer has been created to portray what the “historical Jesus” meant to the authors and their readers. Given this assumption, it has been believed that it might be possible to uncover some facts about the historical Jesus nonetheless. Historical Jesus studies have in this way been confused with the question of Christian origins.

The contributions in this book are from a diverse range of scholars. The introduction explains the purpose of the volume:

 

The essays collected in this volume have a modest purpose. Neither establishing the historicity of an historical Jesus nor possessing an adequate warrant for dismissing it, our purpose is to clarify our engagement with critical historical and exegetical methods in the hopes of enabling the central question regarding the function of New Testament literature to resist the endless production of works on the historical Jesus. Our hope is to open a direct discussion of the question of historicity much in the spirit of the more than decade-long discourse and debate by the European Seminar on Methodology in Israel’s History, which has been so profitably engaged in regard to the historicity of figures and narratives of the Hebrew Bible and the related construction of a history of ancient Palestine.

This sounds a little like an approach I have been suggesting on this blog and elsewhere for some time, so I find such a statement personally encouraging.

Historicity is an assumption Continue reading ““Is This Not the Carpenter? The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus”