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Absolutely false. The majority view among academic scholars reflects no agenda to debunk the Bible . . . just to present it accurately and authoritatively. They make no theological conclusions from it at all. The minority view is your view and I suspect the support of it is based in the feeling you just expressed in the bold . . . why support debunkers. I do not need ALL of the Bible to be 100% inerrant and infallible truth to believe in Christ or God . . . why would you or anyone else? I certainly don't need to embrace the savagery and barbarity as good to do so. God IS love. That says it ALL. Everything else is human vanity and hubris that interferes with "love of God and each other." It fosters judgmentalism, intolerance, bigotry, hatred, divisiveness and vengeance, etc. . . . none of which would be approved of by Christ.
You are correct!
I do not know what MR150 thinks "mainstream scholarship" is - but it definitely does not correspond to his idea of it being equitable with an "orthodox view" of Christianity. You and others have pointed out that Biblical Scholarship - as a field of study - became scholarship exactly when it gave up being theology. That is why Theology is an entirely separate field from Scholarship heh heh!
The biggest problem in how many understand the Bible, in my opinion, is when the phrase "the Word of God" - a supposed direct oracular communication between God and a prophet, literally called the "word of Yahweh (God)" - was later applied to a group of texts that were already seen as important religious texts, which then helped to stagnate these texts into a "finished" or "closed" canon called the Bible. Once this was done, the claims of divine inspiration and inerrancy were all but assured. But nowhere in the Biblical texts themselves do they claim this for themselves. Anyone who claims that they do, is unwittingly adopting a traditional stance that has no Biblical credence at all, but is a result of years and years of dogmatic teachings meant to undergird their "authority". In my opinion, a text does not require "authority" from above if it reveals an evident self-truth about the Universe.
Perhaps that is the biggest flaw with a religion that is known as a "Revealed Religion"? Without something to claim the authority for the revelations, we are not obligated to believe in it - as Thomas Paine pointed out hundreds of years ago. It fails to overcome its status of being "hearsay" and never reaches a state of divine transcendence.
I know it has been pointed out that many enter Seminary and then must wrestle with their faith, but it is also important to note that many students enter a University (religious studies are no longer the sole provenance of religious Seminaries) and emerge as successful scholars in a certain field of study that touches on religious studies, without ever having had a religious motivation in the first place. In fact, the field has become more and more specialized to the point where it is very difficult for someone to say "I want to become an expert in the Bible", but they are more likely to say something along the lines of "I have become an expert in the Book of Proverbs and other Wisdom Literature of the Ancient Near East" or "I have become an expert in the paleography of the Biblical Hebrew script" - and if these specializations happen to contribute to an over-arching conclusion made by others, then so be it. The field is no longer limited to religious students wishing to expand their faith, or ready themselves for ministry. It has become very secular - which is a good thing if one wants to approach it in a scientific way. Scholarship can never claim to be completely unbiased and have definite answers - it raises more questions and problems than it answers - but it can claim that it tries its hardest to not enter the field with a theological agenda to color its results.
Scholarship can never claim to be completely unbiased and have definite answers - it raises more questions and problems than it answers - but it can claim that it tries its hardest to not enter the field with a theological agenda to color its results.
Alas, the whole point of religion is to begin with a predetermined assertion and then bend reality to support it. Fundamentalism may be an extreme expression of this, but I am not aware of a single religion on this planet that is based purely on observation of reality. With the possible exception of Buddhism, but even that has gotten barnacled with notions and traditions and legends that can't be questioned, particularly within any one "flavor" of that religion. Most religions, though, are based on some sort of alleged revelation or at least a body of legend that is held as sacred first principles.
True scholarship simply investigates and lets the facts lead the investigation. It does not care WHAT the end result is, only that it be consistent with the facts. This is anathema to theologians.
When it comes to Biblical scholarship I tend to think that even without according automatic respect to theological traditions, it often obeys unspoken taboos. For example, while most scholars do not see the evidence pointing to a "biblical", miracle-working, son-of-god Jesus, many are still jumping through rings of fire and eating little pieces of glass to "prove" that there was at least a distinct, historical Jesus who was not a composite character or a complete fiction or an uninteresting shadow of the Jesus legend. This gores too many oxes, it would seem. I also find the notion of the "Q" manuscript to be a speculative reach upon which far too many conclusions in the field of Biblical scholarship rest. It is treated more like a theory than a hypothesis.
A For example, while most scholars do not see the evidence pointing to a "biblical", miracle-working, son-of-god Jesus, many are still jumping through rings of fire and eating little pieces of glass to "prove" that there was at least a distinct, historical Jesus who was not a composite character or a complete fiction or an uninteresting shadow of the Jesus legend.
I've read a number of the works you reference and your description above does not square with what I found. John Dominic Crossan, Burton Mack, A.N. Wilson, Reja Aslan, Bart Ehrman...I do not recall a single paragraph when I thought any of the above were "jumping through rings of fire" trying to prove something.
These were all very scholarly, very intelligent authors whose goal certainly seemed to me to be to produce the best guess based on the best evidence.
I do not bestow the same respect on everyone in the field, for example the popular English trio, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, who brought us "The Messianic Legacy" and "Holy Blood, Holy Grail", do tend to fit some of the description which you provided above. They are happily anti religious and make little attempt to mask this in their work. I enjoyed both of their books a great deal, they were witty, they were irreverent, they played right into all of my own anti religious mindsets...but....they didn't nail down their conclusions, they made great and unjustified leaps, they were not in the same class as the authors I mentioned above.
There is some irony then that those three Brits are also the first ones to bring to my attention, the subject of this thread. In the introduction to one of their books, I forget which, they talked about the immense gap between what gets taught in seminaries and divinity colleges, and what gets preached from the pulpit each Sunday. The clerics standing up there telling their congregations to embrace the dogma, were fully aware of how shaky the foundation of the dogma actually was.
For whatever reasons, I had never thought of this before, I had assumed that the preachers believed what they were preaching and that if they knew better, they wouldn't be preaching such easily discredited assertions. So, I launched my own informal investigation, quizzing priests and ministers when I encountered them, and asking if what the Brits claimed was true.
Without a single exception, all said that yes it was, that they were very familiar with the latest scholarship, knew all about Q, about the chronology of producing the gospels, about the internal Christian wars to determine whose interpretation of Jesus would prevail, about the internal conflicts within the New Testament...everything. I would then ask, given that, why do they continue to promote the gospels as sacrosanct? The answers typically centered on "higher purpose" or "spiritual truth", noble sounding justifications for what at bottom were....lies.
It's obvious the bible has become a comforting "blankie" for those with frail faith.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jimmiej
You're really good at criticism.
Speaking from personal experience, he is correct. Once I became aware that everything I'd been taught to believe about the bible was not true, my faith in God crumbled. And that happened precisely because I'd been taught that without faith in an infallible bible, faith in God was impossible. The conservative Christianity I was raised in absolutely ensured that the bible was my blankie, -- something tangible to hold onto, something small and comforting that takes the place of a God that is indefinable and can't be put in a box (or contained in the pages of a book) -- and instilled in me the fear of ever seeking to know God without it.
My side? 2000 years of verifiable evidence. I am good with that.
You've had 2000 years -- show me one. God said "Let there be light" and, sure enough, there is light, so that is verifiable evidence that there is a God and he crated man in his image and his only son is Jesus who was sent to save us from sin and He blesses America? Please. Your kind of "thinkers" refuse to accept verifiable evidence of Darwinian selection and Global warming and Socialized health care and Biological homosexuality, but the fact that there is light is "verifiable evidence" that the universe was created not just by God, but YOUR God, who listens to and answers YOUR prayers. And that YOU, in your living room, are capable of evaluating the "verifiability" of evidence, and judging what is verified and what is not??
True scholarship simply investigates and lets the facts lead the investigation. It does not care WHAT the end result is, only that it be consistent with the facts. This is anathema to theologians.
When it comes to Biblical scholarship I tend to think that even without according automatic respect to theological traditions, it often obeys unspoken taboos. For example, while most scholars do not see the evidence pointing to a "biblical", miracle-working, son-of-god Jesus, many are still jumping through rings of fire and eating little pieces of glass to "prove" that there was at least a distinct, historical Jesus who was not a composite character or a complete fiction or an uninteresting shadow of the Jesus legend. This gores too many oxes, it would seem. I also find the notion of the "Q" manuscript to be a speculative reach upon which far too many conclusions in the field of Biblical scholarship rest. It is treated more like a theory than a hypothesis.
You definitely have a point, but I think the issue of "taboo" subjects has slowly fallen by the wayside.
The fear of losing tenure
Of course, there is a problem for some scholars who work for certain Universities and Seminaries in which they must be acutely aware of their constituents and where the money comes from, so to speak. Most simply engage in the scholarship and try to avoid making theological conclusions that would clash with the values of their university, etc., which is not their business anyways. A recent example of a scholar falling afoul of the powers-that-be is the sad case of Christopher Rollston, a well-respected scholar of ancient epigraphy. He was professor of Old Testament and Semitic Studies at Emmanuel Christian Seminary until he published an op-ed piece at the Huffington Post concerning the marginalization of women in the Bible. It can be found here: Christopher Rollston: The Marginalization of Women: A Biblical Value We Don't Like to Talk About. Complaints rolled in from one of the more conservative professors concerning the post and the blog he maintains on ancient epigraphy, and how it was felt that his scholarly work was not meeting the core-values of the school and was alienating possible donors. He lost his tenure and was basically forced to resign. This was big news for a while, as it brought into the light the problem of tenure being stripped from a professor by a college that claimed to abide by the rules of tenure. In the end, they fell back on the "core values" of the college, and the financial problems that Rollston's work was supposedly exacerbating. See further below in my reply to Grandstander concerning the same problem affecting the ministry.
The Historical Jesus
As for scholars and the historicity of Jesus (I may not be understanding you correctly, but I am speaking of a historical Jesus that was a mere mortal, and not a Christ) - if any of them has appeared to go out of their way to defend the historicity of Jesus the man, which has nothing to do with the Church's view of Jesus the Christ, then his has been because of a recent trend in which the historicity of Jesus the man has been needlessly brought into question by people who, quite frankly, have an agenda and an axe to grind. If we were to follow the advice of these doubters, then we would have to throw out many historical figures who nobody would ever have any reason to doubt the existence of, because there are no religious institutions today who worship Homer, for example. If Greek Religion was the dominant religion of the day, these same people would be calling into question the existence of Homer, or Hesiod - or any other number of ancient Greek poets.
I have always felt that the existence of Jesus the man should not in any way pose a threat to non-believers and those wishing to discredit Christianity. It is enough to say that Jesus was merely a man around whom legends grew which eventually came to view him as the Messiah, the Christ. There is no need to go further and try to disprove Jesus the man ever existed. There's no point, and it betrays itself for what it is: a very aggressive attempt to just nip the bud where it began, not realizing that it only creates problems for the very cause it is laboring for, when an easier solution has already been presented: that a man lived, not a divine Messiah.
Now if you were speaking of scholars trying to prove that Jesus the Christ existed, I do not find this very common in Biblical Scholarship except on the fringes of what passes for conservative "scholarship".
Q and other oral and literary sources of the sayings of Jesus
I do not have a lot of experience with Q scholarship, but what I have read has been compelling to some degree. There may not have been a collection of "sayings" exactly as described, but the Gospel writers got their sources from somewhere. Mark had his sources, Matthew and Luke had Mark as a source as well as sources that neither Matthew nor Luke shared in common - and these came from somewhere, whether it was oral tradition or collected sayings of Jesus. There is just too much linguistic evidence to NOT postulate some sort of Q. That isn't to say that there were not other collections of sayings, either.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Grandstander
I've read a number of the works you reference and your description above does not square with what I found. John Dominic Crossan, Burton Mack, A.N. Wilson, Reja Aslan, Bart Ehrman...I do not recall a single paragraph when I thought any of the above were "jumping through rings of fire" trying to prove something.
These were all very scholarly, very intelligent authors whose goal certainly seemed to me to be to produce the best guess based on the best evidence.
These are very good popular authors at this point, though I personally would stay away from Reja Aslan - he has too much of an axe to grind, I think, and many of his conclusions are very untenable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Grandstander
For whatever reasons, I had never thought of this before, I had assumed that the preachers believed what they were preaching and that if they knew better, they wouldn't be preaching such easily discredited assertions. So, I launched my own informal investigation, quizzing priests and ministers when I encountered them, and asking if what the Brits claimed was true.
Without a single exception, all said that yes it was, that they were very familiar with the latest scholarship, knew all about Q, about the chronology of producing the gospels, about the internal Christian wars to determine whose interpretation of Jesus would prevail, about the internal conflicts within the New Testament...everything. I would then ask, given that, why do they continue to promote the gospels as sacrosanct? The answers typically centered on "higher purpose" or "spiritual truth", noble sounding justifications for what at bottom were....lies.
Many of these individuals have learned that outside of Adult Sunday School classes (which have become increasingly more popular and willing to tackle scholarly subjects that they must wrestle with), their employment within the Church depends on how well they minister. Many of them find it impossible to mix ministry and scholarship and keep a flock, so they unfortunately bow to ministry. N. T. Wright, a writer on the New Testament and a well-known Christian thinker, gave a recent interview on how most people are wary to accept anything about the Bible that they didn't learn in Sunday School, and that they confuse what the Bible actually teaches with a mixture of what the Bible teaches and how hundreds of years of Western Christian Tradition has reinterpreted the Bible and added Augustinian and Pauline theology to the mix.
From his interview:
The book emerged from many different situations over a period of a few years. I didn’t set out to ruffle feathers, but to try to bring some biblical clarity to areas in which many Christians today, in the UK as well as the USA, are genuinely confused. So much of what people take to be “Christianity” is in fact an odd combination of things that really are in the Bible with things that are part of western culture from the last two or three hundred years. Figuring out which is which and how it all works is bound to be puzzling to some people if they’ve been firmly taught something else.
A lifetime of working in some very different churches has taught me that people come with all kinds of odd ideas and that a little clear biblical teaching goes a long way, and also that sometimes people resist it nervously because “it’s not what they said in Sunday School.” I’m all for Sunday schools, but there is a time for people to grow up and see things differently.
(N.T. Wright on the Bible and why he won't call himself an inerrantist | On Faith & Culture)
So again, that fine line that ministers must walk, and occasionally, even scholars in prominent Seminaries (but not so much in Universities).
Speaking from personal experience, he is correct. Once I became aware that everything I'd been taught to believe about the bible was not true, my faith in God crumbled. And that happened precisely because I'd been taught that without faith in an infallible bible, faith in God was impossible. The conservative Christianity I was raised in absolutely ensured that the bible was my blankie, -- something tangible to hold onto, something small and comforting that takes the place of a God that is indefinable and can't be put in a box (or contained in the pages of a book) -- and instilled in me the fear of ever seeking to know God without it.
You completely missed the point! Trusting the Bible as God's Holy Word does not make me childish, as Trout implies.
I have always felt that the existence of Jesus the man should not in any way pose a threat to non-believers and those wishing to discredit Christianity. It is enough to say that Jesus was merely a man around whom legends grew which eventually came to view him as the Messiah, the Christ. There is no need to go further and try to disprove Jesus the man ever existed. There's no point, and it betrays itself for what it is: a very aggressive attempt to just nip the bud where it began, not realizing that it only creates problems for the very cause it is laboring for, when an easier solution has already been presented: that a man lived, not a divine Messiah.
So the fact that there is no concrete evidence that there actually was "Jesus the man" should be overlooked?
Sure, there is a possibility that there was a "Jesus the man" or even the possibility that there was a "Jesus the men".
Heck, who knows? Maybe the Jesus son of God/born of a virgin/non sinning/Zombie/flying Jesus is accurate.
Point being, I certainly think it is important that we continue have scholarly work concerning the historicity of Jesus considering the impact that this personality has had on history and culture.
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