The Secular Frontier

John Kloppenborg is one of the foremost experts on the "Q" source, the material common to Matthew and Luke that does not come from Mark. In this essay he tries to get beyond the notion of Jesus as the great genius to the idea that the gospel writings emerged out of substantial networks that had multiple agents contributing to the work. Kloppenborg gives the example of a Q saying that suggested influence of ancient scribes: As I have argued elsewhere, the measure-for-measure aphorism begins from the fact that seed grain was measured out (metreō) with a grain scoop (metron) and, in order to ensure parity in lending and borrowing, measured back by the same metron of the granary from which it was originally measured.35 Dozens of lease agreements prepared by scribes take the form, “I, NN, have measured out to you, NN, by the grain scoop [metron] of the third granary of Karnis, Karnis, x artabae of grain and you will measure it back to me, on (date) by the same metron of the third granary of Karanis” (o ... Read Article

WHERE WE ARE In my initial post, I analyzed eight definitions of the word "miracle" into seven different elements. I am not satisfied with any of these definitions, so in my previous post I began to evaluate these definitions to make clear the problems I see with them. In this current post, I will continue to evaluate these definitions in relation to these three elements: AGENT/CAUSE – the person(s) or kind of being(s) or kind of thing(s) that brings about a miracle EXCEPTION – the way in which a miracle departs from ordinary or normal circumstances BASELINE – the ordinary or normal circumstances from which a miracle departs In a later post, I will attempt to construct a definition that preserves the insights in the existing definitions but that avoids the various problems that I point out with these definitions. MY ANALYSIS OF EIGHT DEFINITIONS OF THE WORD "MIRACLE" Here is the table that represents my analysis of eight definitions of "miracle": THE AGENT/CAUSE ELEMENT T ... Read Article

The passage I would like to highlight in Whitlock's essay is: Historical Jesus scholarship must value multiple pieces without synthesis. We are not obligated to provide a complete, unified picture of Jesus. Mitzi Smith and Yung Suk Kim in Toward Decentering the New Testament, for example, thoughtfully discuss “The Danger of a Single Story” when they present the diverse gospel stories and their diverse sources.46 Scholarship must avoid a single story about Jesus of Nazareth and instead present a diverse and fragmented Jesus. It's interesting if we draw a comparison between the historical Jesus and the historical Socrates. Certainly, we usually think we have an idea about the gist of what Socrates was like. His label of being a gadfly certainly encourages a portrait of the thinker nobly going around Athens and annoying people with questions. His death was a little murkier. Was he the resolute master ordering Crito to make an offering to Asclepius for the poison/cure (pharmakon) because of the t ... Read Article

This chapter was an occasion for me to reflect on Chartism and unjust death. Crossley notes for the Chartist interpretation of Jesus: Jesus’s death was regularly understood as an example of the unjust end that always awaits the benevolent reformer, though this Jesus did not always passively accept his fate. From our point of view, Jesus didn't deserve to die, like Socrates didn't either. We live in a more enlightened age. But that enlightenment was built on the corpses of those martyrs that opened our eyes to the corruptions of the system. And so, we didn't see the unjust nature of the traditional definition of marriage until we saw it do violence to LGBTQ+ rights. And for Socrates, this was the important point. Socrates' last words to Crito was to make a sacrifice to Asclepius to give thanks for the poison for the curative salve it would be opening people's eyes to the unjust nature of their society. And it worked. The injustice of Socrates' death opened our eyes to what was wrong wi ... Read Article

A couple of passages stood out to me in this essay. Firstly, characterizing Augustine's thoughts on time: In that latter masterwork, time emerged as the great divide between humans—intrinsically time-bound and, thus, caught up in confounding problems of interpretation, be it of experience, of language, or of biblical texts—and the timeless god for whom the restless soul longed (Conf. 1.1.1). I am reminded of the ancient idea that the eternal such as the Platonic forms ought to be attuned to because such a comportment brings about a calm mind (tranquillus animus) The other passage I noted from Fredriksen on Augustine concerned that Jesus did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. She writes: Christ had criticized the Pharisees not because they were too scrupulous, but because they were not scrupulous enough. Jesus, he asserts, never broke a single one of God’s commandments according to Jewish custom, “but he found fault with those around him who did” (Faust. 16.24). As ... Read Article

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleNU4mAJqg&t ... Read Article

Religious dispositions are not so much viewed as one’s subjective set of beliefs for the faithful but rather the way they experience the world, like how the world might appear/present itself to a schizophrenic in a conspiracy saturated way.  The religious details seem woven into the fabric of reality itself for the believer. Young writes: Let’s say you prefer, benefit from, or just feel comfortable with a particular institution (e.g., your mosque, church, or synagogue), set of values (e.g., no sex outside of marriage), social hierarchy (e.g., men in authority over women), or even collection of categories for thinking about your world (e.g., everyone is either a man or a woman). You may then gravitate toward narratives in which these things are not your preferences because you inherited or benefit from them. No, instead they are universal and foundational, part of the fabric of reality from the beginning. For an example of such a narrative, “Men are more naturally leaders because God made men ... Read Article

One of the great underreported sins of New Testament scholarship is the problem that, unless we're told by the writers, there is no way to tell whether specific interpretive units like the lord's supper or the empty tomb have their origins as historical memory, lie, rumors, dreams, visions, hearsay, etc. We know in the case of Paul the Lord's Supper wasn't practiced until after Jesus' death because it has its origin in a vision Paul had, because Paul tells us. There are numerous explanations as to the origin of Mark's empty tomb story (which isn't in Paul), and Galbraith suggests it could have been a vision: Taking indigenous vision ontologies seriously leads us to reevaluate the formal characteristics of Mark 16:1–8 in their entirety. Form-critical analyses of Mark 16:1–8 seldom account for more than a few of its features. Holly Hearon for example offers a minimal structure, describing its form as a typical narrative with a beginning, middle and end. For David Catchpole, the angelus interpres and ... Read Article

WHERE WE ARE In my previous post, I analyzed eight definitions of the word "miracle" into seven different elements. I am not satisfied with any of these definitions, and in this post I will evaluate these definitions to make clear the problems I see with them. In a later post, I will attempt to construct a definition that avoids the various problems that I will point out with these existing definitions. MY ANALYSIS OF EIGHT DEFINITIONS OF THE WORD "MIRACLE" Here is the table that represents my analysis of eight definitions of "miracle": THE IMPACT ELEMENT The first element of definitions of "miracle" that I will examine is that the IMPACT element: IMPACT – the emotional or psychological effect of a miracle Only one out of the above eight definitions includes this element. The definition by the Christian philosophers Kreeft and Tacelli requires that something be "striking" in order for it to be considered a miracle. Although none of the other above definitions include such an elem ... Read Article

There are many different definitions for the word "miracle", and I am not happy with any of them. So, I'm going to examine a number of different definitions, analyze them, and then (in later posts) evaluate them, and try to come up with a definition that does not suffer from the problems that I see with the existing definitions. EIGHT DEFINITIONS OF THE WORD "MIRACLE" Richard Purtill (Christian philosopher): I propose to define a miracle as an event in which God temporarily makes an exception to the natural order of things, to show that God is acting.[1] Peter Kreeft & Ronald Tacelli (Christian philosophers): A miracle is: a striking and religiously significant intervention of God in the system of natural causes.[2] C. Stephen Evans (Christian philosopher): An event brought about by a special act of God.[3] Norman Geisler (Christian philosopher): A miracle is a special act of God that interrupts the natural course of events.[4] Richard Swinburne (Christian p ... Read Article

Some things mythicists point to is the lack of detail about Jesus in Paul, and Mark as allegorical literature. This, though, needs to be qualified in a way that favors historicity, not mythicism. Paul says he resolved to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified (1 Cor 2:2), which suggest Paul knew far more details than he said but omitted them because of apocalyptic urgency. In the same way, the gospels indicate this selective process of choosing details, which while this problematizes the quest for the historical Jesus since much has been omitted, it does lend weight to the idea that the writers did have sources about Jesus and weren't just inventing out of whole cloth. Yes, there was mythmaking like haggadic midrash (and mimesis), but this technique at the time was done to historical figures like the Teacher of Righteousness by the Dead Sea Scrolls writers. Regarding the selectivity of the writing process, Goodacre notes: The reminder about absent data is constantly present in the earli ... Read Article

Keith gives an interesting example of how even if we consider something to be true of Jesus, there is so much that we still don't know. He writes: If I could indict atomistic approaches to the historical Jesus for one thing, it would be that their attempts to recover tradition out of the narrative frameworks of the Gospels treat those frameworks as ahistorical products, theological castles in the sky that appeared as miraculously as the Jesus they portray. Let us take the attribution of the title “Son of God” to Jesus as an example. Later followers of Jesus may have fabricated traditions about Jesus that describe him as the Son of God because they were already convinced that he was the Son of God, in which case their portrayal of the past amounts to a retrojective narrativization of their present theological convictions. But merely observing this dynamic of narrativization does not alleviate the historian from his or her task. This kind of thing happens all the time with narratives of the past, and ... Read Article

Bond stresses the difficulty in trying to distill historical information about Jesus from the gospels. She writes: Thus the many chreiai in the Gospels are not primarily repositories of oral tradition, but fundamentally literary creations, crafted to take their place in a larger biographical work... There is most likely some historical fact at the core of these stories, though extracting it from its present literary context would be next to impossible. Other chreiai may have no historical roots at all. Examples might be the so-called nature miracles, such as the accounts of Jesus feeding the multitude (appearing first in Mark 6:32–44). As the early Christ followers compared Jesus to great figures like Elisha and Moses, it would not have been a great leap to move from a belief in a Jesus who could supply sustenance once again to a story in which he actually did so. We might expect the story to draw on both the account of Elisha in 2 Kgs 4:42–44 and the manna in the wilderness (Exod 16:1–36; Num 11 ... Read Article

One of the interesting things about this essay is some of the anti-Jewish overtones in the gospels may stem from literary need born out of the attempt to present universal saving by Jesus. Reinhartz writes: (1) Although the Four Gospels vary with respect to some of the details, they all portray some level of animosity between Jesus and other Jews, they all assign responsibility to the high priests and other leaders, albeit in different ways and to different degrees, and they all portray the crowds—presumably composed of Jews who, like Jesus, are in Jerusalem for the Passover—as shouting for Barabbas to be released and Jesus to be crucified (Matt 27:21; Mark 15:11; Luke 23:18; John 18:40). Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (pp. 103-104). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition. (2) A shift in perspective would lead us away from a search for facts and toward Jesus’s broader context and the questions of how and why the historical Jesus came to be seen ... Read Article

Blogging my way through the anthology, Moxnes has the first essay. One tidbit I'd like to highlight is how Jesus challenges societal norms. Moxnes writes: Jesus is calling young men to follow him and leave the patriarchal household and their father (Mark 1:16–20). The new household that Jesus establishes is one without a father (10:28–30); the relations between men are expressed with the term “brothers” (3:35). (Halvor Moxnes "Reception History" in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (p. 55). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.) It is interesting to question whether stories of Jesus breaking with tradition reflects historical truth, or whether it is just a revolutionary literary theme Jesus was clothed in? In this case it seems historical because Paul called Jesus the firstborn of many brothers. ... Read Article