Credo Courses offers a number of resources on theological and apologetical issues. They have a short course entitled "The Historical Jesus" by Rob Bowman. For details of the series see HERE.
Apart from buying the course (which looks like it would be very worthwhile to do!) there are two resources listed along with the course that can be downloaded for free.
1. The course syllabus can be downloaded HERE. What is especially helpful is the extensive bibliographies listed for each section of the course. A number of the items have the web address for access online. So even if you don't get the course this resource has a number of good links to follow for research on the various issues covered in the class.
2. Dr. Bowman's notes for the class can be downloaded HERE. These notes contain a number of helpful charts and outlines covering such things as the synoptic problem, other ancient Christian and non-Christian writings, defenses of the miracles in the Gospels, the resurrection of Jesus, and much more.
Showing posts with label Gospels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gospels. Show all posts
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Jesus Seminar: Some Notes
The hey-day of the "Jesus Seminar" was from the mid-1980's to the early 1990's. In my Apologetics and Worldview class I lectured on the Jesus Seminar. The students had to read Craig Blomberg's essay critically interacting with the Jesus Seminar: The Seventy-four "Scholars": Who Does the Jesus Seminar Really Speak For? Even though the Jesus Seminar is not the head-line grabbing entity it once was Blomberg's essay is worth reading in that he mentions a number of assumptions used by much of non-evangelical scholarship that should be challenged. One of these concerns the fluidity of the oral history between the time of Jesus and the first written Gospels. I explained this in class today and mentioned the work of Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition which looks at this issue.
Below are the notes I handed out in class today. It's not a full analysis but a few introductory thoughts.
____________________________________________
Jesus Seminar: Critical Interaction
1.
Oral Tradition/History: approximately from AD
30-50/70
2.
Competing views: fluid vs. stable oral tradition
a.
Jesus Seminar = fluid oral tradition
b.
Jesus Seminar criteria for oral tradition:[1]
i. O1:
In the oral transmission of Jesus’ words,
his disciples remembered only the core or gist of his sayings and parables, not
his precise words.
ii. O2:
The bedrock of the sayings tradition is
made up of single aphorisms and parables that once circulated independently.
iii. O3:
The simpler forms of sayings and parables
are more likely to be original with Jesus.
iv. O4:
Hard sayings are frequently softened in
the process of transmission to adapt them to the conditions of daily living.
v. O5:
Words are frequently borrowed from the
fund of common lore or from the Old Testament and put on the lips of Jesus.
c.
Another list of criteria mentioned by Paul
Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd:[2]
i. The
assumption of a purely oral period
ii. The
assumed lack of a coherent narrative
iii. The
assumed lack of biographical interest
iv. Limited
role of eyewitnesses
v. Assumed
“laws” of oral and written traditions
vi. “Prophetic
inspiration” and Jesus Sayings
3.
Some examples
a.
Mark 6.35-44
i. “…all
the words attributed to Jesus are context-bound (N2) and so cannot be used to
determine what Jesus said.”[3]
ii. N2:
Quoted speech that is entirely
context-bound is probably the product of the storyteller.[4]
b.
Mark 8.31-33
i. “Since
these predictions mirror the ‘proclamation’ (Greek: kerygma) of the primitive church and accord with Mark’s conception
of his narrative (W4, W8a), most scholars regard all three as composed by Mark
after the events to which they refer (W10).”[5]
ii. W4:
The evangelists frequently compose or
revise and edit both sayings and narrative contexts to make them conform to
their own individual language, style, or viewpoint, or to make saying and
context conform to each other.[6]
iii. W8a:
Sayings and parables expressed in
“Christian “ language are the creation of the evangelists or the oral tradition
before them.[7]
iv. W10:
Sayings and narratives that reflect
knowledge of events that took place after Jesus’ death are the creation of the
evangelists or the oral tradition before them.[8]
4.
Challenging the Jesus Seminar
a.
“Though the authors regularly refer to oral
cultures, the only actual examples they give come from a very non-oral culture,
that of their own modern Western world.”[9]
b.
“The theory that sayings, aphorisms, memorable
oneliners, and sometimes parables are the things that survive, whereas stories about Jesus, with his words embedded
within them, do not, is clearly promulgated with one eye on the results. ‘It is highly probable,’ we are
told—this, recall, at the introductory level, before we have examined a single
saying!—that the earliest layer of the gospel tradition was made up almost
entirely of single aphorisms and parables that circulated by word of mouth,
without narrative context—precisely as that tradition is recorded in ‘Q’ and
Thomas.
“With the evidence thus well and
truly cooked in advance, it is not surprising that the portrait of Jesus-the-quizzical-sage
‘emerges’ from the subsequent discussion.
It could not help doing so.
The theory about what sort of material survives in oral tradition, I
suggest, was designed to produce exactly this result.
“Against this whole line of
thought we must set the serious study of genuinely oral traditions that has
gone on in various quarters.
Communities that live in an oral culture tend to be storytelling communities.
They sit around in long evenings telling and listening to stories—the
same stories, over and over again.
Such stories, especially when they are involved with memorable
happenings that have determined in some way the existence and life of the
particular group in question, acquire a fairly fixed form, down to precise
phraseology (in narrative as well as in recorded speech), extremely early in
their life—often within a day or so of the original incident taking place. They retain that form, and phraseology,
as long as they are told. Each
village and community has its recognized storytellers, the accredited bearers
of its traditions; but the whole community knows the stories by heart, and if
the teller varies even the slightly they will let him know in no uncertain
terms. This matters quite a lot in
cultures where, to this day, the desire to avoid ‘shame’ is a powerful
motivation.”[10]
c.
“Early form critics such as Bultmann took it for
granted that folk traditions consisted almost exclusively of short
vignettes. How could longer
narratives, to say nothing of epics, be remembered and transmitted intact
orally? While this view is still
prevalent today among many in New Testament circles, a significant number of
folklorists, anthropologists, and ethnographers over the last several decades
have justifiably abandoned it. The
reason for this reversal is that empirical evidence has shown it to be
demonstrably wrong. A large number
of fieldwork studies have ‘brought to light numerous long oral epics in the
living traditions of Central Asia, India, Africa, and Oceania, for
example.’ Hence, as the famed
Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko recently noted: ‘The existence of genuine long
oral epics can no longer be denied.’
In fact, amazingly, scholars have documented oral narratives whose
performance lasted up to twenty-five hours carried out over several days.”[11]
d.
“If the oral period of the early church
functioned similar to the way we now know oral communities tend to operate, we
should expect that those individuals who were closest to Jesus during his
ministry would have played a significant role in the transmission of oral
material about Jesus. This does
not in any way deny that the material was, to some extent, shaped by the needs
of the early faith communities, for as we have seen oral tradents always shape
their performances according to the particular situation of the audience. But it does at the very least mean that
we would expect to see this material being transmitted by, among other ‘strong
tradition bearers,’ eyewitnesses from among the original followers of
Jesus. And this makes it much more
difficult to suppose that the oral Jesus tradition acquired a significant
amount of fictionalized material in the process of transmission during the
several decades prior to the writing of the Gospels.”[12]
e.
“The Jesus constructed by the Jesus Seminar is a
talking head whose teachings bear no intelligible relation to his death on a
cross. If Jesus said only the
sorts of things judged authentic by the Seminar, it is very difficult to see
how he could have been mistaken by Jewish and Roman authorities as a messianic
pretender who needed to be executed.”[13]
Thursday, May 8, 2014
Matthew 8.5-13 and Luke 7.1-10: Possible Resolutions to Tensions
I wrote the following for my high school systematic theology class when discussing the topic of inerrancy. The whole discussion is pulled from Vern Poythress' book Inerrancy and the Gospels: A God-Centered Approach to the Challenges of Harmonization (Westchester: Crossway, 2012), 17-24.
Matthew 8.5-13 and
Luke 7.1-10: Possible Resolutions to Tensions[1]
|
Matthew 8.5-13
(ESV)
|
Luke 7.1-10 (ESV)
|
|
5 When he had entered Capernaum,
a centurion
came forward to him, appealing
to him, 6 “Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering
terribly.”
7 And he said to him, “I will come and heal
him.”
8 But the centurion replied, “Lord,
I am
not worthy to have you come
under
my roof,
but
only say the word, and
my
servant will be healed.
9 For I too am a man under authority,
with
soldiers under me. And I say to one,
‘Go,’
and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’
and he
comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’
and he
does it.”
10 When Jesus heard this,
he
marveled and
said
to those who followed him,
“Truly,
I tell you, with
no one
in Israel have I found such faith.
11 I tell you, many will come from east
and
west and recline at table with Abraham,
Isaac,
and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven,
12 while the sons of the kingdom
will
be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and
gnashing of teeth.” 13 And to the centurion Jesus said, “Go; let it be done for you
as you have believed.”
And the servant was healed at
that very moment.
|
1 After he had finished all his sayings in the
hearing
of the people,
he
entered Capernaum.
2 Now a centurion had
a
servant who was sick
and at
the point of death,
who
was highly valued by him.
3 When the centurion heard about Jesus,
he sent
to him elders of the Jews, asking
him to come and heal his servant. 4 And
when
they came to Jesus, they pleaded
with
him earnestly, saying, “He is worthy to
have
you do this for him, 5 for he loves our
nation,
and he is the one who built us our synagogue.”
6 And Jesus went with them. When he was
not
far from the house, the centurion sent
friends,
saying to him, “Lord,
do not trouble yourself, for
I am not worthy to have you
come
under my roof.
7 Therefore I did not presume to come to
you.
But say the word, and
let my servant be healed.
8 For I too am a man set under authority,
with soldiers under me: and I
say to one,
‘Go,’ and he goes; and to
another, ‘Come,’
and he comes; and to my
servant, ‘Do this,’
and he does it.”
9 When Jesus heard these things,
he marveled at him, and turning
to the
crowd that followed him, said,
“I tell you,
not even in Israel have I found
such faith.”
10 And when those who had been sent returned to the house, they
found the servant well.
|
Issue
·
Matthew: no mention of intermediaries (i.e., “elders of the Jews” and “friends”)
·
Luke: no mention that centurion met Jesus face to face; intermediaries
Possible Responses
1.
Possibility of multiple events: are these two
different events being narrated?
In any case that deals with parallel passages we have to ask
whether they recount the same incident or two different incidents. In this case
there are many similarities between the two accounts. The centurion’s speech
given in Matthew 8:9 is almost identical to Luke 7:8. We can safely conclude
that we are dealing with two accounts of one event. So there is a genuine
difficulty.[2]
2. Several
stages of events
a.
Postulate stages in the encounter between Jesus
and the centurion
i. Centurion
first sent elders of the Jews (Luke 7.3-5)
ii. Then
centurion sent friends (Luke 7.6-8)
iii. Then
centurion came in person and repeated some of what had been said earlier
(Matthew 8.5-9)
b.
Norval Geldenhuys’ view
When we bear in mind the parallel account in Matthew viii. 5–13,
we must picture to ourselves that after the centurion had sent his friends to
Jesus he also went to Him himself. Owing to the seriousness of the
circumstances and his inner urge to go to Jesus himself, notwithstanding his
feeling of unwor- thiness, he overcame his initial hesitation. Luke emphasises
the fact that the centurion sent friends, while Matthew only states that the
centurion went to Jesus. And so the two Gospels supplement each other.[3]
c. Minor
difficulties
i. Centurion
states explicitly that he is unworthy (Luke 7.6) and that is why he has sent
others (Luke 7.7). Yet, he then
changes his mind comes for a face to face to meeting with Jesus.
But Geldenhuys supplies possible motivations by reminding us of
the “seriousness of the circumstances,” by postulating an “inner urge” to come
to Jesus, and by labeling his original attitude “initial hesitation” rather
than a firm resolve not to come because of his unworthiness. Is all this
possible? It is. Human motivations and decision making are complex and often
include some wavering or change of mind.[4]
ii. Repetiton: Luke 7.6-8 friends give speech then, according to this theory, centurion says
the same thing again (Matthew 8.8-9)
In Geldenhuys’s picture of the event,
the centurion repeated in person what he had said to his friends earlier. We
may ask why the centurion thought he had to repeat his speech, since his friends had
already delivered it. But human motivations are complex. Particularly in a situation of distress, such as
the emotional turmoil the centurion experienced, he might in spite of himself
repeat what he knew had already been said.[5]
3.
Representatives acting on behalf of the
centurion
a.
Augustine, Calvin, and R. T. France all offer this
view
His [Matthew’s] omission of the means
of the centurion’s approach to Jesus is a valid literary device to highlight
the message of the incident as he sees it (on the principle, common in biblical and contemporary literature,
that a messenger or servant
represents the one who sent him to the point of virtual identity). R. T. France[6]
b.
Craig Blomberg points out that Matthew 27.26 and
Mark 15.15 also illustrate this principle. “Both verses report that Pilate scourged Jesus; but given
the social and military protocol of the Roman world, Pilate would not have
taken up the scourge in his own hands.
The verses mean that Roman soldiers would have physically handled the
scourge, acting on Pilate’s orders.”[7]
What We Learn from
the Differences in the Narratives
1.
Plausible harmonizations are not inspired; the texts with the
differences are inspired!
a.
The differences of nuance and detail have
something to teach us
b.
Beware of “flattening out” the text into a
harmony
2.
Matthew stresses the centurion’s Gentile status
a.
Matthew 8.11-12
b.
Theme in Matthew’s gospel
Matthew shows repeated concern for the unique role of the Jews
and the issue of Jewish rejection of Jesus. Matthew alone has the expression
“sons of the kingdom”: “the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer
dark ness” (Matt. 8:12). These “sons of the kingdom” are Jews who are resisting
his ministry. They have the
privilege of having a certain nearness to “the kingdom,” that is the kingdom of God, and yet,
tragically, they “will be thrown into the outer darkness.”Matthew alone includes
the pointed threat, “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken
away from you and given to a people producing its fruits” (Matt. 21:43).
Matthew, more than the other Gospels, emphasizes the Jewishness of Jesus (Matt.
1:1–17). Twice Jesus emphasizes his ministry “to the lost sheep of the house of
Israel” (Matt. 10:6; 15:24). But Jews who presume on their heritage are in
danger of being left out.
This theme is important to Matthew. It comes out pointedly in
our first pas- sage, Matthew 8:5–13, because Jesus commends the centurion for
his faith and contrasts this commendation with the failure in Israel: “Truly, I
tell you, with no one
in Israel have I found such faith” (Matt. 8:10). The centurion was a Roman
soldier, not a Jew. His Gentile character comes more starkly to the foreground
in that Matthew does not mention “elders of the Jews” as intermediaries.[8]
3. Luke
stresses the humility of centurion
The
Gospel of Luke has humility as a theme. “He [the Lord] has brought down the
mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate” (Luke 1:52). “For
everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself
will be exalted” (Luke 18:14; see 14:11). Luke devotes attention to social
outcasts and marginalized people: women, the poor, the sick, tax collectors,
Gentiles (Luke 4:18; 7:21–23). Luke 7:1–10, by explicitly including the role of the
intermediaries and by including the contrast between “worthy” (7:4) and “not worthy”
(7:6), has highlighted the theme of humility and of Jesus’s mercy to the
“unworthy.”[9]
4.
Conclusion
In
sum, Matthew and Luke have distinctive emphases; Matthew emphasizes the
centurion’s Gentile status, and Luke emphasizes his humility. Both of these
emphases say something significant about the kingdom of God and Jesus’s
ministry. First, the kingdom of God will include Gentiles and all who come to
Jesus in faith. Jews who do not trust in Jesus are excluded. Second, those who
enter the kingdom must come in humility, recognizing that they do not deserve
the benefits that God offers.[10]
[1] I am
dependent upon Vern Poythress, Inerrancy
and the Gospels: A God-Centered Approach to the Challenges of Harmonization
(Westchester: Crossway, 2012), 17-24.
Online: http://www.frame-poythress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/PoythressVernInerrancyAndTheGospels.pdf.
[2] Vern
Poythress, Inerrancy and the Gospels,
18.
[3] Quoted in
Vern Poythress, Inerrancy and the Gospels,
19.
[4] Vern
Poythress, Inerrancy and the Gospels,
19.
[5] Vern
Poythress, Inerrancy and the Gospels,
20.
[6] Quoted in
Vern Poythress, Inerrancy and the Gospels,
21.
[7] Vern
Poythress, Inerrancy and the Gospels,
21.
[8] Vern
Poythress, Inerrancy and the Gospels,
23.
[9] Vern
Poythress, Inerrancy and the Gospels,
24.
[10] Vern
Poythress, Inerrancy and the Gospels,
24.
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