Freethought & Rationalism Archive

James Still · 08-01-2001, 02:18 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by JohnV:
<STRONG>1) How is this a problem? Read the OT: Israel rebels, a remnant is saved, Israel rebels again. There's no need to invent an explanation. The believers would see themselves as the faithful remnant.
2) Preachers who are ignored by nearly everyone generally don't get executed.</STRONG>

(1) You may not feel that there was a need to invent an explanation but Mark certainly did (so your argument is with him and not me).

(2) At that time if a Palestinian subject claimed to be the king of Israel, then he was found guilty of sedition against Rome. It didn't matter whether he was a popular guy or a marginal figure like Jesus.

John do you intend to say what Isaiah 6 has to do with the miracle reports of Jesus? Ordinarily I wouldn't ask twice but you went to a lot of trouble to say that we were all switching the subject.

JohnV · 08-01-2001, 02:22 PM

Quote:

Apikorus: John, you should try addressing my points.

Apikorus, go back to your first post and tell me what you see. Here's what I see:
1) An appeal to authority, which pointed out that only Christian scholars believe that Jesus is alluded to in the OT. I addressed this.
2) An almah rehash. I did not respond to this because I didn't see the connection, and it easily become a 3 thread issue itself.
3) An LXX rehash. No response for the reasons in 2 above.

This seems fair to me. If you have brought up even more issues in later posts, then you're taking a "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks" approach, and I don't respond to those.

What's your view of your first post?

James Still · 08-01-2001, 02:29 PM

Quote:

James, you are misusing the term "pseudepigraphal". The gospels are anonymous works, not pseudepigraphal works.

When I use the term "pseudepigraphia" I mean authorship by an anonymous person which is then attributed to a famous biblical character for purposes of lending authority to the text. I certainly agree that the gospels were anonymous up until the second century.

James Still · 08-01-2001, 02:37 PM

For those interested in my remark that the Markan Jesus is clandestine, just enter "messianic secret" into any search engine. It is a subject which has been widely commented upon since the German scholar William Wrede first wrote about it. Here is a good neutral summary from L. Michael White,
Professor of Classics and Director of the Religious Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin, spotted at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...ory/mark.html:

Quote:

For Mark, Jesus is a somewhat enigmatic figure and that's very important to his way of telling the story. Jesus is mysterious. Jesus intentionally keeps people from understanding who he really is, at times. At times, Jesus actually silences the demons who would announce his true identity. When he performs a miracle, he tells people, don't say anything to anyone about what I have done. He even takes the disciples away, off into a corner, and teaches them privately so that others won't hear and understand the message. He seems to be a very secretive kind of figure in Mark's gospel.

Now, why does Mark tell the story this way? It seems to be the case that he uses this motif of secrecy and misunderstanding as a way of reconceptualizing the image of Jesus. There's something about the the previous understandings of Jesus, even within the Christian community, that Mark feels compelled now to correct and to give a new meaning for, and it probably has something to do with the post-war experience. Why had it all happened? What had gone wrong? Why was Jerusalem destroyed? Mark tells the story in such a way to make sense out of that, in the light of the death of Jesus.

Bill Snedden · 08-01-2001, 02:38 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by JohnV:
<STRONG>What's your view of your first post?</STRONG>

I think the point to which he was alluding was the one you listed as #1: "An appeal to authority, which pointed out that only Christian scholars believe that Jesus is alluded to in the OT. I addressed this."

Actually, his point was not an appeal to authority, as such, and your response did not adequately address it.

Apikorus' point was that the acceptance of the "Jesus in the OT" hypothesis was more likely to be an indication of confessional status rather than of scholarship due to the fact that those who accept it are all Christians while those who reject it are both Christian and non-Christian alike.

In other words all non-Christian scholars and some Christian scholars reject the hypothesis while only Christian scholars accept it. Therefore, while it cannot be an indication of "confessional status" to reject the hypothesis (as it is rejected by both Christians and non-Christians), it certainly could be an indication of "confessional status" to accept it.

I now return you to your previously scheduled flame war.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

Apikorus · 08-01-2001, 02:54 PM

No, John, I must disagree. First of all, you are confusing what you describe as "appeal to authority". The authorities I quoted (Blenkinsopp and Brueggemann) are Christian scholars who insist that Jesus is wholly absent from the Hebrew Bible, and that Christians retroject Jesus therein imaginatively, with no regard for the plain sense of the text. This point you did not address at all.

I then remarked how there are no non-Christian scholars who find any reference to Jesus at all in the Hebrew Bible. You protested that surely anyone who read the Hebrew Bible as prophetic of Jesus would be a Christian, but as I pointed out that view is a product of your own confessional stance amd that there could be many intermediate levels of belief in a prophesied Jesus which might not automatically lead one to the Christian faith (e.g. you could believe that both Jesus and Mohammed are prophesied).

I then proceeded to discuss a detailed example of how a Christological reading is inconsistent with the text of Isaiah. You incorrectly accuse me of an "almah rehash" when I specifically pointed out that the linguistic problems are in fact minor when compared with those presented by the following verses. (Incidentally, quite aware as I was that the almah/bethulah issue has been discussed to death, I adduced additional material - the rabbinic recensions - which bear on that issue.)

Then I discussed the mechanism by which the early Christian writers associated Jesus with the Hebrew Bible, by constructing their miracle stories of Jesus to parallel those in the Elijah and Elisha cycles in Kings. I don't know what you mean by an "LXX rehash" - perhaps you could elaborate? The main point here was that the gospel authors' hagiographies of Jesus reworked material from the Hebrew Bible (in its LXX form). I suspect you think I was attempting to denigrate the LXX in some way, but that is not the case. (Indeed in many instances I believe the LXX offers a superior reading to that in the Masoretic Text. But, alas, Isaiah is generally regarded to be one of the worst translated of all the books of the LXX.)

My second post discussed how the Christian approach to allegorizing the Hebrew Bible so as to retroject Jesus therein can easily be turned on its head, with some rather uncomfortable results for evangelicals.

This all seems rather plain and coherent to me. To reiterate:

(i) Modern bible scholars of every religion, save for evangelical Christians, overwhelmingly agree that Jesus is mentioned nowhere in the Hebrew Bible.

(ii) Attempts to retroject Jesus into the Hebrew Bible are fraught with difficulties, as my example of Isa 7:14 showed.

(iii) The gospel authors, who knew the LXX as their holy scriptures, borrowed material from it in constructing their hagiographies of Jesus, as examination of the original Greek texts suggests. It is therefore little surprise that credulous readers of the New Testament should find "remarkable" resonance with certain stories they've read in their "Old Testament".

(iv) The Christological hermeneutic allegorizes material in the Hebrew Bible so as to retroject Jesus therein. This approach can be applied equally persuasively to prove that Jesus was a misguided, false prophet and an enemy of YHWH.

You haven't offered anything substantive in response.

James, sorry if I was being a nit-picker. There's a difference, though, between an anonymous work and a pseudonymous work. The gospels are more properly classified as the former. Mark's gospel does not know of Mark (John Mark, presumably) as a "famous biblical character" as it predates all the other gospel writings and Acts!

[ August 01, 2001: Message edited by: Apikorus ]

JohnV · 08-01-2001, 02:57 PM

Quote:

John do you intend to say what Isaiah 6 has to do with the miracle reports of Jesus? Ordinarily I wouldn't ask twice but you went to a lot of trouble to say that we were all switching the subject.

Sorry, but as you can see I've been kinda busy. Verse 13 takes the passage beyond the immediate. Also, as I've said before, it fits the general pattern of unbelief in which a remnant is saved.

JohnV · 08-01-2001, 03:13 PM

Re: Apikorus

Quote:

First of all, you are confusing what you describe as "appeal to authority". The authorities I quoted...

It's an appeal to authority, no more, no less.

Quote:

I pointed out that view is a product of your own confessional stance...

And I pointed out that your view is a product of your own belief.

Quote:

amd that there could be many intermediate levels of belief in a prophesied Jesus which might not automatically lead one to the Christian faith (e.g. you could believe that both Jesus and Mohammed are prophesied).

You interpret the lack of intermediate belief to indicate that the evidence is weak. I interpret it to indicate that the evidence is so strong that it forces people to choose one side or another.

Quote:

You incorrectly accuse me of an "almah rehash"...

Quote:

Christological readings of Isaiah may be useful and even compelling, but they cannot be true to the plain sense of the text, which was of course written centuries before Jesus was born. The prophetic authors of the Hebrew Bible were concerned with their own times and with the imminent future.

As an example of the abject weakness of the Christological reading of Isaiah, consider the famous alleged reference to the virgin birth in Isa 7:14. Now of course it is well known that the Hebrew term "almah" most likely means "young woman" rather than "virgin" (which is Heb. "bethulah"), and that the Septuagint likely mistranslated "almah" as "parthenos" (Greek for "virgin"). As an aside, the early rabbinic recensions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, which sought to revise the LXX so as to bring it in line with the proto-masoretic text, correct "parthenos" to "neanis" (young woman).

But the linguistic issue here is hardly the only problem with the passage. First of all, it is clear that the context here is the Syro-Ephraimite war and that the birth of the child Immanuel would serve as a sign to Ahaz that the immediate crisis and conflict with Rezin and Pekah would abate.

Furthermore, Christian exegetes must be rather uncomfortable when they read the following verses Isa 7:15-16, which state clearly that for a time the child Immanuel would not know good from evil. (I.e. he would be as morally naive as any other human child.) Of course the New Testament tells us virtually nothing about Jesus' childhood, but the notion that Jesus would ever have not distinguished good and evil is enough to make any evangelical cringe, which perhaps is why they never seem to quote these continuing verses.

Almah rehash, with the exception of the bolded part, which is a blatant assumption that I'm surprised I missed the first time.

Quote:

My second post discussed how the Christian approach to allegorizing the Hebrew Bible so as to retroject Jesus therein can easily be turned on its head, with some rather uncomfortable results for evangelicals.

Throwing more stuff against the wall. Don't have time now, maybe another day!

Apikorus · 08-01-2001, 03:19 PM

John V, I suspect we'll never come to any agreement. I'm content to let the others here judge the relative strength of our arguments.

James Still · 08-01-2001, 03:26 PM

Quote:

If it is post-Easter and written way after the fact (I have some claim up to 120 CE), why didn't they get this sorted out? Of what benefit would it have been to pull quotes from the Septuigant if the Jews were total non-believers in who Jesus was?

Rich, I think this is an excellent question. I sure don't have an answer and I know that a lot of commentators have struggled with the problem. If, as many have argued, the first gospel (Mark) was written after the fall of Jersusalem why not make a clean break from Judaism? All I can do is offer several observations:

(1) Jewish-Christians were not yet thrown out of the synagogues when Mark wrote so perhaps a clean break was just unthinkable. Certainly, John's gospel was written after the expulsion so he has no difficulty with making that break.

(2) Ancient Christians enjoyed protection from the state so long as their religious beliefs were under the umbrella of Judaism. If they had embraced the pagan elements with which we're familiar today too soon, they might have been crushed before they even got started.

(3) Along the same lines, if they had blamed Rome for crucifying their leader the young movement might have been persecuted as revenge-seeking followers of a seditioner. However, if the Jews were responsible for Jesus' death rather than the Romans then this would serve to divorce the movement from the crime for which Jesus was convicted and executed.

And of course a combination of these considerations (or of others I haven't thought of) may have influenced the young movement as well.

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08-01-2001, 02:54 PM	#36
Apikorus Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Chicago Posts: 1,396	No, John, I must disagree. First of all, you are confusing what you describe as "appeal to authority". The authorities I quoted (Blenkinsopp and Brueggemann) are Christian scholars who insist that Jesus is wholly absent from the Hebrew Bible, and that Christians retroject Jesus therein imaginatively, with no regard for the plain sense of the text. This point you did not address at all. I then remarked how there are no non-Christian scholars who find any reference to Jesus at all in the Hebrew Bible. You protested that surely anyone who read the Hebrew Bible as prophetic of Jesus would be a Christian, but as I pointed out that view is a product of your own confessional stance amd that there could be many intermediate levels of belief in a prophesied Jesus which might not automatically lead one to the Christian faith (e.g. you could believe that both Jesus and Mohammed are prophesied). I then proceeded to discuss a detailed example of how a Christological reading is inconsistent with the text of Isaiah. You incorrectly accuse me of an "almah rehash" when I specifically pointed out that the linguistic problems are in fact minor when compared with those presented by the following verses. (Incidentally, quite aware as I was that the almah/bethulah issue has been discussed to death, I adduced additional material - the rabbinic recensions - which bear on that issue.) Then I discussed the mechanism by which the early Christian writers associated Jesus with the Hebrew Bible, by constructing their miracle stories of Jesus to parallel those in the Elijah and Elisha cycles in Kings. I don't know what you mean by an "LXX rehash" - perhaps you could elaborate? The main point here was that the gospel authors' hagiographies of Jesus reworked material from the Hebrew Bible (in its LXX form). I suspect you think I was attempting to denigrate the LXX in some way, but that is not the case. (Indeed in many instances I believe the LXX offers a superior reading to that in the Masoretic Text. But, alas, Isaiah is generally regarded to be one of the worst translated of all the books of the LXX.) My second post discussed how the Christian approach to allegorizing the Hebrew Bible so as to retroject Jesus therein can easily be turned on its head, with some rather uncomfortable results for evangelicals. This all seems rather plain and coherent to me. To reiterate: (i) Modern bible scholars of every religion, save for evangelical Christians, overwhelmingly agree that Jesus is mentioned nowhere in the Hebrew Bible. (ii) Attempts to retroject Jesus into the Hebrew Bible are fraught with difficulties, as my example of Isa 7:14 showed. (iii) The gospel authors, who knew the LXX as their holy scriptures, borrowed material from it in constructing their hagiographies of Jesus, as examination of the original Greek texts suggests. It is therefore little surprise that credulous readers of the New Testament should find "remarkable" resonance with certain stories they've read in their "Old Testament". (iv) The Christological hermeneutic allegorizes material in the Hebrew Bible so as to retroject Jesus therein. This approach can be applied equally persuasively to prove that Jesus was a misguided, false prophet and an enemy of YHWH. You haven't offered anything substantive in response. James, sorry if I was being a nit-picker. There's a difference, though, between an anonymous work and a pseudonymous work. The gospels are more properly classified as the former. Mark's gospel does not know of Mark (John Mark, presumably) as a "famous biblical character" as it predates all the other gospel writings and Acts! [ August 01, 2001: Message edited by: Apikorus ]

08-01-2001, 03:19 PM	#39
Apikorus Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Chicago Posts: 1,396	John V, I suspect we'll never come to any agreement. I'm content to let the others here judge the relative strength of our arguments.

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