spin

Think so? To me, this is:

Why the fuck would you recommend a bunch of apologists for "a balanced and proper view"? Kitchen's an Egyptologist meddling in bs. F.F. Bruce is an old time conservative evangelical. Craig Evans is a seminary boy all the way. Frederick Antony Ravi Kumar Zacharias is a new time evangelist and apologist. Recommending this lot is like advocating that child molesters explain why child molestation is good.

Most of the books thought about by the OP are quite reasonable and would not in themselves lead anyone away from, or towards, god. The NRSV is reasonable as a scholarly biblical translation. Finkelstein is relatively cutting edge archaeology and not anti-biblical. Raymond Brown is a well-reputed catholic scholar whose nt analyses are scholarly. The Jerome Biblical commentary is a reasonable source for background to biblical texts.

A freethinker works on the notion of getting as good information as possible then making a decision, not getting preprocessed information based on the commitments of the writers. It's hard enough to deal with the subconscious commitments of writers with neutral intentions, let alone of writers who want to manipulate you.


spin

DCHindley

Jingo,

You have made a good start. Jerome commentary is also pretty good. I also use the NAB (New American Bible, Published by the Catholic Church) Study Edition. You can start with the beginning and go to the end if you want to. As you do, try to forget everything you think you already know. I'd just skim the text of the OT and Apocrypha first, looking at the footnotes too. Don't try too hard to make sense of it all (you won't).

Now you are ready to look at the Intertestamental literature. Find or buy a copy of the two volume Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by J H Charlesworth, which has translations of all the books called Pseudepigrapha as well as some other very interesting stuff (1 & 2 & 3 Enoch, Jubilees, 2 Baruch, Sibylline Oracles, etc.

THEN you can start skimming the NT in the same way as the OT. Same caveats. Don't start thinking you have seen everything yet.

Now find or buy a translation of the Apostolic Fathers (Barnabas, Mathetes, the letters of Ignatius, 1 & 2 Clement), hopefully a newer edition with footnotes. These are writings that were likely written (or claimed to be written) by early Christians up to around AD 125.

FINALLY, check out the Ante Nicene Christian Fathers, a series of 10 volumes of early Christian literature up to around the beginning of the 4th century AD. It was first published around 1830-1860 and has never been updated, but you can find it online fopr free. Cheap reprints are also available for around $100+ for the set. Use the same technique as the bible.

After you have reviewed the basic literature of Jews, Christians and fellow travelers, move on to translations of the works of the Jewish writers Philo (early 1st century AD) and Josephus (ca 75-100 AD), which provide a lot of historical background. The Philo edition was recently updated, but the translation of Josephus is old as mold (18th century). They are both available online in some form or another. Get Penguin Paperback translations of Tacitus' two books and also Suetonius (both early 2nd century pagans). You should also try to get hold of a decent translation of the Christian historian Eusebius of Caesarea (early 4th century, in the time of Emperor Constantine).

See not too much!!

DCH

Minimalist

Arch has a problem with anyone who tells him that his fairy tales are fairy tales.

archaeologist

Because all the books he listed are from a secular viewpoint that soes not believe the Bible thus he will be missing out on information he needs to be well rounded and to make a good decision.

Then why are you opposed to information coming from christians? It sounds more like you are all closed-minded and only want to hear what you want to hear not the truth.

A freethinker would read all points of view from all qualified authors not only those who tell him what he wants to hear.

There are no 'neutral' positions, you are either a believer or not and all books are influenced by which side the author is on.

gurugeorge

This kind of shows where you're coming from actually, and why these kinds of discussions don't get anywhere. When you say "believer or not", see, to a freethinker this concept is a bit daft.

Let's say, you believe something when there's good evidence. Now, sometimes evidence can be conclusive, obvious, clear and indisputable, and undisputed. But a lot of the time it isn't - especially when it comes to nitty-gritty things of the world, including finding out about what actually happened, or what people said, 2,000 years ago.

Clear and conclusive demonstrations can be made in theories - the skeletal patterns of logic that we form, like maths, logic, where the definitions are taken as fixed. But we are always in a position where we may be ignorant of some factors (in fact, by the very principle of objectivity itself, reality may outrun our theories at any point).

So the idea of being a freethinker, or a rationalist, is to be STINGY WITH BELIEF. It's not something you splurge out (in an either-or way) on a bunch of propositions just because they make you feel emotionally enriched or debilitated (which is, I suspect, how most rationalists view religionists' belief-commitment). For the rationalist, belief is something you dole out gingerly, and only as much as is warranted by evidence and sound argument. Otherwise, the freethinker or rationalist is content not to know, and happy to call speculation speculation.

So no, believing in the Bible or in God is not actually an either/or thing in the way you mean. In the very nature of things, such questions can't be empirically tested anyway. You, as a religionist, have (I think) chosen to take something on trust - but you must realise that that's simply your decision, and the values that made you make that decision were already in you (it was your value judgement of "this is good").

The rationalist or freethinker's way is not to trust anything, i.e. not to use trust AT ALL when it comes to the process of knowledge-gathering, of finding out what the hell is actually going on in this amazing world we find ourselves adventuring in. (Of course the rationalist will trust people - or not - for various reasons - I'm talking about trust in a story, or even more abstractly, a bunch of propositions, which is basically what your religion boils down to).

Simplyme

I kind of side with Arch on this. He should be reading both for and against books. There is no harm in it. he can make a conclusion based on both.

Now my question to Arch is, Do you bother reading books that differ from the ones you recommend? Did you read any of those books that you clearly disagree with? Because if you did not then your point is?

archaeologist

That is because you do not grassp the reality. There are no neutral positions and God said it first "you are either for me or against me' which tells everyone you are on one side or the other. of course you do not have to believe that but maybe you will believe Dever who writes:

(Dever:2005:ix)

and

(Ibid:83)

IF you do not trust anything, how can you believe any evidence presented to you? In other words all you have done is leave escape routes open for you to flee when the truth hits you, so you can continue in your unbelief. Is that being free thinking or just ensuring that you get to keep your life as you want it to be?

ChristMyth

What's funny is the suggested authors are exactly the authors that all Christians should be reading, especially the classics that DCHindly mentioned. The fact that Arch doesn't even know when someone is suggesting authors that support his own worldview should make him/her ashamed.

This is why atheists know more about Christianity than most Christians.

While we're on the subject, would any recommend the translations found over on www.ccel.org?

archaeologist

when i said i fpund it funny, it is because of the following:

if someone has an interest in Christianity, why would they read books by people who do not believe in it, are not part of it and do not understand the faith?

if you have an interest in something, say, fishing, you do not read books by those who hate the activity but those who love it. The same goes for christianity, you do not read the books by those who hate the faith to get a grasp of what it is, you need to read the ones who ar members and love it.

This would be wrong as Ihave read or sat through lectures of manyof those authors and so far, that i have noticed, i have beenthe only one who has presented titles from people who share my views to some extent.

All the rest have suggested books by unbelievers who do not know Christ or christianity and speak from a biased position

Of course I do. I have books in my library (and read) by ehrman, dever, finkelstein, lemaire, renfrew, hawkins, degrasse, kung, crick, watson, gibbons, etc.,and lectures from many of the same plus davies and other scholars who accept alternatives.

Non-chrisians find evidence as well as christians and it would not be wise of me to not know whatthey discovered and how they interpreted their finds. one thing i learned from finkelstein is that he does not know the difference between new construction and renovation.

bacht

Arch, the Bible is difficult to read for those of us who don't accept supernaturalism. I'm agnostic about God, but miracles, spirits, resurrection etc are not real to me. But I can still read these texts as if they were written by people not much different from us in their basic psychology, especially their emotional needs.