gstafleu

Do you want to be general or specific? A good example might be taken from Jeffrey Gibson's article on Mark 8:14-21: a passage that makes no sense at all is suddenly understandable due to NT scholarship. I'm not saying that should be your whole talk, but it could be part of it.

Gerard Stafleu

John Kesler

I would first dispense with the idea that there is an "atheist approach" to New Testament study, as such a label hints at an objective other than ascertaining the truth. You could mention that NT scholars don't accept what the NT says uncritically, and use various criteria--of multiple attestation, dissimilarity, etc.--to help determine what is likely to be true. You could then cite John's change of the crucifixion chronology (19:14, compare to Mark 15:25) as an example of theological considerations trumping factual reporting.

yalla

Rather than you do the presenting and thus setting yourself up as a target for counter argument which may not be well informed or bias free try getting them to do the analysis.
Student centred aproach rather than jug [you] to mugs [them].
Set it up as a workshop where they go through a process of discovery which then cannot be blamed on the atheist presenting 'distorted' arguments but on their own efforts.
Perhaps divide them into smaller sub groups and trace the Tanakh origins of select gospels scenarios so as to challenge the inspired eyewitness paradigm
Or analyse, again separately, several sections where the gospels differ and ask them to figure out why and then report back to the main group.

That puts you in the role of facilitator rather than [biased] lecturer.

"Does the reader understand?" type of thing.
Self directed learning is far more powerful than being told from one outside the fold.
cheers
yalla

Amaleq13

I think the idea about discussing the Synoptic-Paul dichotomy would work well. That's a good grade level for it. You could probably do the entire thing with nothing but Christian scholars as your sources and I think that would be an interesting counter to the potential well-poisoning.

Diogenes the Cynic

One hour is not much time. I think your best bet is to pick one central theme to drive home and resist the impulse to try to scatter too much information or cover too much ground at once.

If it was me, I think I'd focus on making the point that nothing in the NT can be traced to a primary witness of Jesus. I'd start with the authentic Paulines (making sure to explain that most NT scholars do not believe that Paul wrote everything attributed to him), move on to the synoptics (which would probably take up the bulk of my presentation), explain briefly where the authorship traditions came from (and when), explain some of the problems with those traditions and perhaps invite the students to offer their vest arguments as to why those traditions should be accepted as authentic. Then, if there were time, I would explain the authenticity problems with the Pastorals and the other alleged apostlic authorship traditions of the NT.

I think you could get out a lot of info, provoke some thought and still keep things clean and simple by just talking about the difficulties with pinning down authorship. It's a topic they should be able to grasp and follow pretty easily and it says a lot of other things without saying them.

I would add that I think it's extraordinary and commendable that a Christian high school is giving you this opportunity. (I hope you're not walking into a trap)

seebs

I guess it depends on what you want to teach them. If what you want them to know is that there is actual substance to the question of "but how do we read this", then one thing to point out would be the huge range of disagreement between Christian groups.

Hmm.

If I had to do this, and I were talking mostly to people from a fundamentalist/evangelical background (I avoid "fundagelical" because I've mostly seen it used in a very derisive sense), I think the thing I'd start in with is a couple of minutes -- and really, three or five could do it -- showing how strong the historical tradition was of understanding "upon this rock I shall build my church" as creating the papacy... and that this shows how much it can matter how we choose to understand a text. Questions like "does it matter that this was a pun in Greek", or "was this even the same pun in Aramaic, or was that a coincidence introduced by translation" give you a way to start on the meatier questions, while giving them the first thing first: Why do we CARE?

And I think the chances are pretty good that most of them will be very interested in knowing how scholarship can contribute to a question like that.

Maybe I'm wrong on that; I just know that it's one of the few passages I regularly see fundamentalists talking about original languages for.

ynquirer

You self-style an atheist, but I’ll assume that you want to open those teenagers’ minds to higher criticism rather than peddle atheism. With that purpose, I would focus on a single text and explore what we know and what we don’t know about it. It might be either First Corinthians, or the gospel of Mark, or Q, or the gospel of John. Q is probably too abstract for such an audience, and the gospel of John entails too complex a background. Between 1 Cor and Mark I would definitively choose Mark.

In the first place, the long and short endings – are they Markan or apocryphal? That would offer occasion to examine the important issue of sources: the Great Uncials, the Bizantine text, quotations by the Church Fathers. What is the decision by evidence? (You may here point at disagreement as among the most orthodox Christians: that is a safe starting point.)

If both the long and short endings are late additions, what is the bearing of Mark’s not including a resurrection story? Differences with the other three gospels. (Personally, I believe this to be more important that the cleavage between the synoptics and John.)

Now, what is the bearing of the Markan lack of a Nativity? To end with the issue of the beginning and ending of Mark, was the writer an adoptionist?

Second, the dating of Mark. Chapter 13 suggests a post 70 dating while silence on the high priest’s name might imply that the writer didn’t know Josephus’ AJ – spin has reminded me this quite recently. Thus, a plausible interval would be AD 70-90.

I don’t think you have got time for much more than this. However, you would so offer a paramount view of the type of problems dealt with by higher criticism: sources and their discordance, differences across the NT, theological agendas and conflict orthodoxy/heresies, dating and dependence of texts on historical, lay sources.

Amaleq13

Don't sell 16 year-olds short. This is prime time for the development of abstract thought. Even the boys are starting to think.

In fact, I think it would be very interesting to lead them through the evidence and see if they reach the same conclusion.

ynquirer

Sometimes Q is too abstract for me.

Diogenes the Cynic

What's abstract about Q? Why would high school kids have any trouble understanding the concept of a common source?