Joan of Bark

I'm about halfway through THE HISTORICAL FIGURE OF JESUS by E.P. Sanders, and thoroughly enjoying it. Sanders doesn't just give various historians' view of HC, but shows how history in this field is conducted and which sources are used, and why.

Anyway, I'm starting this thread to get feedback from II's who have read this book and want to comment on it. Or, failing that, comments on other books by Sanders. Thanks.

Julian

You might want to ask this question in BC&H since E. P. Sanders writes books for that type of crowd and he is quite well-known up there.

I have not read the book you mention but I have read his (and Margaret Davies) book Studying the Synoptic Gospels, about the synoptic problem, which is quite excellent but somewhat technical.

Julian

Pitshade

I'm going to send this to BC&H as it is likely to get more responses there.

Toto

I read the book when I was looking for a justification for the case for a historical Jesus, and I was a bit disappointed. It seemed that he and others hold an underlying assumption that there was a historical Jesus, and arrange what little evidence they have in a nice picture to support that assumption. But it has been a while since I read the book.

exapologist

I love that book. It was partially responsible for helping me deconvert from christianity, as it demonstrated that Jesus was a failed eschatological prophet. See especially his argument that Jesus and Paul's assertions about the immanent end satisfy all the main criteria of authenticity (multiple attestation, embarrassment, etc.)

Also, Sanders is one of the world's leading authorities on Palestinian Judaism during the time of Christ. In the book you're reading (toward the end), he demonstrates conclusively that the gospel passages about the controversies between Jesus and the religious authorities are fictional retrojections by the early church.

These and many other fatal blows to Christianity are made in that book. Ironically, evangelical apologists gleefully refer to "third questers" like Sanders, Vermes, and others as establishing the general accuracy of the NT portraits of Jesus. What they don't tell you is that the majority of such scholars also think that it's demonstrable that Jesus was a failed eschatological prophet, among other things.

If you like Sanders' The Historical Figure of Jesus, you'll love Vermes' The Changing Faces of Jesus. Like Sanders, he is considered one of the leading Jesus scholars. However, unlike Sanders, he documents in detail how the view of Jesus changed through the NT documents, from a simple Galileean Hasidic Jewish miracle worker and exorcist (similar to Hanina Ben Dosa, and Honi) in Mark, to Divine incarnate Word and second person of the Trinity in John.

Steven Avery

Hmm ... I've missed that. Could you give an example of an evangelical lauding Vermes as seeing the NT portrait of Jesus as generally accurate.

Here is Holding on Vermes
http://www.tektonics.org/books/vermesrvw01.html

However, I can see the late David Flusser mentioned in that positive manner.

Now that will be something to see.
Where does Vermes find "the second person of the Trinity" in the NT documents ?

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

exapologist

Hi Praxeus,

Good to hear from you again.

Notice, I didn't say Vermes in particular, but rather the Third Quester camp in general. But with that qualification in mind, sure. For example, the evangelical apologist Gregory Boyd, in his Cynic Sage or Son of God?, he gives a quick history of the search for the historical Jesus. After the era when redaction and form criticism came into prominence (think of Perrin, for example), the consensus was that little could be known about the historical Jesus. But then people (whom quasi-conservative N.T. Wright calls 'the third questers' -- of whom Wright himself is a "member") started studying things like 2nd Temple Judaism, the Essene community of the Dead Sea, etc., and found that many things that Jesus said and did made sense in light of 1st century Palestinian Judaism. People in this camp include Geza Vermes, Joachim Jeramias, E.P. Sanders, and John Meier.

Blomberg makes the same point in his chapter of Moreland and Wilkins (eds.) Jesus Under Fire, as well as in his chapter of Craig's Reasonable Faith. I'll have to check my library to be sure, but I believe that Habermas makes the same assertion in his The Historical Jesus.

In any case, these guys appeal to the authors in this camp as partially vindicating the traditional orthodox portrait of Jesus. The picture you get from these guys is that in the contemporary debate, there are two major camps: the Jesus Seminar folks and the Third Questers. The claims of the former are hostile to Christianity, but happily implausible, since they are based on an antisupernaturalist bias, indefensible methodology, and dubious sources (e.g., the Gospel of Thomas). On the other hand, the claims of the Third Questers are largely favorable to Christianity, and use defensible sources and criteria. The problem is that they fail to mention that although they establish some aspects of the gospel portraits of Jesus, they also demonstrate that crucial portions of the gospels are demonstrably false/inaccurate (leaving out Witherington and Wright, of course).

Re: Vermes' The Changing Faces of Jesus: yes, it definitely *is* something to see. I recommend that you see it.

Re: Vermes on John's high christology: of course, no one is claiming that John comes out and says "and by the way, Jesus is the second person of the Trinity". I must say, Praxeus, this is sort of a superficial point. Obviously, christians throughout the ages have used John's prologue as a proof-text for Jesus' divinity. Also, his upper room discourse has Jesus say things that imply that He is God's equal, and he talks about sending the Holy Spirit to his disciples. From these sorts of passages (among others), christians derive the doctrines of the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity, as they are the most overt in this regard.


Re: Holding: I'll be glad to read Holding's review. I trust that you'll read Vermes' book (and hopefully that of Sanders as well) directly, to judge for yourself? I also trust that this isn't your usual mode of "handling" authors who disagree with you (reading reviews of books by people who share your outlook)? That's not a reliable, truth-conducive method of information-gathering.

Also, if you are in the habit of reading internet reviews, can I recommend Robert M. Price's review of Holding's writings on Jesus? I think he does an admirable job of pointing out some of the problems in his ideas and arguments.


If you're an avid apologetics reader, as I was for 15 years (everything from McDowell to Plantinga), I assure you that nothing you read from the conservative camp (whether I. Howard Marshall, N.T. Wright, Craig Blomberg, Gary Habermas, F.F. Bruce, Ben Witherington, the relevant sections of Moreland and Craig's apologetics books, etc.) will prepare you for what you find.


Regards,

exapologist

Steven Avery

Right, and in no place did you give an example of an apologist lauding his general view of the accuracy of the NT. That was my point, plain and simple. You lumped him into that group with a little category-shuffling.

What I've seen of Geza Vermes stuff on Jesus and the NT has been very unimpressive.
We have this web propaganda piece.

http://opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opini.../19/do1904.xml
Matthew's Nativity is charming and frightening... but it's a Jewish myth
By Geza Vermes

"But Isaiah wrote in Hebrew, not in Greek, and in the Hebrew Bible, the mother of Emmanuel is not a virgin - the Hebrew for this would be betulah - but a young woman, almah, already pregnant."

Please, apparently that is lifted from a nuanced grammatical analysis that fails miserably (compare to Judges). And Vermes just throws that in as a factoid ???

At least the rabbinical story on the dream is interesting.

"Pharaoh - ...had a dream. ... the lamb symbolised a Jewish boy who would become a lethal threat to Egypt."

How about a reference, though ?
And a date of its first mention ?

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

exapologist

Okay, you're starting to creep me out. The last two times I responded to you, you chose to either twist or ignore what I said. I especially appreciate how you construed my clarification of my initial assertion as some sort of anxious back-peddling -- I forgot about the inspiring virtue and good nature of Bible-believing christians.

In what will no doubt be a waste of time, here are some approving references to Sanders and Vermes, and the Third Quest camp in general, by the conservative apologists I mentioned earlier:

-Blomberg, in Jesus Under Fire (p. 26): "The third quest of the historical Jesus began about fifteen years ago by scholars who realized that they had to place Jesus much more self-consciously into the jewish world in which he lived and ministered. They sought to use historical criteria that were ***more defensible*** than those of the Jesus Seminar...Intensive study of Jewish apocalyptic literature and thought ***has spawned a substantial optimism*** concerning how much of the first three Gospels reflect historically trustworthy material....***E.P. Sanders, of Duke University***...stresses that Jesus foresaw a new age inaugurated by his death. Much of Jesus' teaching revolved around the scandalous claim that he could pronounce God's forgiveness on sinners even before they had demonstrated their contrition through repentance....Geza Vermes, ***a leading Jewish scholar from Oxford*** [note that Blomberg holds Vermes in higher esteem than you -- but I'm sure you're in a better position to evaluate Vermes' credentials.], likens him to certain prominent, charismatic holy men in Israel at that time."


-Boyd's Cynic Sage or Son of God?: on p. 47, Boyd states that he will borrow heavily from the findings of the Third Questers to critique the conclusions of the Jesus Seminar (which he labels "the Post-Bultmannians"): "Thus, while keeping in mind the dangers of simple classifications, we will throughout this chapter analyze the contemporary quest under the two broad categories of the "Third Quest" and the "Post-Bultmannian Quest". This shall lay the foundation for our discussion of Crossan and Mack who come out of the post-Bultmannian camp as well as our critique of their approach ***which significantly borrows from the "Third Quest."***

He then goes on to list those he takes to be the leaders of the Third Quest:

"To date, central figures in the movement include ***Geza Vermes***, Ben Meyer, John Riches, Anthony Harvey, Marcus Borg, ***E.P. Sanders***, and N.T. Wright." (same page)

On p. 49, Boyd cites Sanders approvingly as an authority who has a more optimistic outlook on the quality of historical information in the Gospels:

"Thus, within the "Third Quest" there is a general consensus that the Gospels offer ***a firm basis for genuine historical information about Jesus***. ***Sanders*** expresses this sentiment well: "The dominant view today seems to be that we can know pretty well what Jesus was out to accomplish, that we can know a lot about what he said, and that those two things make sense within the world of first-century Judaism.""***

On pp. 24-25 of his The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ, Habermas contrasts the Third Quest movement with the Jesus Seminar, and talks of the former approvingly: "It is probably accurate to say that, at the present, there has been a somewhat ***positive assessment** of attempts to understand Jesus in historical terms. Interestingly enough, this attitude often crosses liberal-conservative lines. Although there is no identifiable consensus among current scholars, current trends have led to what some have called the "Third Quest" for the historical Jesus." (p. 24)He goes on to speak approvingly of the fact that it is ***"more positive in its assessment of the historical Jesus than was the "New Quest"*** [i.e., the second quest, of which Norman Perrin was a leader] (ibid.)

At the bottom of p.24 and on through p. 25, he speaks of examples of the positive assessments of members of the Third Quest, and who are among his first three examples? None other than Geza Vermes and E.P. Sanders!

Finally, on p. 25, he speaks approvingly of the Third Quest as a positive trend, and contrasts it with the Jesus Seminar.

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

exapologist
"evangelical apologists gleefully refer to "third questers" like Sanders, Vermes, and others as establishing the general accuracy of the NT portraits of Jesus."

Yet we see from above that in the case of Vermes they are noting that he is part of a group of scholars that help establish the general accuracy of the NT portrayal of the historicity of 1st century Israel, (which does defacto refute a bunch of the skeptic/mythicist/drama/fiction stuff here) while in fact specifically distancing themselves from his conclusions about Jesus Himself, noting that Vermes ..

"likens him to certain prominent, charismatic holy men in Israel at that time"

Your original statement was simply wrong, if you were implying that evangelicals accept the Geza Vermes portrait of Jesus. Perhaps you wrote with a deliberate ambiguity and mixture of categories. And in the page quoted above we see that Vermes in fact writes in a style akin to Hyam Maccoby, with a polemic more suitable for the anti-mish sites than scholarship.

Shalom,
Steven Avery