Amaleq13

By what specific methodology(ies) is this alleged "core history" recovered?

mens_sana

Oh, I didn't realize ... "embellishment" means the event embellished never occurred. Ummm, that means the 14" trout you brought home, the one you spent over 2 hours reeling in, didn't get brought home — even after you ate it and belched.

Toto

This is the first time I've seen an advocate of the historical value of the NT use the GWTW analogy. How do you recover that history? Was there a historical Rhett Butler?

I know that Conrad's novels were used to reconstruct the social history of colonial Indonesia, but I wonder how far you can take this.

mens_sana

Quote:
Originally Posted by mens_sana
From what I've read, the Gospel genre seems to combine the BIOS with the Encomium. Both types can include a lot of fiction, while conveying at least some core history.

The "core history" is at least tentatively arrived at through independant parallel accounts, but even there, the parallel accounts can sometimes be quite casual or fragmentary, like the Assyrian mention of the House of Omri. And the student still has to make the right connections.

The Tanakh leaves many readers with the impression that the Israelites had a rigorous monotheistic religion, from which they would repeatedly fall away, then return, then fall away, etc., etc., etc. But consideration of such "anomalies" as the inscriptions found at Kuntillet 'Arjud and El-Qôm, the failed religious reform of Hezekiah (it had to be done again by Josiah), the reform truncated by Josiah's death, the 10th century Ta'anach cult stand with an image of Asherah, and the denunciations of human sacrifice by Jeremiah and Ezekiel have given contemporary scholars an entirely different perspective — one of a polytheistic pre-exilic Israel where YHWH had a consort, human sacrifice was unexceptionable, and the prophets were preaching on the fringes of their society, not from its center. This is "core history". Recommended very highly: Ziony Zevit's The Religions of Ancient Israel and William Dever's Did God Have a Wife?

Amaleq13

What does this methodology suggest can be relied upon as historical with regard to the trial and crucifixion of Jesus?

mens_sana

Am I reading a certain amount of surprize on your part? LOL We might not agree on what "historical value" means in this context though. The numerous extracanonical Gospels, Acts (especially the Acts of Paul), Epistles, and Apocalypses, along with the common practice of both forgery and pseudepigraphical attribution suggest to me that the only thing separating those documents from NT documents is datable proximity to 30 CE. A historian has to consider all of them as potential historical sources. "Inspiration" is special pleading. And as ancient history is a matter of probabilities, "miracle" has to be shelved along with supernatural intervention. "Accounts" of such are there, but the probabilities are outside the historians' scope.

Richard A. Horsley, E.W. Stegemann, Gerd Theissen, and Bruce Malina have all written extensively on the sociology of NT Palestine and on Jesus' place in it. (If I had just their bibliographies on my bookshelves, I'd need a warehouse.) And J.D. Crossan has applied Gerhard Lenski's picture of "agrarian society" and "patronage" to the period quite skillfully in his Birth of Christianity.

mens_sana

I think the trial is completely up in the air. There are too many problems to be sure even that a trial took place. It is entirely possible that past Roman experience with Jewish protests and Passover riots resulted in a general order to arrest and crucify any Palestinian who appeared to be inciting a disturbance. And if there is any hint of accuracy in the temple cleansing or the King of the Jews charge, that would certainly have issued in summary Roman justice. While Roman civil law was extensive and codified, criminal law in the provinces was almost completely in the hands of the governor — and his instructions were to collect the taxes and keep the peace. I think the crucifixion took place, but that none of the details, other than that the disciples had fled, can be depended upon.

Amaleq13

All questions of mythicism aside, I completely agree with your assessment. How boring.

mens_sana

Ahah! You maybe were expecting another "true believer"!? I'm not sure I could even begin to pull that one off. My thinking runs somewhere between Crossan and Ehrman — and nowhere near the oversimplifying reductionism of the Myth & Midrash School. :devil3: