Toto

Lord or Legend? Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Gregory A. Boyd and Paul Rhodes Eddy

I read a few pages on Amazon, and the first chapter is devoted to arguing the case for the existence of miracles, which means that they argue at great lenght against naturalism. This is rather astounding.

The same authors have written The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (or via: amazon.co.uk), for which there is an exceprt here (pdf file)

Zeichman

It looks like both of them discuss Doherty, though their earlier one much moreso. Has Doherty addressed this?

Koyaanisqatsi

Well, this part: "test against multiple scholarly disciplines--including history, ethnography, anthropology, and folklore" is very telling. History is the only one of those that actually matters in a scholarly discipline sense in that it seeks to faithfully chronicle (or should anyway) what actually happened, not merely what was claimed to have happened. The other areas are by no means equivalent to such a "discipline," since they all seek to chronicle merely what mankind claimed to have happened and the more psychological/esoteric reasons behind those claims.

:huh:

Toto

Not that I know. I myself would be more willing to invest the time in reading their books if they did not start out by arguing for the existence of miracles.

They do not address Doherty's arguments in depth; they do lump him in with HJ'ers of the Jesus Seminar type as "legendary" - they seem to realize that he is closer to the Jesus Seminar HJ'ers who believe in a human Jesus who accumulated legends, than they are as evangelicals who believe in the whole gospel enchilada.

Joan of Bark

Arguing for miracles in the first chapter is not a good sign -- IMO it instantly discredits the book as a scholarly work.

Ray Moscow

Yes, it does for me, too.

I remember a debate in which Bart Erhman pointed out that an historical approach to a reputed event never seriously considered miracles, since history dealt in probabilities, and a miracle was the least probable scenario.

Pragmatista

I read the first chapter at Amazon. The "Principle of Analogy" was unintelligible to me. Maybe I am slow. Does anybody understand that part?

Minimalist

Jesus freaks like miracles. Always give your audience what it wants....first rule of a good con man.

aa5874

After reading the 2 links, it appears to me more and more that the historicity of Jesus is completely flawed. Attempting to use the occurence of miracles does not confirm that a specific Jesus Christ ever lived. If an event appears to be miraculous, how can it be determined to be done by Jesus or his Father?

Toto

The "principle of analogy" is evangelical-speak for the idea that the past is like the present, and since we do not see any miracles happening today, we can infer that there were no miracles 2000 years ago.

Since these evangelicals are playing the game of being modern, academic, intelligent people, it's pretty hard to argue in favor of miracles. We have so much evidence that apparent miracles can be faked, that people are gullible, and that documents can be forged, and no evidence that there has ever been a miracle. Therefore a certain amount of obfuscation is called for. Quantum physics is counter-intuitive and hard to understand, so maybe miracles occurred 2000 years ago. All this is padded out with a lot of intelligent sounding words, in the hope that you will assume that people who can write so intelligently must know something, or at least must not be in the grip of an ancient discredited superstition.

Boyd and Rhodes then go on to rely on all of the postmodern, relativist products of modern academia, the ethnographers who write that perhaps western science is just another way of knowing, and that we should respect other societies' definitions of reality.