Toto

I didn't want this to get lost:

Redescribing Christian Origins (Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series, No. 28) (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Redescribing Christian Origins on the SBL site.It can be previewed on Google books.

DCHindley

But get a load of the dense, oblique titles of the articles it contains!

Oye! It's like they are trying to one up each other with clever titles to show how cutting edge they are.

PART 1: ALTERNATE BEGINNINGS: THE SAYINGS GOSPEL Q AND THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS
*Introduction to the Papers from the Third Year of the Consultation
*The Schooling of a Galilean Jesus Association (The Sayings Gospel Q)
*Why Q Failed: From Ideological Project to Group Formation
*Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of the Gospel of Thomas and Christian Origins
* “Keep Speaking Until You Find…”: Thomas and the School of Oral Mimesis
*Discussion and Reflections
PART 2: A JESUS SCHOOL IN JERUSALEM?
*Proposal for the First Year of the Seminar
*Introduction to the Papers from the First Year of the Seminar
*Acts and the History of the Earliest Jerusalem Church
*Antioch, Paul, and Jerusalem: Diaspora Myths of Origins in the Homeland
*What Do We Really Know about the Jerusalem Church? Christian Origins in Jerusalem according to Acts and Paul
*A Jewish Jesus School in Jerusalem?
*History, Historiography and Christian Origins: The Jerusalem Community
*Agenda for the Annual Meeting, Discussion, and Reflections
PART 3: A PRE-PAULINE CHRISTOS ASSOCIATION
*Proposal for the Second Year of the Seminar
*Introduction to the Papers from the Second Year of the Seminar
*The Problem of the Origins of a Messianic Conception of Jesus
*Christos as Nickname
*From Messiahs to Christ: The Pre-Pauline Christ Cult in Scholarship
*Why Christos? The Social Reasons
*The Anointed Jesus
*Agenda for the Annual Meeting, Discussion, and Reflections
*Backbay Jazz and Blues
*Smoke Signals from the North: A Reply to Burton Mack’s “Backbay Jazz and Blues”
*Issues and Commentary
PART 4: METAREFLECTIONS
*Social Formation and Mythmaking: Theses on Key Terms
*Remarkable
*Redescribing Christian Origins: Historiography or Exegesis?
*Dayyeinu [hint, it is a hymn sung at the Passover Seder - DCH]
*Mythmaking, Social Formation and Varieties of Social Theory

DCH

Toto

I have been reading the google books version. Around p 140 and following, there is a discussion of Mack's ideas, which seem to come down to a rejection of the basic historicity of Acts account of Christian origins, a rejection of the idea that either the death of Jesus or the Resurrection account for the early church. Around p 155, the Jerusalem Church is described as the product of mythmaking. This is all a lot closer to the Jesus Myth hypothesis than it is to the Historical Jesus story.

No wonder this has to be dense and oblique. No one wants to get the Christian literalists too upset.

DCHindley

Toto,

Christian literalists do not read this kind of stuff. However, this book is almost EXACTLY like the output of one of those random paper generators you see on the web. I've seen one for "Post Modernism," but not for "Christian Origins."

Compare this to, say, _The Didache and Modern Research_ or _The Didache in Context_. Both these books, collections of essays much like the book under consideration, are heavy with social scientific theory and speculations. Yet they are perfectly understandable!! I have myself posted a detailed summary of the social scientific theory of Christian origins proposed by Jonathan Draper here on IIdb (originally on Crosstalk2 in 2003 - I still get e-mails from Aaron Milavec who I had contacted in the process of reading up on Draper's model of early Christian organization), derived entirely from these two books.

On the other hand, this stuff is virtually impenetrable. I think they are pushing an agenda. They are so in love with a romantic idea of Jesus the eloquent Cynic-like nobody Galilean sage dispensing timeless ethical gems that they are creating their own myth right before our eyes.

I wonder how Kloppenborg feels about the direction these things are going, seeing that it was Buton Mack's take-off of his stratified Q in _Formation of Q_ that got this ball rolling?

DCH

A Stable Flux

I haven't read the volume but isn't the Society for Biblical Literature a respectable institution for biblical studies? I don't know much about them except that it's apparently the oldest and largest international scholarly organisation on biblical studies. I would of thought their publications would be good. As for being oblique and dense, well thats common enough in academia. Also since it's about information that could undermine the beliefs of the common believer I think it's ok to sensitively release these ideas in a somewhat indirect manner. One day they will filter down to the person on the street.

youngalexander

Not that bloody Noone again by any chance?

A Stable Flux

I don't know what you're asking or why you quoted that particular sentence but I was just saying that societies like the Society for Biblical Literature, the Jesus Seminar and seminaries of Princeton, Harvard and the like partly use thick language and argumentation so they don't say bluntly "Jesus' resurrection is a myth" and "he wasn't born in Bethlehem" and so on. To sum biblical studies is a slow science and is particularly sensitive to making changes that depart from the status quo.
I'm not saying there is anything wrong with more direct declarations about lead scholarship ideas on Jesus which contradict peoples beliefs, I just meant to say that I'm not expecting biblical studies organisations to be vocal about facts which disturb the commoners beliefs (minor exception with the Jesus Seminar, which is probably my favourite organisation in biblical studies).

DCHindley

Yes, the SBL is a well respected organization and represents a wide and diverse spectrum of biblical scholars. The particular cabal of critics on this particular "Christian Origins" kick even have a Yahoo e-list (called, appropriately enough "Christian Origins", founded by William Arnal and Zeba Crook). They will let anyone read the posts, but will carefully screen those who ask to join to weed out "philosophers" as Zeba calls them.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/christian_origins/

These "philosophers," like the ancient Jewish "Minim," apparently consist of a mixture of sinners. I can detect "supernaturalists" (who allow for divine intervention in the normal course of nature, and who list members have recently complained have "infiltrated" the SBL), as well as those who use the post modernism that marks their own discourse to demonstrate that they (well, modern scholarship in general) are not only capable of, but appear to be, allowing their own ideological predispositions to color their analysis in way more ways than they are willing to concede (yeah, I believe I fell into that category, but it was also a view that was shared by some of the "supernaturalists"). These pesky philosophers were annoying them on Jeffrey Gibson's Crosstalk2, and since their defection from that list - a list that pioneered the concept of giving professional critics a place to let it all out and rub shoulders with the public - has had virtually no traffic.

To be honest, from the beginning there had been a subset of Crosstalk2 listmembers who wanted it to be an "in club" for professional critics only (have your PhD in a related discipline or at least be a candidate). Personally, I thought Jeffrey did a really good job of moderating his list, and was certainly fair and willing to let amateurs participate if they stuck to the materials and could credibly draw on the secondary literature to make their cases. FWIW, Jeffrey is also a participating member of the Christian Origin's list.

The Jesus Seminar is also like this: They firmly believe that enlightened scholarship must be the torch bearer that has the moral obligation to lead the layman out of the darkness of ignorance and superstition. Laymen, however, should politely stand by to view professionals in action and perhaps applaud their contributions, but not (shudder) contribute. I politely refrain from participating in (um, perhaps more correctly enabling) such elitist mythmaking.

BTW, I know from conversations with Arnal on Crosstalk2, that his definition of Myth is not Freke and Gandy myth (stories of the acts of gods & goddesses that symbolize general "truths" about society in general) but Roland Barthes myth (the secondary levels of meaning that can be associated with literal meanings - like the myth of US democracy, or of the White Man's Burden, or Manifest Destiny, or the Moral Superiority of the West, etc).

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~marton/myth.html

There is a certain irony at work there.

DCH

Clivedurdle

What does that mean? All scholars? That gnostic xians were earlier than Jerusalem xians?

Is there any agreement about any basic "facts"?

Virgin Birth?

Jesus had apostles who he sent out to spread the good news?

Is this a subject area where power - ie the views of the Catholic Church - are more important than scholarship?

Compare science - for example evolution - once papers are published and arguments accepted the scientific establishment moves on to the new understanding. What is the understanding in this area? Is there any concensus about anything?

Zeichman

[/QUOTE]
They are clearly pushing an agenda: treating Christian origins the same way scholars treat any other religion, but with a large emphasis on social formation. Regarding the Cynic thing, I'm pretty sure that's not true. Arnal criticized the cynic hypothesis extensively, and the scribal deracination hypothesis of Q's origins is a starting point for the seminar. Granted, Willi Braun still utilizes part of it in his work, but it's not something totally central. That said, it's undoubtedly the most difficult work on biblical studies I've ever read, but the work the reader invests in it pays off ten-fold. Two more volumes are forthcoming, I think one on Paul is coming out this year, and one on Mark in 2009/2010.

Kloppenborg was a participant in the group (past tense), but he presented a paper that was a response to one that Ron Cameron wrote and another Burton Mack wrote. It was published in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (wikipedia gives this citation: 1996 “Political Histories and Theories of Religion: A response to Burton Mack and Ron Cameron,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8/3 (1996) 279-89) and he also presented a generally positive review of Redescribing Christian Origins at the 2006 SBL, which will be (if it has not already) published soon.

If you want to know what Kloppenborg thinks about Mack's work, he talks about it a bunch in Excavating Q, but for some real money, read his awesome essay "A Dog Among the Pigeons: The “Cynic Hypothesis” as a Theological Problem,” Pp. 73-117 in From Quest to Quelle: Festschrift James M. Robinson.

SBL publishes books from every area of the spectrum (in terms of an academic-but-vaguely-apologetic/overtly-secular dichotomy) in biblical studies.

Thanks for making this its own thread, by the way. I think their work is really important, and deserves considerable attention. I think a lot of mythicists are working closer to the traditional paradigm of Christian origins than this, with an emphasis on individual revelations and the centrality of Jesus' person (Arnal criticized RM Price for such in a review). There's a distinct LACK of theory or method in most biblical scholarship, and Christianity thus gets privileged as somehow unique.