Zenaphobe

I've been reading this thread for a while and was wondering if that part of John could be interpreted as fiction and how would one make this determination?

The Pericope Adulterae is generally considered an addition that does not belong, doesn't this raise the possibility of it being a fictitious part of John?

Doug Shaver

I have no quarrel with that in principle, but it looks to me as if you judge scholars mainly on the basis of the extent to which their conclusions support your particular version of Christianity.

Johnny Skeptic

Which beliefs, just the belief that an ordinary man named Jesus existed, or that the conservative Christian version of Jesus existed?

Toto

ercatli: This is how I see it. History is a highly ideological enterprise. At the current time, a group of Christians have established a beachhead in what would otherwise be regarded as secular scholarship and have claimed the mantle of "historical consensus" for their particular view of history. This is not the result of a disinterested study of history; it is a justification of their faith. It allows Christian apologists like William Lane Craig to make clever but falacious arguments based on an alleged consensus among historians that there was an empty tomb, when in fact there is no reliable evidence of an empty tomb at all.

You can cling to your imaginary consensus of the "best" historians, but the next generation of scholars will revise that consensus. What will you do then?

In the meantime, please do not insult us by claiming that NT Wright, the Bishop of Durham, is a secular historian, or that Bart Ehrman is some sort of radical.

Petergdi

How is it then that the few who argue for ahistory appear to have enormous axes to grind?
And how is it that there are many non-christian scholars who see more history in the gospels than many theologians?

You cross that bridge when you come to it. So far the ahistoricity thesis has less support than it did a century ago. Your beliefs about the next generation are a matter of your own faith.


N. T. Wright is pretty seriously competent about what he writes about.

Peter.

aa5874

The mention of real places in a book has nothing whatsoever to do with the VERACITY of its contents.

And gJohn contains known fiction.

JohN 20:19 - John 20 is fundamentally fiction regardless of any mention of real places of the 1st century.

Toto

Compared to the historicists? I don't think that the a-historicists have especially large axes to grind.

There are not "many" non-Christians of that sort. This is a meme that ercatli has floated, but not produced any evidence for.

There is Michael Grant, a presumably non-Christian classicist writing in a Protestant atmosphere, who is recorded as reading the gospels as embellished history, at a time when the gospels were regarded as mostly historical. There are no recently published historians who take that stance.

It won't take a new generation.

NT Wright is a competant and verbose theologian.

Petergdi

We seem to live in different universes.

I would want your list of disqualifying characteristics before even considering giving a list. Do Jews and agnostics count, or do you have to be a militant Atheist to qualify? Does work have to be published after 1980, or after 2008? Are there specific areas of specialization, degrees taken or schools attended which make someone not count, or a specific approach to the field required for someone to count?

I've seen this movie before, so I know how it goes.

No presumably - he says that he is not Christian. I only have hearsay and reasonable inference for thinking him an atheist - it is possible that he was an agnostic, but he quite definitely said that he was not a Christian.

That's your faith. Let's see if it actually happens.

Peter.

gurugeorge

How the hell do you know that (if you'll excuse the profanity )??? (I don't necessarily mean a novel per se, but any category that would fit the analogy, including myth.)

That's the whole point - what provenance, who wrote it, why, how, when, where - these have to be determined before you can be confident about whether it's meant as history, allegory, an entertaining story, a literary joke, a myth (whether traditional and believed concrete or not), etc.

It's THAT level at which the requisite work hasn't really been done enough to give anybody overmuch confidence about their analysis.

(Many here hoped that the recently-defunct Jesus Project would at last be a serious attempt at this type of serious investigation from first principles, but that fell through.)

bacht

But what about the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox church, the Protestant churches, the seminaries and divinity schools, don't these organizations have a lot at stake in the MJ vs HJ debate? Granted some atheists or mythicists might make a little on book sales but there are many many volumes in the bookstores I visit which build on some kind of historical Jesus.

Would you dispute that skeptics have always been a minority compared to believers in religion and supernatural phenomena? Have people really changed that much since the days of Copernicus and Galileo?