squiz

Threnody: Rethinking the Thinking behind The Jesus Project
by R. Joseph Hoffman

http://www.bibleinterp.com/opeds/hoffman1044.shtml

No Robots

Thanks, squiz.

Here's one bit that stood out:

[T]he true miracle would have been for the NT to stand completely outside the limits of Hellenistic storytelling and the rudimentary historiographical interests of a religious community.

Hellenistic? Not a single hint of Jewish storytelling? Weird.

dog-on

Obvious.

No Robots

Obvious? You really think that the NT is Hellenistic rather Jewish literature?

dog-on

Yes.

No Robots

Well, that's okay coming from an anonymous web debater. But I find it surprising that this position is still held by people who see themselves as public scholars.

dog-on

I find it surprising that anyone could belive that the NT is not Hellenistic literature.

Regardless of who it is...

No Robots

The weird thing is that scholarly proponents of the view that the NT is Hellenistic literature seem to simply ignore the argument that it is Jewish literature. I mean, have any of the pro-Hellenistic scholars dealt with the Jewish scholarship on this issue? We have, for instance, this from Leo Baeck:

[T]he Gospel, which was originally something Jewish, becomes a book—and certainly not a minor work—within Jewish literature. This is not because, or not only because, it contains sentences which also appear in the same or a similar form in the Jewish works of that time. Nor is it such—in fact, it is even less so—because the Hebrew or Aramaic breaks again and again through the word forms and sentence formations of the Greek translation. Rather it is a Jewish book because—by all means and entirely because—the pure air of which it is full and which it breathes is that of the Holy Scriptures; because a Jewish spirit, and none other, lives in it; because Jewish faith and Jewish hope, Jewish suffering and Jewish distress, Jewish knowledge and Jewish expectations, and these alone, resound through it—a Jewish book in the midst of Jewish books. Judaism may not pass it by, nor mistake it, nor wish to give up all claims here. Here, too, Judaism should comprehend and take note of what is its own.--"The Gospel as a document of history." In Judaism and Christianity / Leo Baeck. Philadelphia : Jewish Publication Society of America, 1958. p. 101-102.

It seems slack that a scholar who rejects this view does not even bother to mention it.

dog-on

Possibly because it misses the giant elephant.

No Robots

Avoid mention of the Jewish background of the NT by asserting that its central figure is fictional? Curiouser and curiouser. I mean, you wouldn't say that, because Hamlet is a fictional character, "Hamlet" is not English literature, now would you?