Peter Kirby

Hello lurkers, and thank you for joining me in this virtual interview. Spin, I have a few questions for you. If you don't mind, I'm sure the good people of IIDB at home would like to follow along.

My first question is, boxers or briefs? Sorry, I just had to ask.

My second question is, what is it about IIDB BC&H that you like?

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spin

Confusious would go for boxers -- I think there's some Manchurian in him. I think boxers allow for too much hang.

Quid pro quo: which hand do you wipe with when taking care of business?

The macrame classes. No, better, you can get your brain dirty at IIDB BC&H. It's terrible to finish without ever taking it out of the box.


spin

Peter Kirby

I wipe with the right, spin.

And you are certainly known as an "out of the box" kind of guy.

Moving right along...

Your most successful thread ever, judged by post counts and view counts, has been "How do we date the Pauline corpus from scratch?" which got a followup along the same lines a year later. What have we learned from this exercise?

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spin

Hell, my mother taught me to use paper.

I wouldn't judge success with length of threads. That's like judging novelists by number of pages. Think of James A. Michener.

The date of Paul is still up in the air. It's one of those "ho-hum, this has been known for millennia so what's he on about" subjects. I still don't really know if the institutionized thought on the subject is valid or not. I certainly haven't seen any conclusive evidence on the matter. What usually happens is that circumstances get worked upon to build a hypothetical scenario for dating Paul to the current status quo date. Hopefully as we've seen with the Damascus in a basket during the reign of Aretas IV case, we can discount that approach. Approaches using Acts seem to fail because we cannot date that text to the time it purports to deal with, nor can we validify any of the foreground material in it. I have no tickets in the race, so if anyone can get a winner home I'll be happy. As it is Paul still seems undatable. And dating is essential when trying to work out historical developments.

I think there have been better threads.


spin

Peter Kirby

Well, then, let's take one of your least viewed and commented threads, The development of ideas. What accounts for this thread's relative obscurity, and what would you like people to note about it?

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spin

I guess for BC&H it might be a matter of timing. Or perhaps the thought wasn't well-enough expressed. The good thing about the substance in this thread is that I think we have a slightly less cocky approach to the development of traditions -- a better word here than the less specific "ideas" in the thread in question. I've used the content in other threads and now I've seen people here who mention Ebion as an example of a tradition which did not arise from a real person.

Once we start to get into traditions we learn that we are no longer dealing with truths and lies. The processes involved in the developments of religions are much more complex and subtle, and we probably have buckley's of getting to the sources of these traditions, because they tend to disappear off the map when we get back far enough.


spin

Peter Kirby

The 9th century Zen master Linji reportedly said, "If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him." I don't know what he meant by that, but I think it has something to do with truth, lies, and following traditions. What kind of koan would you suggest to awaken the typical biblical scholar to the complexity of religion's development?

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spin

How about beautiful sex with a Shintoist? (I'll leave you to eke out a koan from that.)


spin

Peter Kirby

Do you mean, they might see past their noses if they were intimate with another religious tradition? Or, explain.

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spin

I thought koans were fundamentally unexplainable. You get what you can out of them.

What does it take for a young student, a bible-belter, to become a liberal HJ believer? There is some kind of conversion that takes place. A typical scenario is someone who has just come out of a backwoods bible-belter college and wants to learn more so they go to a big-smoke university and they start losing their religion. But how? They get into a fast crowd who have a more analytical approach to the literature and these are the people you have to compete with to get on. The adjustment requires a great change of approach to the literature and what you expect from it. This I think was the road taken by Bart Ehrman. Ehrman seems to have gone a little further once he had a head of steam.

There are christian scholars who work hard to overcome their own presuppositions in an effort to get a better understanding of the forces at work in the literature they are studying. One example that comes to mind is Eugene Ulrich and his work with the development of the Hebrew bible text traditions from Dead Sea Scrolls evidence. In one example he lays out what he considers the things that will get in the way of his own analysis, so as to keep them in mind as he goes. Great stuff.

It's very hard for any of us to to get beyond our presuppositions. We should be happy if we are aware of even a few traces of those presuppositions. It's in the interface with people different from ourselves that we can hope to shed them. It's the contrasts they display that should make us that slight more aware. It's probably faster and more dramatic with the Shintoist.


spin