Toto

This excerpt appears to be reporting what "critics" or the "higher critisicm" believes, not what Catholic doctrine entails. But I would have to read it more carefully.

edited to add: read the paragraph a little above that section:

Vorkosigan

Got Messiah Myth today. Read first 54 pages. Very good stuff, lots of insights. Deals with mythicism at the level of tropes common throughout the ANE. Has some great tidbits. Can't to finish this weekend and post larger review.

GakuseiDon

Has Thompson shown that the patriarchal legends ARE mere myth, then? That there is no historical core at the centre of the myths? I'm not trying to be funny, I'm genuinely interested. It just seems that Thompson's views (at least as can be gleaned from Doudna's article) seems to be consistent with late 19th C textual criticism. What is the new direction that Thompson's views created in the 1970s?

Bede

Isn't it more likely that Thompson's initial submission wasn't good enough so he had to work part time while he did some rewriting? This is quite a common occurence. The Crosstalk post sounds like a fiction trying to make Thompson into a hero while denigrating the pope.

I'd like to see some primary evidence but I expect we will be denied this.

Best wishes

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

Vorkosigan

OMIGAWD! Clear the area! The Pope's been denigrated! Oh! the humanity!

Hey Bede, the post wasn't even to Crosstalk but to ANE! <howls with laughter> If you weren't so knee-jerk in your Defend-the-Pope response, you probably would catch little details like that.

Vorkosigan

andrewcriddle

Thompson IIUC sought to refute the claims by Albright and others that the patriarchal narratives were based on customs and practices otherwise found only in 2nd millenium BCE material such as the tablets from Mari.

Thompson argued that some of the parallels were dubious and others were not confined to the 2nd millenium BCE.

This sort of argument does not disprove historicity but does undermine one of the main arguments for historicity.

Thompson's negative results on this point appear to have been accepted by most scholars (at least in the form that the Mari type material may or may not be relevant to understanding the patriarchal narratives but it is useless in dating them) whereas van Seters' positive claim that the patriarchal narratives originate after the exile remains much more controversial.

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

IF this is more or less accurate it almost suggests that Ratzinger was concerned not with the specific problem of the historicity of the Patriarchs but with the more general problem of the relation of historical to theological truth.

(Such issues would arise in an oral on systematic theology much more naturally and legitimately than the question 'did Abraham exist?')

ie Ratzinger may have seen Thompson's position on the Patriarchs as an expression of a more general skepticism about using religious texts for historical purposes.

(I must emphasise that this is pure guesswork. I have no positive information beyond the original post.)

Andrew Criddle

GakuseiDon

Thanks Andrew.

andrewcriddle

One problem with this story is chronology according to http://www.mapsofworld.com/list-of-p...-new-pope.html Ratzinger severed relations with Tubingen in 1969 as too liberal or Marxist or whatever.

According to http://journalofbiblicalstudies.org/...l_thompson.htm Thompson was a graduate student at Tubingen from 1963-1971. Apparently failing to obtain a doctorate there and finally being awarded one from Temple University in 1976 after the publication of his book The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives in 1974.

It would seem that the refusal of Tubingen to award Thompson a doctorate must have occurred 1970-1971 by which time Ratzinger had left Tubingen.

Andrew Criddle

Vorkosigan

Doudna's story says that Ratzinger prevented him from obtaining his PHD, something that I know from personal experience here in Taiwan that physical presence is unnecessary for. Hans Kungs, who Ratzi would later attack, was one of the people who encouraged him to take the job. In any case there is no indication that Thompson applied again in the period when Ratzinger wasn't there. So there is no inconsistency here. It's incredible that I have to defend Doudna and Thompson against an authoritarian shit like Ratzinger, who has suppressed progressive/creative types like Kung and Boff and Arns and Romero, attacked gays, and thinks that relativism is a form of dictatorship.

Beliefnet chronicles those years, apparently poor Ratzinger was exposed to the horrors of human autonomy there....
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/165/s..._2.html?rnd=62