DCHindley

Boy, same goes for R H Charles. I'm not sure what he is comparing Robinson's Nag Hammadi Library to ... perhaps the kind of speculations about Gnostics and their literature and beliefs put out by G. R. S. Mead at the turn of the 20th century (I am thinking of Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, 1900).

Charles is today charged with being somehow condescending towards Jews by uncritically accepting many stereotypical views about them prevelant in Christian circles of his day.

Mead's opinion of Irenaeus - that he was more interested in setting up straw dogs in order to poke fun at Gnostics than actually describing their literature and beliefs), is said by some today to have been demolished by publication of a large cross section of their actual writings (Meade essentially only had the Pistis Sophia and the Two Books of Jeu to use as examples of Gnostic literature at the time), which they believe vindicates his mocking opinion of the Gnostics - "Ha! Irenaeus was right all along ... those stupid gnostics!'

Funny, Charles' ecclectic reconstruction of 1 Enoch was closer to the Aramaic fragments from the DSS than is the translation of a single mss in Charlesworth's volume. His analysis of the organization of the book was spot on (one only need check J T Milik's Books of Enoch). I am also not so sure Mead was really wrong about Irenaeus, who still seems to be simply a more subdued version of the controversialist hack Epiphanius, and would do Rush Limbaugh proud.

DCH (taking the union mandated PM break)

Although far from perfect on a number of levels the Hennecke-Schneemelcher Neutestamenliche Apokryphen in Deutscher Ubersetzung was a pioneer work in the non-parochial study of extracanonical literature when it was first published in German, and in English translation in 1963, making the eccentric one-man collection of ghost-story writer M. R. James virtually useless. The same can be said of James Charlesworth’s editorial management in the translation of Old Testament apocrypha in relation to the 1913 collection edited by R. H. Charles and James Robinson’s production of a serviceable English edition of the Nag Hammadi materials.

Clivedurdle

After 300 years of this area of the ANE being Greek, how can you say Judaism and Greek thinking were not inextricably intertwined - they had a civil war about this. Most of the Jewish population of the med, Africa and middle east probably could not speak Hebrew, much as Muslims learns the koran in Arabic but do not speak arabic.

Greek mythology with Jewish themes is definitely worth exploring.

The Pharisees confusingly were probably more Greek thinking than most, in complete contradiction to the Gospels, which raises questions about are they a collection of viewpoints edited together after the destruction of the Temple to attempt a reunification under a new Joshua.

No Robots

Clive, that's fine, and worth discussing. However, in the case of Hoffmann here under discussion, it was the the reference to Hellenic story-telling without any mention of Jewish literature that I found interesting.

lpetrich

No Robots, why does that sort of thing bother you so much?

And who do you think holds the view that you describe as the "penultimate Western fantasy"?

For what reason?

show_no_mercy

Of course the most Greek aspect of the NT is the major premise of Christianity - that god came down to Earth in human form. There is absolutely nothing Jewish about that. How many Greek, Persian, and Roman kings were worshipped as a god [after death]? How many Jewish kings were worshipped as a god?

And then there's the Neoplatonic flesh/bad and spirit/good dichotomy that doesn't really exist in mainstream Judaism, but might be among the more ascetic/extremist versions of Judaism.

No Robots

How people respond to Christ, Christianity and the NT is fascinating. We find here a distillation of the whole of human science. I am interested in how people respond to the argument that the whole thing is essentially Jewish. Pushing this argument is a great way for me to test and promote Brunner's ideas.

Look at Hoffmann's reference to Hellenic story-telling, with no mention of Jewish literature. Look, I don't expect everyone to accept what I see as obvious. However, I don't see why I shouldn't take every opportunity I have to throw the idea out there.

For the same reason that I have to see "Hamlet" as English literature. It just seems obvious to me, now that it has been pointed out, that the NT is Jewish literature. It is the resistance to this idea that fascinates me now, because this resistance does, in my view, encapsulate so much of importance in the human sciences. I have my own thoughts about why people resist this, but I don't think that anything I have to say about that would be meaningful to people who have already made up their minds to resist it.

Huon

However, this Jewish literature (I do not contest this idea) has not been accepted by the religious Jews. The NT contains certainly some ideas which are not "kosher"... and where do they come from ?

Huon

not "kosher"... :
Heracles, son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene.
Jesus, son of God #1 and Mary (who belonged to a noble family, remember) ?

Jewish origins :
The name Jesus Christ is meaningless to an uninformed person. Yeshuah has not been translated into Greek (or Latin). What is a "massiah" in Greek or Latin ? Anointed, where do we find this ritual in the graeco-latin civilization ?
Christos, or Chrestos ???

No Robots

The literary/cultural analysis of the NT from a Jewish perspective is quite involved: Brunner's book is 500 pages! If you want to look at a decent introduction to the subject, see A Jewish View of Jesus by Hyman Gerson Enelow (1920).

There is a lot of mythologizing, a lot of poetry in the NT, but that mythologizing and poetry is a way of expressing truth. Here is Brunner on the Virgin Mother:

The Virgin Mother and much else is poetry—but we cannot do without it; there are things which can only be expressed poetically and which can only be assimilated into the consciousness through poetry.

The term "Son of God" is part of Jewish literature. It is Gentile theomorphizing that turned this into "God the Son." Part of the responsibility for this does lie with Paul's flirtation with Greek thought, and of course with the Prologue to John's Gospel. Christ's own preferred term for himself is "Son of Man."

Huon

How do you know that ? (apart from the gospels, of course, which have, of course, been written by some authors who knew personaly the Christ).