Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Toto · 12-18-2005, 10:44 PM

In an op-ed piece in the Sunday LA Times, Charlotte Allen claims that Jesus Skeptics are on the run. (Allen has previously written about the Jesus Seminar for Lingua Franca and is the author of The Human Christ. She is currently co-edits a blog for the anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum, funded by the Sarah Scaife Foundation and other right wing players.)

Her evidence? Anne Rice's new novelistic treatment of Jesus' childhood came out about the same time that Robert Funk of the Jesus Semiar died.

Quote:

Funk's death and Rice's novel constitute a kind of symbolic marker of the passing of a brand of dogmatic hyper-skepticism toward the Gospels and the rise of a new and more generous biblical scholarship that holds, contra the seminar, that the Gospels and other New Testament writings constitute virtually our only record of what Jesus said and did. These scholars contend that there is no point in trying to deconstruct the Gospels to find the "real" Jesus. They maintain there is nothing in the historical or archeolological record of the 1st century that makes the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life inherently implausible.

How neatly Allen makes "not inherently implausible" the equivalent of "historically believable."

Allen touches on the rise of Ben Witherington III, Luke Timothy Johnson, and NT Wright on the quote circuit, and ends with

Quote:

We know from the historical record that the Judean hills abounded with shepherds because crops couldn't grow there; that Herod was a paranoid, homicidal maniac; that sea transportation was excellent by ancient standards — so it was not out of the question, as Rice tells it, for Jesus' fleeing family to live among the large Jewish population of Egypt's Alexandria and learn Greek. We know something about the intense, proud, hopeful, family-centered Jewish piety that flourished amid the violence of those times. We cannot prove anything about angels or a star or a virgin birth. But thanks to Rice and the scholars who preceded her, we do not have to feel like ignoramuses should we choose to believe these things.

The muddleheadedness of this approach is breathtaking. Allen wants to believe in Christian doctrine, but doesn't want to feel like an idiot, so she has searched out a rationalization that other smart people think will do, and now she's happy.

freigeister · 12-19-2005, 10:37 AM

Charlotte Allen did some writing for a publishing project that I worked on.

This project was designed to serve as a key component in the traditionalist counter-attack against The Jesus Seminar and other liberal tendencies. At the time, the hope was that historical research would support the traditionalist outlook. That didn't really work out.

Traditionalism is in a very weak position. In the end, all they have is hope for a future revival. Hence people like Allen see hopeful signs everywhere: death of a liberal, hopeful sign; publication of a traditionalist novel, hopeful sign; mass media presence of conservative theologians, hopeful sign.

Traditionalism cannot accept the radical democratization of spiritual outlook. For the traditionalists, there must be one right way of believing. But the traditionalists are not alone in this approach. There is an element of it among some sceptics. Some of these claim that the only logical and scientific belief is that either Christ never lived or that it is impossible to assert that he did so. To the extent that skepticism is seen by the masses as something compulsory, it will have the same fate as traditionalism.

I don't know why people can't keep in mind the words of that great Christian Gnostic, Clement of Alexandria: "There is but one river of truth, but many streams pour into it from this side and from that."

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12-19-2005, 10:37 AM	#2
freigeister Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Posts: 503	Charlotte Allen did some writing for a publishing project that I worked on. This project was designed to serve as a key component in the traditionalist counter-attack against The Jesus Seminar and other liberal tendencies. At the time, the hope was that historical research would support the traditionalist outlook. That didn't really work out. Traditionalism is in a very weak position. In the end, all they have is hope for a future revival. Hence people like Allen see hopeful signs everywhere: death of a liberal, hopeful sign; publication of a traditionalist novel, hopeful sign; mass media presence of conservative theologians, hopeful sign. Traditionalism cannot accept the radical democratization of spiritual outlook. For the traditionalists, there must be one right way of believing. But the traditionalists are not alone in this approach. There is an element of it among some sceptics. Some of these claim that the only logical and scientific belief is that either Christ never lived or that it is impossible to assert that he did so. To the extent that skepticism is seen by the masses as something compulsory, it will have the same fate as traditionalism. I don't know why people can't keep in mind the words of that great Christian Gnostic, Clement of Alexandria: "There is but one river of truth, but many streams pour into it from this side and from that."

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