Vorkosigan

That must have been Vinnie. No, I don't recommend purchasing this book. Get it on the Interlibrary and read it just to say that you have. It ain't worth the paper it is printed on. It is a chatty, shallow collection, blandly inoffensive.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Ha! It was me after all who recommended this one to you, Sec, as you have kindly pointed out. My abject apologies, for being wrong AND even more for recommending such a dud.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

If you look at Crossan's treatment of the narrative, you can see what I mean by the way people believe that if the narrative is discredited, the history is discredited. When he writes on the PN, he notes that it is constructed out of various OT proof-texts, a common perception in the field. From that, he concludes that it must be a fiction, created because the disciples did not know what happened at the Crucifixion. Doherty also has a long section making the same point. From their different angles, both are in general agreement as to the historicity of the passion narrative.

So, here is the conventional position adhered to by both mythicists and historicists. The narrative is discredited, therefore it ain't history. Hold that thought.

Now, Crossan chops up the gospels into complexes which he uses to ascertain the nascent movement's political and social positions. This sociopolitical approach is often used to understand the gospels, in two basic ways. First, like Crossan, they are used to shed light on the practices of early Christianity. For example, do the sayings about bread and fish give us information about what meals the early Christians might have had? The data here speaks only to the sociopolitical -- Christians probably had communal meals, but I doubt that the apostles met Jesus while out fishing as in John 21. Thus, the history here is gathered by analyzing the complexes as social background rather than as narrative history.

You can see where mythicists have not really paid attention to that. They tend to dismiss the background data as mere background -- whatever the movement did and thought, it has no connection to the HJ and is unimportant to our writing. HJ was a myth; ipso facto, any sociocultural data on early Christians can only connect to the movement. It's might be a correct assumption, but it is still an assumption, and probably needs to be drawn out and defended in more depth, positively.

The second sociopolitical attack is to see the various data as showing faction fights between different Christian groups, like Price, or the way Timothy is often read to see a counterattack on the power of women in the early Church.

Now, back to Crossan. In tackling the Temple Destroyed and Raised in Three Days, Crossan flip-flops between these two positions. He wants to regard the Temple event as sociopolitical data. The complex tells us something about the early Christian movement. He reads it symbolically -- Jesus spoke of the destruction of the Temple in symbolic terms, and then later it was physcially destroyed, and the two stories merged.

But Crossan won't give up the narrative history. He just can't let it go. On p360 he then goes on to try to make it historical, speculating that Jesus made this speech, or some other egalitarian speech, in the Temple during festival and that is what got him arrested, thus preserving the sequence of Temple-Disturbance-Arrest in the gospels, even though he has just discredited the narrative by treating it as symbolic. Worse, he completely fails to present the arguments often made that the Temple incident is also constructed from the OT like the passion narrative (although, now that I think of it, I can't remember where I last read that argument).

Anyway, I hope this is clear. I'll put it in the review.

Vorkosigan

Llyricist

Well it seems to me that the only thing the socio-political data CAN show is the movement's doctrines and beliefs. It doesn't attest one way or another to the existence of an HJ. Especially after all the historical data about the alleged PERSON is acknowledged as fiction! That is, if Jesus didn't do any of the things attributed to him.....who in heck WAS he??

godfry n. glad

Ahhhh... At last... I'm no longer alone.

Long ago, I tried reading Sanders' _Historical Figure of Jesus_ and could not finish it. It, in my mind, was all retread. Protestant retread, but retread none-the-less. Yet, fellow enthusiasts continued to recommend it. I couldn't fathom it, and put it down to my own inadequacies. I even found F. F. Bruce far more interesting.

A superlative piece on Crossan and his work. You have put words to my as yet unformulated and indeterminate uneasiness with his engaging work. I just couldn't put my finger on what it was amongst the seductive prose that didn't quite scan...

Thanks.

godfry

Ted Hoffman

Thanks Vork.