spin

This is just highlights your discernment problems.


"the criterion of embarrassment is christian hermeneutic and not a tool of historians."

outhouse

Your mistake is that scholars are historians.

spin

This is just highlights your discernment problems.

The criterion of embarrassment supposedly concerns history, ie the realm of historians, not text scholars. We are not concerned with just any scholar but ones trained in history.

outhouse

Isnt this ignorance?

Scholars who write about history are called historians, are they or are they not spin?

spin

No. This is ignorance:

If you are a scholar trained in sub-atomic physics and you write about climate change, you cannot be called a climatologist. You need specific qualifications. You don't get a plastic surgeon to perform brain surgery. You need specific qualifications. The study of history involves not only a detailed knowledge of the historical context to be dealt with, but also training in historical methodology. As the historical context is not clear for the biblical literature and biblical scholars generally are not specifically trained to perform historical analyses, they generally are not historians. Anyone can write about history, be they scholars of any sort or not, but that per se doesn't make them historians.

ficino

Ralph Rodriguez' head-on critique of the criterion of embarrassment is in this very volume. I summarize his paper in #14 [should be 15 - mod] above.

rlogan

You don't seem to realize that you've just argued that if something is embarassing, we leave it out.

So had the embarassed Matthew been the author of Mark, it would not have been included in Mark. Except that it was. So by your reasoning it is not an embarassment.

This is the schizophrenic world of apologia where you get to argue both for and against the same position, but retain the one that supports faith.

outhouse

Unsubstatiated boloney, a weak attack on modern scholarships.

TedM

I know you hold the position that we can't know what people from other cultures must have been thinking or feeling in the past if they don't explicitly tell us. I consider that to be a rather convenience excuse to avoid applying reasonable standards based on human nature which really doesn't change near as much as you seem to think. IMO its nearly the equivalent of willful avoidance of rational thought, which is the antithesis therefore of the purpose of these forums. Your employment of this philosophy equates to a carte blanche convenient avoidance of all kinds of thinking.

TedM

Bizarre post. I'm not writing about Matthew as Mark, I'm writing about Matthew as Matthew. The embarrassment I'm talking about is with regard to Matthew. You are shifting the focus to Mark, yet apparently haven't read what I wrote about Mark. I said he may or may not have been embarrassed.