Christmas reflections

[Josh]

[alliebath]

Josh, I was not doubting a common authorship of Luke-Acts; however, I was doubting that it was written by Luke, in spite of the first person narration. It is unlikely that any of the great speeches of Acts were verbatim, but rather composed by the author. It was the thing to have speeches, rather like Bollywood films break into musical numbers.

You are working from assumption of a literal truth presented in everything that is written in the New Testament. I cannot accept that, because of the nature of the writings in cultural context.

There are so many inconsistencies from the various records to make, for me, a literal acceptance an option.

Reading accounts of the development of the Church, such as presented by Bart Ehrman etc., show quite clearly how there are distinct biases produced—such as the deliberate misinterpretation of ‘maiden’ for ‘virgin’, the use of psalms and prophetic announcements to be tailored to fit a ‘Jesus’ acceptable to the Chuch as well as to fit the story of ‘Jesus’ into a prelaid pattern.

The development from Mark’s account into Matthew’s and Luke’s is significant. By the time of the Fourth Gospel, the Jesus of mark is pretty much unrecognisable.

Now I am not trying to do a Schliemann and assume that excavating bedrock must mean the true city of Troy. But we do need to excavate and record.

With the documents from Qumran, a greater knowledge of Samaritan texts, the discoveries of Nag Hammadi and so on, we now know, for example, how redefined even the Masoretic Text is—which was the text used by Luther and Tyndale to get back to the original Hebrew. There is a much greater flux than stability.

I think this is good—we have to be challenged in all our assumptions.

After all the ‘Jesus’ of experienced faith always has to be interpreted according to our own personal, cultural and linguistic understanding. We do not know the truth, only our perception of it.

[Josh]

[JRosemary]

[alliebath]

[Josh]

[alliebath]

I would agree that the very last logion of the Gospel of Thomas is decidedly odd, given elsewhere Jesus distinctly uncharacteristic love of mixing with women and treating them as equal to men. But that is one logion. An equally strnage an odd pericope of the canonical gospels is Jesus cursing a fig tree ouut of season that does not produce grapes. There is much to nitpick over in both canonical and non-canonoical gospels.

The ending of the Lord’s Prayer, of course, is developed from another non-canonical source, The Didache.

You assume a patina of wisdom for the Church Fathers because that is how they are regarded—but we can actually see in their writings, both Jerome and Augustine on Pelagius for example, an attititude of pettiness and spite. It does not reflect well on them or on the new orthodoxy they are promoting—which wisely not all the Church bought into (notably the eastern Orthodox Church).

I have explained the difference between the Fourth Gospel and the Synoptics before. But take note of this. Oddly Jesus refers throughout the Fourth Gospel to ‘the Jews’—which is odd and seems to indicate that from the writer’s perspective Jesus is not one of them. Not surpisingly as this was written long after Jesus died and after the split of the Church from Judaism. The day of the last meal is not a Passover in the Foruth Gospel. The names of the dsiciples are different. The way in which Andrew becomes a disciple is different. Jesus constantly uses ‘I am’ in the Foruth Gospel and talks as if he knows he is divine: this is not the case in Mark’s Gospel. for example, with the ‘Messianic secret’, and Jesus being unsure whether the Son of Man (a title not used at all in the Fourth Gospel) is he himself. There is no mention of a belovèd disciple in the Synoptics as more favoured, for example, than Peter. The list is endless… and this is just from memory.

Ask any unbiased reader and they could spot all of these differences quite easily, because they are intentional—the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel is portrayed as a different sort of person from the Jesus of Mark and the Synoptics as a whole. It is a far different theology—the understanding of the Holy Spirit, for example, and the coinherence of the Father and the Son. Mark can easily be read (as Paul) to portray Jesus as a human being who becomes God’s chosen agent, ie. Lord, (in Mark) through baptism and in Paul (through his death and resurrection). Rightly, in my view, the Gospel of Mark leaves what the resurrection is open. Matthew and Luke totally disagree about the resurrection, how it happened, who did wnat and how it came about and the fact that the disciples were either in Jerusalem or in Galilee. There is no agreement here at all.

But these are two writers expressing a different theological viewpoint about the significance of Jesus, so it is not surprising.

[Josh]

[alliebath]

Come on, Josh, there wasn’t a canon until circa 400, and by that time certain works had gained the patina of established texts.

You could well explain the parable of the fig tree to me—I dare say you can explain why in today’s lectionary we have Jesus using the example of David eating the shew bread and sharing it with his men during the time of the priesthood of Abiathar as well—although that is actually not what happened according to LXX, the MT and indeed the versions in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Sinfulness is not the answer.

The title ‘Lord’ used by Paul and Mark is not a divine title.

And yes, along with lots of scholars, including the ones who trained me, I do believe that Mark finishes where it does. Yes it is untidy for those who want a graphic physical resurrection, which is probably why Luke and Matthew wrote their gospels—although, as I have said, if Paul is comparing his revealtion of Jesus with that to Peter and the 500 at one time, it can quite clearly be argued it was not physical in any true bodily sense.

We have the same problem with the NT with reading into the text stuff that is not there. The early Church did it with Tanakh/the OT. There was no virgin going to give birth in Isaiah and her child was not said to be the coming Messiah. Prophets spoke to their own day and age. there was always the ‘when the boat comes in’ Day of the Lord expectation when all would be put right, but really the prophets were concerned telling forthrightly their contemporaries to start acting justly and mercifully and godly. We just reduce all their message to mere caricature otherwise.

The early Church just broke up the text of Tanakh and sieved it out of anything that could not be adopted or adapted into the perceived story of Jesus, and also manoeuvred the story to fit the ‘facts’—hence Bethlehem, never mentioned in the body of the texts of Matthew and Luke.

Now I am not accusing them of deliberately lying—it was just their way of contracting stories to present Jesus in the light they wanted to. There was no copyright in those days and a great fluidity as to facts. We can see in both Herodotos and Josephus, for instance, that dated references often need amending, and Herodotos and Josephus repeat a story with different conclusions.

There is some thought that this a literary technique, almost like the schema of a developing child, so Abraham and Sarah get ‘mistaken’ for brother and sister twice, as does Isaac and Rebecca. Ramesses II regular used other Pharaohs statues as his own, and Ramesses III attached other Pharaoh’s victories to his own records. Is Merenptah’s Victory Stele with the first mention of Israel his, or actually his father’s campaigns?

The texts do not all work together in the NT to present a consistent picture—that is challenging, exciting and, in my opinion, right and proper. We have so many different understandings of the texts of the NT over two millennia, and they will continue to be understood differently. Some of the truth of those texts, I would also opine, is totally hidden from christians because we fail to get past the blind spots that we have in our understanding. Maybe Hindus and Wiccans can find different aspects of the truth—but that is well and truly God’s wicked sense of humour—wonderfully portrayed in the book of Job, which knocks all pious assumptions into touch!

[alliebath]

Pete, suggested dates for the books of the NT and other writings.

[alliebath]

[Josh]

[alliebath]

Just for the moment taking the concept of Church and sinfulness. My worry is about blanket labelling things as sin or sinfulness. Some of the divisions in the Church could quite easily be seen as growth nodes, thinking organically. The wrongness was and is in trying to develop some pure and right thinking and acting Church—that is basically fascism with a religious face. Ironically, I think Paul was good as a challenge for the ealry Jerusalem Church, what was wrong was his theological dominance of the successive direction of Christianity.

The word ‘sin’ and its family of word-development has taken on a life of its own and become church-speak. And especially sin has become—it would seem—closely associated with anything sexual in the minds of certain Christians. It is parallel to the word ‘messenger’, which suddenly has become always translated into the strange and peculaiar concept of ‘angel’, from which has developed a whole plethora of understandings and concepts and imagery. It would be much clearer and more consistent if we got rid of ‘angel’ all together, along with the nativity tinsel and translated everything accurately as ‘messenger’ or ‘messengers’. Sin in both Hebrew and Greek is mis-hitting, a wrong shot. You can’t be mired in a wrong shot—you can retrieve the arrow or you can shoot again with another one, and learn from the experience.

We talk as Christians in techno-babble basically. ‘Being saved from sin’—what does it actually mean? The words are obviously used to describe a personal sense of emotion and spiritual awareness , and for those ‘in the know’ that might mean they are using a technical term to equate similar or parallel experiences. But beyond that, it is rather like a game of Mornington Crescent.

[Josh]

[alliebath]

Well, very many evangelical Christians have talked to me about knowing they are saved through such an emotional and spiritual experience—and I would argue that the basis of any relationship with divine has to be some sort of ‘wow’ feeling, otherwise we are all just involved in some sort of pointless intellectual exercise.

It would also seem to go against the biblical record when Jesus healed people there seems to be some sort of experiential change which is more than just the healing. People felt amazement, they were staggered, and that was just the onlookers!

Ecstasy started off as a religious word—the awareness of standing without the norm.

So ‘salvation’ in your terms is not personal? So we can we throw out the whole of mystical experience as mere emotionalism?

There is no connection with this historic event in 1st century Judaea in any way other than to note it mentally? It just happened and that is the state of things?

That seems a very cold faith, Josh—but, perhaps, very Calvinistic? It has the distinct dryness of a legal report.