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I’m currently reading your book “Forged”…not sure whether I read this there or in the blog, but it puzzled me. You said the authors of Mark and Luke were not Jews? I’d somehow assumed the authors of all the Canonical Gospels were Jews – among the educated elite, of course, since they could write in Greek….  I’m sure the author of Matthew was a Jew, though very dissatisfied with some of his fellow Jews!

RESPONSE:

This comment is part of a larger question the reader had about Mark and Luke specifically – were they Jews? (I haven’t included the entire question here)  I have dealt with Mark already on the blog recently, arguing that he probably was not a Jew.  I’ll deal with Luke in a later post.   Here let me say something very briefly about Matthew.   I too tend to think that he was probably a Jew by birth and upbringing, who had converted to be a follower of Jesus.  But not everyone agrees.

One of the premier scholars of the NT and the historical Jesus is John Meier.   Before he began his massive four-volume (and counting!) study of the historical Jesus, called A Marginal Jew, he was principally known as an expert on the Gospel of Matthew.  Meier’s view was / is that Matthew was not a Jew.  And one of his pieces of evidence is very interesting.   In Matthew 21….

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The following is drawn from my old chapter 4.

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I was raised in the church from my infancy.   As a child I went to services and Sunday school, every week, in an Episcopal church in Lawrence Kansas; I was confirmed there and became an altar boy as soon as I could.   I continued serving all the way until college.   But when I was a junior in high school, as a fifteen-year old, I started to attend a weekly Youth for Christ club designed for high school kids with the goal of “converting” them to Christianity.   One might wonder –  as I do now, looking at things from the distance of many years and many experiences — what it was I was supposed to convert from.   I was already…

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The following is from what was originally going to be my Preface; it is the opening gambit.

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The issue that lies behind this book is simple but gripping.  Jesus was a lower-class Jewish preacher in the backwaters of rural Galilee who was condemned for illegal activities and crucified for crimes against the state.   Yet within several years his followers were claiming that he was a divine being.  Not long afterward they went even further, declaring that he was none other than God, Lord of heaven and earth.  And so the question:  How did a crucified peasant come to be thought of as the Lord who created all things?  How did Jesus become God?

Here in this Preface I can say with all candor that….

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Today I will finish out what I started to say yesterday.

Let me say again that I have long appreciated Spong’s work and am sympathetic to his mission.   He is trying to do from inside the church something very similar to what I am trying to do outside of it: help educated lay people outside the field of biblical scholarship see what scholars – believers and non-believers alike – are saying about the New Testament.

Since Spong is operating within the church, however, and sees himself as a Christian, some of his perspectives and goals are different from mine.   At the end of the day, he is interested in reforming Christianity in order to make it sensible for the twenty-first century.  That is not my goal, since I am not a Christian.  And it is this difference that,….

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The post Spong’s New Book on John: Part Two appeared first on Christianity in Antiquity (CIA): The Bart Ehrman Blog.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-shelby-spong/gospel-of-john-what-everyone-knows-about-the-fourth-gospel_b_3422026.html?ref=topbar

In the article Spong summarizes the conclusions he advances in the book, based on an “intensive five-year long study.” He acknowledges that many of his findings are those that scholars have held for a long time. Spong himself is not trained as a biblical scholar but has made a very successful, and useful, career out of making scholarship known to a wider audience. So too, his goal in the book, in large measure, is to bring major scholarship to a general reader, a goal I obviously sympathize with deeply.
The following are the points that he stresses in his HuPo article. I will comment on them from my perspective – with the caveat, once more, that I haven’t read what he adduces as evidence, only what he says in this article. I will respond to his views in two posts. Here are his first four major points.

1) There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus.

I absolutely agree; this is a common view among scholars.

2) There is probably not a single word attributed to Jesus in this book that the Jesus of history actually spoke

Well, that’s a bit extreme…..

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Where then did Israel come from?

In other words, if the Israelites did not conquer the Promised Land as narrated in Joshua, but Israel did at some point appear in the land of Canaan – where did they come from? The following is my very brief summation of the options

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Explanations for the Beginnings of Israel in the Land

Modern scholars have come up with a number of explanations for how the nation of Israel emerged within the land known as Canaan.  The following are the four most popular.

1. The Conquest Theory.   Popularized especially by American archaeologist William Albright in the mid-20^th century, this view more or less accepted the accounts of Joshua as factually accurate.  There really was a conquest of the land by the Israelites.  Because of more recent archaeological discoveries, few except the most theologically conservative scholars accept this view today.
2. The Immigration Theory.  Put forth most compellingly by German scholar Albrecht Alt, this theory indicates that a group of people entered into Canaan from the outside and settled in the sparsely inhabited highlands, only later to….

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This will be my final post, for now, on the problems with the Hebrew Bible.  I couldn’t resist one last set of comments on the historicity of the accounts narrated there, this time with respect to the stories in the book of Joshua about the Conquest of the Promised Land (Jericho and so on).   Here too I am citing what I lay out in my forthcoming textbook on the Bible

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When considering the historicity of the narratives of Joshua, the first thing to re-emphasize is that these are not accounts written by eyewitnesses or by anyone who knew an eyewitness.  They were written some 600 years later, and were based on oral traditions that had been in circulation among people in Israel during all those intervening centuries.  Moreover, they are clearly molded according to theological assumptions and perspectives.  Biblical scholars have long noted that there is almost nothing in the accounts that suggest that the author is trying to be purely descriptive of things that really happened.  He is writing an account that appears to be guided by his religious agenda, not by purely historical interests.  That is why, when read closely, one finds so many problems with the narratives.

• Internal discrepancies.   As we have seen, parts of Joshua stress that Joshua was fantastically successful in conquering the land: “Joshua defeated the whole land” (10:40); “Joshua took all that land” (11:16); “Joshua took the whole land” (11:23).  If it were true that Joshua took “all” the “whole” land – why are there so many parts of the land that the text admits were not taken?   The Deuteronomistic historian later has to acknowledge that when “Joshua was old…the LORD said to him ‘very much of the land still remains to be possessed’” (13:1).  And so we are told that Jerusalem had not yet been taken (15:63); or parts of Ephraim (16:10); or parts of Manasseh (17:12-13).  At the end of the book Joshua has to persuade the people to drive out the natives living in the land (23:5-13).
• Tensions with other Accounts.  A similar problem arises between Joshua and other books of the Deuteronomistic history.  In ch. 11, for example, the Israelite forces completely annihilate the city of Hazor: “they put to the sword all who were in it, utterly destroying them; there was no one left who breathed, and he burned Hazor with fire.”  If that were true, why is it that in the next book, Judges, the Canaanites still very much live in and control Hazor, under their king Jabin, whose powerful army afflicted and oppressed the Israelites (Judges 4)?
• General Implausibilities.  A number of the stories in Joshua are so chock-full of the miraculous that historians simply cannot deal with them as historical narratives (see the excursus in ch. 1).  None of the miracles is more striking than the account in ch. 10, where the Israelite armies are having such a huge success, routing the coalition of kings aligned against them that Joshua cries out to the sun to stop its movement in the sky.  And the sun stands still at high noon for twenty-four hours before moving on again, giving the Israelites ample time to complete the slaughter.   As readers have long ntoed, it would be a miracle indeed if the earth suddenly stopped rotating on its axis for a day and then started up again, with no disturbance to the oceans, land masses, and life itself!
• External Verification and Archaeology.  For biblical scholars, just as significant is the surviving physical evidence (or rather lack of it) for the conquest.  Archaeologists have long noted that there is scant support for the kind of violent destruction of the cities of Canaan – especially the ones mentioned in Joshua.  Think for a second: if one were to look for archaeological evidence, or other external verification, to support the historical narratives of Joshua, what would one look for?
  • References to the invasion and conquest in other written sources outside the Bible.
  • Evidence that there were indeed walled cities and towns in Canaan at the time.
  • Archaeological evidence that the cities and towns mentioned actually were destroyed at the time (Jericho, Ai, Heshbon, etc.).
  • Shift in cultural patterns: that is, evidence of new people taking over from other peoples of a different culture (as you get in the Americas when Europeans came over bringing with them their own culture, different from that of the native Americans).

And what kind of verification do we actually get for the narratives of Joshua?  The answer appears to be: none of the above.  There are no references in any other ancient source to a massive destruction of the cities of Canaan.   Archaeologists have discovered that few of the places mentioned were walled towns at the time.   Many of the specific cities cited as places of conquest apparently did not even exist as cities at the time.  This includes, most notably, Jericho, which was not inhabited in the late 13^th century BCE, as archaeologists have decisively shown (see box 4.2).   The same thing applies to Ai and Heshbon.  These cities were neither occupied, nor conquered, nor re-inhabited in the days of Joshua.  Moreover, there is no evidence of major shifts in cultural patterns taking place at the end of the 13^th century in Canaan.   There are, to be sure, some indications that some towns in Canaan were destroyed at about that time (two of the twenty places mentioned as being destroyed by Joshua were wiped out at about the right time: Hazor and Bethel)  But that is true of virtually every time in antiquity: occasionally towns were destroyed by other towns or burned or otherwise abandoned.

We are left, then, with a very big problem.  The accounts in Joshua appear to be non-historical in many respects.  This creates a dilemma for historians, since two things are perfectly clear:  (a) eventually there was a nation Israel living in the land of Canaan; but (b) there is no evidence that it got there by entering in from the East and destroying all the major cities in a series of violent military campaigns.  Where then did Israel come from?

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Exodus from a Historical Perspective

It has proved difficult for biblical scholars to establish when these events are to have taken place.  The most common dating of the exodus event places it around 1250 BCE, both because the text indicates that the Israelites had been in Egypt for 430 years (which would coincide roughly with the narrative of Genesis, when Joseph would have gone to Egypt at the beginning of the 17^th century BCE, according to the chronology we adopted there) and because of two other considerations.

The first is a hint provided in Exod. 1:11, that the Hebrew slaves were forced to build the cities of Pi-Ramses and Pithon; both cities actually were rebuilt or reoccupied in the mid-13^th century BCE.  The second is an archaeological discovery of a stele (a stone pillar) erected at the end of the 13^th century by the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah (who ruled 1213-1203 BCE).   On this stele is an inscription in which….

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The internal tensions came to be seen as particularly significant.  Nowhere were these tensions more evident than in the opening accounts of the very first book of the Pentateuch, in the creation stories of Genesis chapters 1 and 2.   Scholars came to recognize that what is said in Genesis 1 cannot be easily (or at all) reconciled with what is said in Genesis 2.  These do not appear to be two complementary accounts of how the creation took place; they appear to be two accounts that are at odds with each other in fundamental and striking ways.  Read them carefully yourself.  Make a list of what happens in chapter one, then a list of what happens in chapter 2, and compare your lists.  Among other things you will notice the following:

• According to Genesis 1, plants were created on the third day; only later, on the sixth day, were humans created.  But not according to Genesis 2.  There we are told that “the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground” before there were any plants or herbs on the earth (2:4, 7).
• According to Genesis 1, all the animals, of all kinds, were created before humans, on the fifth and sixth days.  But according to Genesis 2….

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