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Does Luke Combat a Docetic Christology?
QUESTION: There are some scholars who believe that the resurrection story found in Luke’s gospel is an antidocetic narrative ( Gerd Ludemann and Charles Talbert, for instance). According to these scholars when the risen Jesus performs acts designed to show his disciples that he has an actual body of flesh and isn’t some phantom or demon, the story is designed to refute the heresy of docetism that existed during the time that Luke wrote his gospel. I have never seen convincing evidence for this. What is your take on this? Do you agree with these scholars? If so, why? If not, what is your opinion? RESPONSE: Yeah, this is a tough one. I think I need to provide some background for some of the people reading the blog. The term “Docetism” comes from the Greek word dokeo which means “to seem” or “to appear.” The term came to be used in reference to certain Christians and Christian groups who maintained that Jesus was not a real flesh and blood being, but that he only “seemed” […]
- Canonical Gospels
- Early Christian Doctrine
- Heresy and Orthodoxy
- History of Biblical Scholarship
- Reader’s Questions
Tags: docetism, Gospel of Luke
September 24, 2012
The Bible as History and Theology
QUESTION: Would you please explain more on the differences between Biblical history and theology? Is it difficult as an historian to keep these separate in your personal beliefs? RESPONSE: I was all set to write up an answer to this question, but then as I was plotting it out, it occurred to me that I was just going to say what I had already said in the Excursus to the first chapter of my Bible Intro. And so I’ve decided just to give that. I hope you don’t mind! If there are further questions from anyone, or need for clarification, do let me know. Here’s what I tell my student-readers at the beginning of the book, to explain the difference between a theological (or confessional) approach to the Bible and a historical approach. __________________________________________________________________________ EXCURSUS Most of the people who are deeply interested in the Bible in modern American culture are committed Jews or Christians who have been taught that this is a book of sacred texts, Scripture, unlike other books. For many of these […]
Tags: Biblical history, biblical theology
September 26, 2012
More on Faith and History
I have decided that one way to deal with all the comments that I get on the blog is to respond more directly, right away, and at length here by way of a new post rather than by (a) responding quickly in a comment on the comment in the comment section or (b) adding the comment to my long and getting longer list of comments and questions that I slowly work through one at a time to form the basis of some of my posts. So I got a number of responses to my post yesterday about faith and history – some on the blog itself and some via emails (I prefer questions/comments on the blog itself, by the way, as I can deal with them more efficiently. In case anyone should ask you which I prefer 🙂 . Some of these comments were all heading in the same direction, and were made, I think, because (can you imagine it?) I was not as clear as I could be in what I was trying to […]
Faith, History, and Isaiah 7
A QUESTION ARISING OUT OF MY DISCUSSION OF FAITH AND HISTORY, IN REFERENCE TO AN EARLIER POST ON ISAIAH AND THE VIRGIN BIRTH QUESTION: I know that you posted something on the virgin birth in Isaiah in the past (which I think was in fact an excerpt from your forthcoming Bible Intro book) – but can you elaborate how you will apply your approach you discuss here with passages such as Isaiah 7 where there is debate around whether it is a prophecy referring to Jesus or not. Will you take a hardline interpretation and saying it must not be referring to Jesus, or will you just outline the major interpretations and stay neutral so the reader doesn’t know how you personally interpret it? RESPONSE: It’s a good question, and I do indeed have a firm opinion about it. My opinion is not very idiosyncratic; it is simply rooted in the “historical method” that I prefer to use when reading ancient texts. If you look at Isaiah of Jerusalem living in the 8th century BCE, […]
Tags: biblical interpretation, Isaiah 7
September 27, 2012
Jesus and the Historical Criteria
QUESTION: I’ve seen, somewhere on the internet (I know, great source!) some discussion that modern scholarship is moving away from the idea of criteria (such as multiple attestation, dissimilarity, etc.) and that the use of criteria is becoming seen as outmoded. Is there any truth to this, or were these sources just blowing RESPONSE: This question is about the criteria that scholars use to establish historically reliable material about the historical Jesus. For background: there are several criteria that get used; the two most common are independent attestation and dissimilarity. To make sense of them, one needs to realize what was happening to the traditions of Jesus as they were being circulated, mainly by word of mouth, in the Roman empire. It’s a long story. The short version of it is this: stories were being changed by the story-tellers and some stories were being made up. There’s simply no way around this, from a historical perspective. Just about the only ones who disagree are people who have theological reasons for thinking that every single […]
Tags: criterion of dissimilarity, independent attestation, the historical Jesus
September 29, 2012
Blog Preferences
To: Members of the CIA. And potential members of the CIA. And anyone else who wants to be involved. From: The Director of the CIA Re: Overt operations OK, so here’s the deal. A couple of weeks ago I published a post indicating how we were doing now just over five months into this blog. A number of you commented about the number of posts that I’m doing, many of you (not all) indicating that it seemed like a lot, and some (not all) suggesting that fewer might be better. That got me thinking. I wonder if some people are turned off by the blog because there is simply too much information on it, and it’s a drag feeling like one has to plow through it all. That, obviously, would be counterproductive for what I want to achieve (which is maximum subscribers, to raise as much money for charity as I can). And so it occurred to me: maybe I should simply ask you, the readers, what you would prefer. So this is a kind […]
October 1, 2012
More on the Criterion of Independent Attestation
QUESTION: Re. multiple attestation: would you elaborate on how these sources are truly independent. I’ve read comments by mythicists and others that state that all the sources actually go back to one source and that any differences in the gospel accounts can be accounted for by the theological views or the ‘agenda’ of the particular author, e.g. Matt 5:17 or Mark 3:21 (and, of course, accounted for by simple miscommunications thru’ generations). Also, please forgive me for asking a stupid question….are there any accounts found in the gospels that pass all three criteria but which you don’t think actually happened? RESPONSE: Yes, once you dig deeper into the question of “independent attestation,” the trickier it gets. Technically, the term refers to sources that have not used one another for their accounts. And so, for example, whoever wrote Mark did not have access to Q, and Q did not have access to Mark; M did not have access to John’s Signs Source, and vice versa; Paul did not know Matthew and vice versa; etc. The matter […]
The Next Project: How Jesus Became God
Now that I have finished my Bible Introduction (a dozen or so scholar-teachers are reading it now to tell me what they think; so I have a month to move on to do other things), I am starting in on the next big project, my long-ago promised book “How Jesus Became God”. People have known about this book for years, and keep asking me when I’m going to write the thing. The answer is: Now! So the deal is this. I was two weeks away from starting to write the book back in 2005. I had done all the research for it and was literally ready to begin. I had a contract with Oxford University Press, I had the book completely outlined, I was ready to roll. As fate would have it, I had to make a trip up to New York City in order to … I don’t know what I was doing. Probably just going up for pleasure. Sarah and I try to get to NYC at least once a semester, and for […]
Tags: How Jesus Became God
October 2, 2012
The Resurrection as a Key to Early Understandings of Jesus
A key part of my book on “How Jesus Became God” will involve a discussion of Jesus’ resurrection. One can make the case, rather easily, that apart from the Christian belief that God raised Jesus from the dead not only would no one ever have thought of him as God (since, as I will be arguing, no one thought of him as God while he was living – he himself almost certainly did not!) but that Christianity itself would not exist apart from the belief in the resurrection. One can’t argue that Christianity started with the life and teachings of Jesus, per se, since what he taught (I’m speaking about the historical man Jesus, not the Jesus who is portrayed in the Gospels – especially the Gospel of John) is not what Christians teach. That sounds weird, but it’s true. In a nut shell, Jesus taught that the end of the age was imminent, that God was soon to send from heaven the son of man in judgment to destroy the forces of evil and […]
Tags: messiah, resurrection
October 3, 2012
Gerd Lüdemann on the Resurrection of Jesus
Gerd Ludemann the Resurrection of Jesus. One of the first books that I have re-read in thinking about how it is the man Jesus came to be thought of as God is Gerd Lüdemann’s, The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry (2004). Lüdemann is an important and interesting scholar. He was a professor of New Testament at Göttingen in Germany, and for a number of years split his time between there and Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville. He is a major figure in scholarship and is noteworthy for not being a Christian. He does not believe Jesus was literally, physically, raised from the dead, and he thinks that apart from belief in Jesus’ physical resurrection, it is not possible for a person to be Christian. This book is written for people with a lot of background in New Testament studies. It is exegetically based, meaning that he goes into a detailed examination of key passages to uncover their literary meaning, but he is ultimately interested in historical questions of what really happened. To follow his […]
Tags: Gerd Lüdemann, resurrection
October 5, 2012
Paul’s View of Resurrection
QUESTIONS: So if, as you say, Paul believed in a ‘physical resurrection of the body ( = of the corpse, right?) of Jesus’ then why did he never refer to an empty tomb or to the discovery of such an empty tomb by the apostles in his letters although that would have fitted well at occasions? Also, and I know we have discussed these matters briefly here before, why did Paul describe the ‘risen Christ’ as a light etc in his visions? And not as a humanoid? And if that ‘transformed’ body was so different from the normal, natural body humans have then why assume the corpse was actually needed in the first place to get ‘resurrected’ in this new one (and if a corpse is needed then what about corpses that have been totally decomposed?)? Why is it Paul’s aim to get away from the physical body that he himself is currently living in (as he mentions in some of his letters)? Why does Paul then contrast the ‘natural’ body to the ‘spiritual’ body? […]
Tags: Paul, resurrection
October 6, 2012
Christians Charged as Perverts and Criminals
I have some more posts dealing with resurrection matters; but I thought maybe I should give it a break for a day or two, since the resurrection isn’t the most interesting thing for absolutely everyone. So here’s something else for today: At one point in my bible introduction I talk about the persecution of the early Christians (specifically as mentioned in 1 Thessalonians) and point out that deep into the second century Christians had a very bad reputation. Here, without much comment, I indicate some of the charges sometimes leveled against them. It’s a pretty amazing text, taken from the apology of Minucius Felix, called Octavius. There is no solid evidence to suggest that specific allegations of wrongdoing were being made against the church in Thessalonica at the time of Paul’s writing, but we do know that other secret societies were widely viewed with suspicion and that certain standard kinds of slander were leveled against them. The logic of these slanders is plain: if people meet together in secret or under the cloak of darkness, […]
Tags: 1 Thessalonians, persecution
October 7, 2012
The Women and the Empty Tomb
QUESTION: So, on Ludemann’s account, how do the stories of the women at the tomb found in the canonical gospels come to be told? As many scholars I’ve read have pointed out, having women, who were considered untrustworthy witnesses, as the first to see the risen Christ, was not exactly a way to get people to believe the stories. So why would the gospel writers tell the stories with the women in such a prominent place? RESPONSE: I’m not sure how Lüdemann would answer your question (I.e., I don’t recall off hand how he deals with it). But I thought that maybe I should give it a shot. I am not responding here with a long-held position that I have carefully thought through and worked out. I’m really just “thinking out loud” (well, thinking silently, at my keyboard, in any event). I have indeed heard this argument for many years. In fact, I used to make it myself. The argument is that since women were not considered reliable witnesses (since their testimony was not acceptable […]
Tags: Gerd Lüdemann, resurrection
October 8, 2012
Paul and the Resurrection of the “Flesh”?
QUESTIONS: But what is a BODILY resurrection without the flesh? And doesn’t this indicate that the flesh (the corpse) didn’t matter anymore and could be left behind, rotting and decomposing? Isn’t it all about the spirit finally getting this new, better, perfect, divine ‘body’? Addendum: The Greek for ‘spiritual’ (like in spiritual body) is pneumatikos, right? According to Strong’s that means: pertaining to wind or breath, windy, exposed to the wind, blowing. Now those wouldn’t be obvious words to describe something physical or made out of matter, would it? They seems to rather define something ‘intangible’ RESPONSE: OK, I’ve been getting a lot of questions along these lines (some on the blog itself). So I need to try to clarify the whole matter. It’s not easy, for a variety of reasons. But I’ll do my best. First thing to stress: the ancient apocalyptic view of the human that Paul had is not the view of the human that WE have. This is one instance where it becomes crystal clear that we have to try to […]
Tags: Paul, resurrection
October 9, 2012
Was Jesus Given a Decent Burial (By Joseph of Arimathea)
One of the most pressing historical questions surrounding the death of Jesus is whether Jesus really was given a decent burial, as the NT Gospels indicate in their story of Joseph of Arimathea. Even though the story that Joseph, a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, received permission to bury Jesus is multiply attested in independent sources (see, e.g., Mark 15:43-47; John 19:38-42), scholars have long adduced reasons for suspecting that the account may have been invented by Christians who wanted to make sure that they could say with confidence that the tomb was empty on the third day. The logic is that if no one knew for sure where Jesus was buried, then no one could say that his tomb was empty; and if the tomb was not empty, then Jesus obviously was not physically raised from the dead. And so the story of the resurrection more or less required a story of a burial, in a known spot, by a known person. For some historians, that makes the story suspicious. There are real grounds […]
Tags: burial, crucifixion
October 10, 2012
Were the Disciples Martyred for Believing the Resurrection?
QUESTION: Another very very popular evidence put forward for the resurrection is “the disciples would not have died for what they knew was a lie, therefore it must have happened.” I hear this all the time. You note that they really believed they saw Jesus after he died so they were not lying. However, is there evidence (historical or literary) that they were killed because of their belief in Jesus’ resurrection? RESPONSE: Ah yes, if I had a fiver for every time I’ve heard this comment over the years, I could retire to a country-home in Maine…. Several other people have responded to this question on the blog by saying that we have lots of records of lots of people who have died for a something that they knew, literally, not to be true. I am not in a position to argue that particular point. But I can say something about all the disciples dying for believing in the resurrection. The way the argument (by Christian apologists) goes is this (I know this, because I […]
Tags: persecution, resurrection
October 12, 2012
The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: Another New Development
In earlier posts I talked about the “discovery” of the tiny credit-card sized fragment of a Coptic Gospel, with several lines of text on it, in one of which Jesus is recorded as speaking the words “my wife.” The text has been named “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” As I mentioned in a previous blog, there are heated discussions of the fragment’s authenticity, with a large number of experts contending that it is a modern forgery. We will probably not know for certain until the tests on the ink have been conducted and published. But in the meantime there is one interesting development. In my last post on the topic I discussed an article by Francis Watson of the University of Durham, England, and author of Text and Truth, and Gospel Writing, who argues that every word and phrase of this fragment could easily have been lifted from the Coptic Gospel of Thomas – with one exception: the very phrase that everyone is interested in, “My wife.” Watson’s argument is that someone (recently) who is […]
Tags: forgery, Gospel of Jesus' Wife, Karen King
October 14, 2012
Books and Icebergs
A couple of snapshots of my life right now, followed by a comment. Snapshot One: Snapshot one: I’ve had a couple of people ask me why I’m reading so many books and articles about the resurrection right now, in preparation for my book How Jesus Became God. The resurrection, of course, is key to answering the question of the title, since if Jesus was thought to have been executed, and to have stayed dead, not only would there never have been anything like Christianity, but Jesus himself would have been thought of by posterity as, possibly, a Jewish preacher who ended up on the wrong side of the law, or a failed messianic pretender, or yet another prophet who met a bad end, or something else – but not God. The resurrection itself did not immediately make anyone think Jesus was God (at least that’s what I’m going to argue in the book), but without the resurrection, the thought process that eventually declared he was God would never have been set in motion. But back […]
Tags: textbook
Anti-Judaism in the Gospels
QUESTION: It is in my understanding that it is of common scholarly opinion that the Gospel writers (at least Matthew, Luke, and John) were rather anti-Semitic in nature. Correct? How would you respond to that claim? After reading “The Origin of Satan” by Elaine Pagels, it is a subject that deeply interests me, and I would love to hear your professional opinion on the matter. RESPONSE: This question actually ties into some of the things I’ve been thinking about with respect to the stories of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and so it seems appropriate to answer it now rather than in a separate blog. I won’t deal with the question on the very broadest level, but will consider one feature of the Gospels that shows that with the passing of time they become more and more anti-Jewish. I should say at the outset that I do not think that the Gospel writers, or anyone else in their time, was “anti-Semitic.” The idea and reality of anti-Semitism are modern, and are based on modern sense of […]
Tags: anti-judaism, Jewish Christian relations, Pilate
October 16, 2012
Why Was Jesus Killed?
QUESTION: I don’t see the rationale for the Romans to crucify Jesus. It doesn’t appear that he verbalized any anti-Roman propaganda nor was anything anti-Roman alluded to in Josephus’s couple of lines on Jesus. Pilate probably didn’t even know who Jesus was (possibly the bouncing back and forth between Herod was legend). RESPONSE: Yes, it’s a great question and completely central to the story of Jesus: why was he crucified? First off, I agree the Herod story is almost certainly not historical. It’s found only in Luke and is part of Luke’s attempt to show that Pilate was innocent and wanted nothing to do with Jesus’ execution (he tried to fob him off on the ruler of Galilee). Herod too finds him innocent. So if the ruling authorities aren’t to blame, who is? It’s those blasted Jews! It would take an entire book to answer your question adequately, but I do want to say a couple of things about it. The crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans is one of the most secure facts we […]