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My Moody Experience
Here I continue with my reflections on my fundamentalist past. For me, as an inordinately gung-ho evangelical Christian teenager, passionate about learning about the Bible, Moody Bible Institute was the ideal learning environment. More than just about anyone I knew, even there, I thrived on the academic side of the school. Moody at that time did not give a bachelor’s degree. It was a three-year diploma. For a degree, one needed to transfer credits and go to another college. That’s what I did after my three years, when I could transfer two of those years to Wheaton and graduate from there with a degree in English literature. There was no English literature to speak of at Moody. In fact there was no liberal arts curriculum of any kind. It’s not because they rejected the liberal arts as … too liberal. (!) It’s that the school simply wasn’t interested in the humanities, the social sciences, or the hard sciences. Who cares about such things? What matters is the Bible. Hence the name of the school: Moody […]
Tags: Moody Bible Institute
May 12, 2015
Education at Moody
In thinking back on my days at Moody Bible Institute, part of my now-ambivalence has to do with not just what I learned (or more important, what I did not) but also about how the thinking process itself was handled. That has both a downside and an upside, and I would like to say something about both. I should start by reiterating that I am simply talking about my own personal experience. Everyone’s experience would have been, and was, different. Still, my strong sense is that my experience was not simply a result of my personality, although it certainly was in part that, but also as a result to how education itself was approached at Moody. How did one get good grades at a school like that? By mastering tons of material. Committing lots of things to memory. Knowing exactly what a teacher taught and being able to reformulate it, without changing its substance, in one’s own words. What was not taught, so much, was how to think for oneself. When one *did* get encouraged […]
Tags: Moody Bible Institute
May 13, 2015
The Threat of Judgment
Since I’ve been making these posts about my experience at Moody Bible Institute, I’ve been getting some reactions from former classmates there. Some of these are in a public forum I’m on. Others have been private communications. A few of these have been kind and heartening. Others … not. Among the latter, some have told me that they pity me because of where I will end up on the day of judgment. Others have suggested that I changed my theological beliefs because that would help me become famous. Some have expressed both sadness and outrage that I have “led so many people astray.” So, dealing with these kinds of comments one-by-one, in one post at a time. First, the day of judgment. Well, none of us knows what will happen on the day of judgment, but I think I’m glad none of my classmates has been appointed to be the judge! That hasn’t stopped them from judging in the present, of course, and one would think they would be a bit wary of that, given […]
Tags: final judgment, Moody Bible Institute
May 14, 2015
How the Bible Explains Suffering – Video
On September 8, 2008 I gave a lecture at the University of California Berkeley. The lecture was titled “God’s Problem and Human Solutions: How the Bible Explains Suffering.” It was part of the Foerster Lectures on the Immortality of the Soul. It is an interesting lecture series. Established in 1928 by Edith Zweybruck, The series is devoted to lectures that in the words of the founding document) are to be “on the immortality of the soul or other kindred subjects. Such lecture is not to form a part of the regular college course and shall be delivered by some person especially qualified therefore and especially appointed for the purpose.” My lecture does not, obviously, deal with directly with the question of immortality, but with another question of deep importance, suffering. I was introduced on the occasion by a very fine scholar of Christianity in Late Antiquity, whom I have known for years, Susanna Elm, Professor in the Department of History, UC Berkeley. Please adjust gear icon for better definition.
Tags: Foerster Lectures, Suffering, theodicy
May 16, 2015
Writing to Become Famous?
I’ve been referring to the reactions that I received from my former classmates at Moody Bible Institute about some of my posts about what my experience was like there. Some of them, as I indicated, warned me of future judgment. Others made some a rather belittling comment: that I have written my books simply because I have wanted to become famous. My sense is that nothing I say would ever change someone’s mind if that’s what they are already inclined to think, but I do want to say something about the matter from my own perspective. When I started out in my publishing career, I had no idea at all of becoming well known and that certainly was not a goal of mine. Very, very far from it. My goal was to be a widely respected scholar among New Testament scholars; I wanted to become a world-class expert on the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament. I had no idea at all of reaching out to the general public in anything I wrote. I […]
Tags: academic writing, textbooks, trade books
May 15, 2015
On Writing for A College Audience
I have been dealing with some of the criticisms that classmates from my college days at Moody Bible Institute have leveled against me. The reason this thread started is that I had decided to say a few words about my Moody experience here on the blog. I didn’t really finish that, but word got out among my former peers (I’m on a listserv that some of them hang out on) and several people made remarks about it. I’m not sure they knew I was reading their comments. (!) One comment was that I was in danger of judgment on the Last Day. I’ve already said a couple of things about that. Another was that I write my books simply in order to become famous. This post will be the second one on that. The third, which I will also deal with in a couple of posts, is the claim that I have led so many people astray (harming them, the truth, and reality as we know it). First let me finish with the view – […]
Tags: textbooks
May 18, 2015
How I Moved into Trade Publishing
I have been explaining that I started to write books for a broader audience not because that was some kind of goal in my life – just the opposite! – but because I came to think it would be a good thing to try to communicate scholarship on the New Testament to 19-20 year olds in a college-level textbook. A couple of readers have commented that when my former classmates from Moody have indicated that I wanted (and still want) to write books to become famous, they were not referring to my textbooks but to my trade books for a general (adult) audience. That’s exactly right – that is indeed what they were referring to. The reason I’ve been talking about my first textbook is that this was the beginning of my quest to reach out to a broader swath of people. Here in this post I’ll get to my trade books. After I wrote my first textbook (I’ve now written three, and compiled three anthologies of ancient texts, in good translations, with brief introductions, […]
Tags: trade books
May 19, 2015
Authors Who “Just Want to Sell Books”
Sometimes I hear someone criticize me, or another author, by saying “he just wants to sell books.” That has always struck me as a very strange thing to say. Of course I want to sell books. Why else would I write books? Would I want to write books so no one would read them? Has there ever been an author on the face of the planet who wanted to write a book that would not be read? What people actually *mean*by that comment, of course, is far more sinister, snide, and offensive. What they mean is: “he will say anything in a book in order to get people to buy it.” There may indeed be authors for whom this is true. I can’t speak for them, only for myself. And for myself, this is one charge that I really bristle at. Almost no one of course comes out and actually makes the charge directly. But it must be what they mean, since, as I just pointed out, no one actually faults someone for writing a […]
Tags: How Jesus Became God, Misquoting Jesus
May 20, 2015
My Resentment at Moody Bible Institute
OK, I want/need to bring this current thread – or rather, this current tangle of threads – to a close. I started out talking about what, looking back, I thought favorably about my three years at Moody Bible Institute, and what I felt resentful about it. This got me on to other things, which I was happy to do, since ten days ago I was at the end of the semester and the end of a book project (which happened simultaneously) and I was burned out and brain dead, and I couldn’t get up the energy to write anything about serious scholarship on the blog. But I’m recovered now, and can get on to more important things than me and my life. Which, frankly, would be most everything!! But I do need to spend this final post on the original thread to explain in very brief order what I am resentful about when it comes to my education as a 17-21 year old at Moody. There are three things, all of which I could expand […]
Tags: Moody Bible Institute
May 21, 2015
Back To the Discovery of Lost Early Christian Writings
I have decided to return to the thread that I unceremoniously cut off nearly two months ago. At the time – in the middle of the thread — I decided to start discussing my book on memory and the historical Jesus, since I had just finished it and wanted to get some feedback (which was all terrifically helpful, thank you all very much!). I then got onto some personal reflections about Moody Bible Institute and related topics. But now I’m ready, all this time later, to pick up the thread. The thread was dealing with lost writings from early Christianity that I would absolutely love to have (re-)discovered. If I could choose, which books would be on my list? Here by way of review is what I have said so far: In the opening posts of the thread I mentioned three early Christian writings (the first two are collections of writings) that I would love to have discovered. First, I would love to have… THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. If you […]
Tags: lost manuscripts, lost texts
May 22, 2015
Signs in the Gospel of John
For many decades now there have been scholars who have been convinced that the Gospel of John is based, in large part, on written, but no-longer surviving, sources. It is much debated whether John relied on the Synoptic Gospels for any of its stories, or whether in fact its author had ever read (or even heard of) Matthew, Mark, and Luke. There are very few verbatim overlaps between John and the others, and outside of the Passion narrative there is not a lot of overlap in the stories told. Somewhat like the Synoptics John does have the healing of a Capernaum official’s son, the feeding of the 5000, and the walking on the water – all told in striking different ways. John’s four other miracles (which he doesn’t call miracles, but “signs”) are unique to his account (including the favorite miracle on college campuses everywhere, the turning of water into wine, and the favorite of most Hollyood screen writers, the raising of Lazarus). Moreover, the teachings of Jesus are highly distinctive in John. Almost nothing […]
Tags: Gospel of John, signs
May 23, 2015
The Temptation Narrative Missing from John
In my previous post I started to discuss the hypothetical Signs Source that some scholars have claimed lay behind the accounts of Jesus’ miracles in the Gospel of John – one of the now lost documents of early Christianity (assuming it once existed) that I very much wish could be discovered. Before giving evidence that there was some such written source, I started in the last post by discussing the distinctive view of Jesus’ spectacular deeds in the Fourth Gospel, where they are called “signs” rather than “miracles.” In that post I argued that John has a completely different view of these deeds from that found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In these Synoptics Jesus refuses to do miracles in order to prove his identity. When he is asked to do so, he indicates that “no sign will be given to this generation” – apart from the sign of Jonah. Not so in John. Jesus does signs. They are designed to make people believe who he is (4:54). And the Gospel writer himself indicates that […]
Tags: temptations of Christ
May 25, 2015
Why Jesus Does Miracles
I seem to be taking a very circuitous route (as you may have noticed) to the question of why we might think that the author of the Gospel of John had access to a written source that gave him his information about the “signs” that Jesus did during his public ministry. To get to that point, I have been discussing how John’s view of Jesus’ spectacular deeds differed significantly from the view of the Synoptics. I have stressed that whereas in John Jesus does signs in order to prove that he is the Son of God so that people would come to believe in him, in the Synoptics Jesus refuses to do signs in order to prove his divine identity. But why then does he do miracles in the Synoptics? I suppose the common answer is probably right: he does miracles out of compassion for those who are suffering. But there is more to it than that. The miracles in the Synoptics do demonstrate that what Jesus says is true. But in these Gospels what […]
Tags: John, miracles, signs, synoptic gospels
May 26, 2015
Some Evidence for a Signs Source in John
I started this mini-thread by mentioning one of the now-lost documents of early Christianity that I would love to have discovered, the alleged “Signs Source” of the Gospel of John. Before giving the evidence that there may have been some such source, I went off on a tangent, in order to show that John has a different view of Jesus’ spectacular deeds from what you find in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In these earlier Gospels, Jesus does “miracles,” both because he feels compassion for those in need and in order to illustrate his teaching that the Kingdom of God was soon to appear. In John, however, he does “signs” to prove that he really is a divine being. So, what evidence is there that John’s accounts of Jesus’ signs derive from a previously existing, but no longer surviving, written source? The evidence does not make a slam-dunk case, and so the matter is debated among scholars. I’ve long thought, though, that there probably was some such source. First, some basic factual information. These are the […]
Tags: Gospel of John, literary seams, signs source
May 27, 2015
The Nature of John’s Signs Source
I have given one of the major pieces of evidence that there was a Signs Source that was used by the author of the Gospel of John, a written document that enumerated seven miraculous deeds of Jesus that were designed to show that he was a divine being, the Son of God. There is another piece of evidence. It is the concluding comment of chapter 20 of the Gospel, which I have already quoted a couple of times: “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, but these are written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you might have life in his name.” (20:30-31) The reason this verse seems to suggest the existence of a signs source is that it doesn’t really make very much sense where it now occurs, at the end of the stories of Jesus’ resurrection (Note: as I’ve indicated before, scholars frequently think that chapter 21 of John was tacked on later, in a second edition; […]
Tags: Gospel of John, signs source
May 28, 2015
Losing Religion in America
As many of you know, there was a major poll done recently by the Pew Research Center involving religion in America. The results were published about three weeks ago, and the findings were striking indeed. Among the most intriguing were that the percentage of people identifying themselves as Christian in the U.S. has declined by nearly 8% in just seven years. That corresponds to those who consider themselves not “religiously affiliated” in any way, which, for the purposes of this poll, meant they were atheist, agnostic, or basically no religion at all. This category is up nearly 7%. Here are the findings in the salient paragraph, drawn from the full account at http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/ The major new survey of more than 35,000 Americans by the Pew Research Center finds that the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years, from 78.4% in an equally massive Pew Research survey in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014. Over the same period, the percentage of […]
Tags: nones, religion in america
May 30, 2015
The Lost Writings of Papias
In this thread I have been discussing documents known from early Christianity that no longer exist and that I very much wish would be discovered. So far I have talked about the lost letters of Paul, the writings of Paul’s opponents, Q (the source used by Matthew and Luke for many of their sayings of Jesus), and the Signs Source (a collection of Jesus miraculous activities used by the Gospel of John). With this post I move outside the New Testament to indicate documents that certainly at one time existed that I wish we still had. One such document was a five-volume book produced by a church father named Papias. We don’t have this long book any longer. In fact we don’t have any of the writings from Papias. We know about him, and his writings, only because later church fathers refer to him. He is first mentioned in the writings of Irenaeus, the bishop of Gaul and himself the author of a long five-volume work that attacked heretics (especially Gnostics). Irenaeus’s book is known […]
Tags: Papias
June 1, 2015
The Death of Judas in the NT
In this and the next couple of posts I will be talking about what we know was in Papias’s five-volume book, now lost, Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. As I previously indicated, the only reason we have any clue about the matter is that later church fathers quoted a few passages from the book. Would they had quoted more! But what they give us is very tantalizing. The first passage I want to discuss involves the death of Judas Iscariot. To make sense of what Papias has to say, I need to provide some context. Many people don’t realize that Judas’s death, after he betrayed Jesus, is not mentioned in three of our Gospels: Mark, Luke, and John. It is mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, however, and just as important, in the book of Acts, written by the same author who produced the Gospel of Luke (so, well, let’s call him Luke). What is striking is that the descriptions of Judas’s death in these two accounts are at odds with one, even […]
Tags: death of Judas, Judas
June 2, 2015
My Trip to Turkey
I am en route to Istanbul now with a layover, at this moment, as we speak, in London’s Heathrow airport. I’ll be in Turkey for nearly three weeks. This is a trip sponsored by my home institution, the General Alumni Association of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As is true of most universities, UNC has a vibrant travel program for alumni. Trips can be on the expensive side, but they are usually fantastic. As the guest lecturer, I get a free trip out of it. There are four people connected with the blog on the trip (maybe more: but there are four that I know of so far). (It may seem strange, but one does not have to be an alum of the university to go on an alumni trip!) It is intentionally a small group, just twenty-five of us. Turkey is one of the great places on earth, with a massive and varied cultural history. My lectures concern only one small part of the Turkish legacy. As it turns out, this […]
Tags: Turkey
June 3, 2015
Other Accounts of the Death of Judas
As I indicated in the previous post, there are two versions of the death of Judas Iscariot in the New Testament. These versions have some striking similarities, but at the end of the day, I think they cannot really be reconciled with one another. After the New Testament period, there were legends about Judas’s death that continued to be invented and circulated. I discuss one of them in my college-level textbook on the New Testament, in a side-bar that I meant to be a kind of humorous human interest story. Here is what I say there: When trying to determine which stories in the Gospels are historically accurate, we need to look not only at the Gospels of the New Testament, but at all the surviving ancient narratives that discuss Jesus’ life. In many instances, however, the accounts are quite obviously legendary, written for the entertainment, edification, or even instruction of their readers. One occurs in a fourth- or fifth-century document known as the Gospel of Nicodemus (also called the Acts of Pilate). In one […]
Tags: Gospel of Nicodemus, Papias
June 4, 2015