Search

Advanced search




Found 4348 Results

The Gospels as Supernatural Histories


In order to explain the view I started having about the Bible after I had come to realize that it was filled with discrepancies, contradictions, historical errors, and other mistakes – and yet remained a committed Christian – I have to set out my understanding at the time of the Bible as “myth.”  And to do that I have to give a very brief (though this will take a few posts) history of scholarship on the New Testament itself, specifically the Gospels.  (What I say about the Gospels can be applied more broadly to the Bible, as I’ll explain). When I was preparing to write this post I *thought* I was simply going to be able to copy and paste this explanation from something I had written before.  But I’ve looked everywhere, and I can’t find that I’ve ever written about it in any context whatsoever, books, articles, blog posts, nada.   How strange.  I lecture on this all the time. The history of Gospel scholarship is, of course, extraordinarily complex.  There are hundreds of scholarly […]

Tags: , , ,

May 22, 2017

The Gospels as Natural Histories


I indicated in my last post that, to my surprise, I had never written about the history of the scholarship on the Gospels in terms of the major shift from seeing them as Supernatural Histories to Natural Histories to Myths.   And just as I was preparing to write about the move to see them as Natural Histories, in today’s post, I read a comment from a reader (Bless his soul, as we used to say!) who pointed out that I did indeed have a detailed discussion of the matter in my first trade book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium.  I looked it up, and lo and behold, I absolutely did — and inn precisely the terms I wanted to discuss the matter here on the blog.  For some reason none of my search engines picked it up when looked through all my files. So, today I will talk about The Gospels as Natural Histories, as lifted from that treatment in my book.  As I hope you’ll agree, this shift in understanding the Gospels […]

Tags: , , , ,

May 23, 2017

The Gospels as Myths


In providing background to how I began to understand the Bible once I realized that it was not an inerrant revelation from God, I have been giving a kind of history of scholarship on the Gospels, explaining how it was that, before the Enlightenment, virtually everyone understood the Gospels to be Supernatural Histories, and that during the Enlightenment there were scholars who maintained they were Natural Histories.  Now I can complete this short survey by talking about a significant development, one of the most significant in the history of the entire discipline of New Testament studies, in which the Gospels came to be understood as Myths.   Let me stress that I am not saying that everyone started accepting this new view or, more germane to this series of posts, that I agree with this view as I’m presenting it: I’m simply indicating what happened in the field of New Testament studies.  Later I’ll explain its relevance for my views.  This, again, is taken from my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. ********************************************************* The […]

Tags: , ,

May 24, 2017

True Stories that Didn’t Happen


In my previous post I explained how the term “myth” came to be applied to the miracle stories of the New Testament in the work of David Friedrich Strauss in 1835-36.   This is all background to what happened to me personally – 150 years later!  Before talking about how my views of the Bible changed once I realized many of its stories could not be literally, historically true, I should expand a bit on the very notion that, as Strauss thought, there could be true stories that didn’t happen.  What??  Yup.  Here’s how I explain it in my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. ******************************************** Skipping on to Modern Times A lot – a very lot – has happened since Strauss published his Life of Jesus in 1836.  Scores of scholars have pored over every detail of the Gospels, thousands of books and articles have been churned out, countless views have been marshaled, debated, believed, and spurned.  And none of that is going to end soon, unless some of the people who think […]

Tags: , ,

May 26, 2017

Would I Be Personally Devastated if the Mythicists Were Right? A Blast From the Past


For my mailbag this week I dug into one from the past — almost exactly five years ago.  I would probably answer it the same today.  My thoughts here on how we go about knowing what actually happened in the past strike me as having very broad application (not just to the question I was asked), and (especially toward the end of my answer) to have even greater relevance now than they did then, given our current historical moment.   QUESTION: Was also wondering – and maybe you addressed this in your book … would you feel an emotionally traumatic disappointment if it was conclusively proved that Jesus was indeed a mythical figure? In all honesty how would you feel if it were true beyond a doubt that all the arguments the ‘mythicists’ have presented were found to be correct (or mostly correct) regarding his assumed existence? This question is not meant to be offensive or unnecessarily provoking – I’m just curious. RESPONSE: I don’t address this in the book, and I think it is a terrific […]

Tags: , ,

May 28, 2017

An Example of a True Story that Didn’t Happen: Part 1


I have been trying to explain (without complete success) that the Bible, in the view of some scholars starting in the early 19th century, could contain “true” stories that “didn’t happen” – or at least didn’t happen as they are narrated.  One important point I want to make about this claim: I am *not* saying that I personally hold this view.  I’m not saying I think these stories are necessarily “true” as far as I’m concerned.  I’m saying that the idea is that these stories were designed to convey truths, rather than objective history lessons. I talk about that in my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium, and try to demonstrate the point by giving a couple of particular examples.  The first example will take two posts for me to cover. ********************************************************* What, though, is the evidence (that there could be true stories in the Bible that didn’t happen)?  Or is this simply a theory cranked up by biblical scholars with too much time on their hands and not enough sense simply to […]

Tags: , , ,

May 29, 2017

Is Theological “Truth” More Important than Historical Accuracy?


In the previous post I began to explain how there could be an account in the Gospels that is not historically accurate because an author is more interested in conveying what, to him, is a theological “truth” than in giving a history lesson about what actually happened in the life of Jesus.  In my view, the early Christian story tellers and Gospel writers (often?) changed historical data in order to make theological points.  What mattered more than historical accuracy was the ultimate point of the story. In this post I give a concrete example of how it works.  To make sense of what I have to say about this story you need to remember what I said yesterday about how the Passover feast worked in the days of Jesus.  This particular example involves only a small detail in the Gospel of John – a tiny detail, in some ways.  But it is illustrative of a larger point.  Sometimes Christian authors changed a historical fact in order to express what, for them, was a theological “truth.” […]

Tags: , , ,

May 30, 2017

Lecture at Washington & Jefferson College


On March 9, 2017, I gave a lecture at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington PA, called “Who Wrote the Bible? The Surprising Claims of Modern Scholars.”  This was part of a kind of lecture tour that I did for the nation’s oldest honor society, Phi Beta Kappa.  The society’ has a “Visiting Scholar Program”: a dozen or so scholars are chosen each year to visit college and university campuses to meet with Phi Beta Kappa members, teaching some classes, and give a public lecture.  I went to eight campuses over the course of the academic year, usually for two or three days each, teaching a variety of classes and giving lectures on a variety of topics that each school could choose from.. This particular lecture is based on my book Forged.  It deals with how ancient people understood the phenomenon that today we would call “forgery” — when an author writes a book falsely claiming to be some other well-known author.  Would ancient people consider that to be a deceitful practice?  Would they approve of […]

Tags: ,

July 26, 2017

Another “True” Story that Didn’t Happen? Jesus’ Birth in Luke


I have been trying to illustrate the point that critical scholars who remain Christian have long made, that there can be stories in the Bible that are not historically accurate but that are trying to convey larger theological truths.  My first illustration had to do with the death of Jesus; in this post and the next, I will deal with the birth of Jesus.   This is a topic I’ve dealt with several times over the years on the blog; but it’s worth covering it again!   I’ve drawn this discussion, again, from my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. ***************************************************** “True” Stories that Didn’t Happen (at least as narrated): Jesus’ Birth in Luke We may take an example from the familiar stories at the beginning of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.  These are the only Gospels that narrate the events of Jesus’ birth (in both Mark and John, Jesus makes his first appearance as an adult).  What is striking – and what most readers have never noticed – is that the two accounts […]

Tags: , , , ,

June 1, 2017

Why It Didn’t Happen that Way. The Stories of Jesus’ Birth


In the previous post I began to discuss (as a review for many readers of the blog) the historical problems with the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke.  The point of the discussion is that the stories cannot be accepted as historically accurate.  This is a huge issue mainly for fundamentalist Christians and conservative evangelicals – and those they have managed to persuade that if a story does not describe what actually happened, then it is worthless and should simply be thrown out. For others – whether theologians, pastors, parishioners, or simply lay-folk interested in Christianity – the stories are important for other reasons, for example in the ideas they are trying to convey. In any event, here is the second post dealing with the historical problems that arise when you compare the two accounts to one another. ***************************************************** It may be possible to reconcile these accounts if you work hard enough at it.  I suppose you’d have to say that after Joseph and Mary returned to Nazareth, as in Luke, they decided to move […]

Tags: , , ,

June 2, 2017

Why Have I Stopped Explaining How I Lost My Faith? Readers’ Mailbag June 4, 2017


I will be dealing with two questions in this weeks’ Readers’ Mailbag.  The first is about what happened to that thread I was supposed to be doing on why I lost my faith (!) and the other about whether Mark’s account of Jesus’ death contains an inner discrepancy (one verse flat out contradicting another).   QUESTION: I’m a bit confused. A few weeks ago you said you were going to write about what you tell your students on the last day of school about why you lost your faith, but it seems you may have gotten off track, unless I missed a post or two….  Anyway, I am sorry I seem to have missed the posts that were about what you say to your class each year about why you lost your faith. I hope you will repeat it sometime soon.   RESPONSE: Ha!  Right!  I can see how this could be confusing.  When I started this thread I did not know it was even going to *be* a thread.  I had planned to make […]

Tags: , , , ,

June 4, 2017

What Really Happened to Me: Demythologizing the New Testament


As I suggested in yesterday’s post, the reason I’ve been trying to show that biblical scholars who still revere the Bible but recognize that it is, even so, filled with mistakes, discrepancies, and contradictions is to explain what happened to my faith once I realized that the Bible was not the inerrant revelation from God that I had always assumed it was. It is amazing how often people tell me – usually with a touch of personal complacency – that the reason I lost my faith was that I was a fundamentalist.  If I had only had a more reasonable understanding of the faith (like *them* for example!) then the problems I encountered would not have led me to become an agnostic.  In their view, I am at heart still a fundamentalist. In their view I had thought (as a fundamentalist) that if every word in the Bible can’t be completely true and accurate, then none of it can be true and accurate, and that for that reason, once I realized there were mistakes in […]

Tags:

June 5, 2017

What I Came To Believe About the Bible


It is a little difficult for me to describe what I believed after I gave up on my view that the Bible was the inerrant revelation from God with no mistakes in it whatsoever.  In part that is because there was a long transition period, and over time my beliefs evolved as I studied more, talked with friends and colleagues more, encountered more ideas, thought more. I was in the perfect situation for this kind of study and reflection.  I was already a PhD student at Princeton Theological Seminary and I was literally surrounded by people who spent most of their days, every day, reading, studying, talking, and thinking about the Christian faith from both a personal and an academic perspective.  I spent every day for lunch with people doing research and thinking about the Christian faith.  Every day I read significant books and articles on everything having to do with ancient Christianity.  Every day I had conversations about religious topics – mainly about the academic study of the New Testament and early Christianity, but […]

Tags: ,

June 6, 2017

Update on my Publication Plans


A couple of people have asked me about the status of my two books – the one that is finished and coming out, The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept the World, and the one I am now doing my research on The Invention of the Afterlife: A History of Heaven and Hell. First, Triumph.  There is indeed news about this one, and I can’t decide if it’s good news or bad news.  It feels (emotionally) like it’s bad but I think it is probably good.   My publisher, Simon & Schuster, has decided to delay publication from this coming September until the following February.  The new publication date is February 13. There are no glitches or problems with publishing it earlier.  It is done and ready to go.  I have read through two sets of page proofs, it has been copy-edited multiple times, it is sitting there waiting to be run off and sent out.  But for a variety of complicated reasons Simon & Schuster wants to wait till February. The short story […]

Tags: ,

June 7, 2017

Can (or Should) We Change the Canon of Scripture? A Blast from the Past


  Digging around in posts from five years ago now, I came across this one –as interesting to me now as it was then!  Hope you think so too.  It’s a response to a penetrating question. QUESTION: Given the criteria used to determine what would go on to constitute the New Testament canon, how is it that Hebrews and the book of Revelation remain part of the canon? I understand that Christians came to believe that they were authored by the apostles which is why they made it into the canon, but we now know that they weren’t authored by Paul or John..so why are they still in the NT? RESPONSE: Interesting idea!   I sometimes get asked what I would exclude from the canon if given the choice, and I almost always say 1 Timothy (because of what it says about women in 2:11-15, and how the passage has been used for such horrible purposes over the years).  But, well, it ain’t gonna happen.  I don’t get a vote. And that’s the problem with Hebrews […]

Tags: ,

June 9, 2017

What I Believed as a Committed but but non-Fundamentalist Christian


It is a little hard to encapsulate what I thought, believed, and practiced during those years when I had moved away from being a hard-core Bible-believing conservative (as I was in college) but remained a committed Christian (as I was for years after that).   The change did not come overnight so that one day I was one thing (a fundy) and the next I was something else (a liberal).  It was a gradual change marked by important moments and key shifts.   But let me pick a time in my life and try to explain what my faith meant to me at that time.  This will take a couple of posts. Quick biographical background: when I was doing my PhD in New Testament Studies, a lot of things happened to me personally that affected my faith.  My studies, of course, were one thing.  But outside of that was my daily life.  I was attending the small but interesting Princeton Baptist church, which was part of the American Baptist denomination (very different, and far more diverse, than […]

June 10, 2017

More of What I Believed When I Was a Committed (non-fundamentalist) Christian


Yesterday I started explaining what it was I believed when I left fundamentalism but remained a committed Christian – one who realized that the Bible was not at all an infallible book but was still a person of faith.   I’ve never talked about any of this before in print, either on the blog or in any of my books.  One reason for wanting to do so now is that I think I must have given some people the false impression that I went from being a fundy to being an agnostic in one step, that once I came to see that my fundamentalist views were just wrong, I immediately became a non-believer, having no other options to fall back on.  In fact it didn’t happen that way, at all.  I was a committed Christian for many years after giving up on conservative evangelicalism.  Here is more of what I believed at the time. The ultimate teaching of the Gospel was love. Love of God.  Love of neighbor.  Jesus not only taught this ethic and lived it […]

June 11, 2017

A New Way of Reading the Bible


I have been discussing how I experienced a radical change in my Christian faith, from being a conservative evangelical to being a more open-minded and better informed Christian.  I can now begin to talk about how my new way of understanding the faith intersected with the scholarship I was involved with in pursuing the academic study of the Bible. As a budding biblical scholar, I had come to see that the Bible was filled with problems.  As a believer with a new perspective these problems were not detrimental to my faith but actually provided important insights that previously I simply had no access to. To explain that will take a couple of posts.  The overarching point is that the discrepancies, contradictions, and mistakes of the Bible reveal clearly that we are dealing here with different authors with different perspectives, and it is important to let *each* author speak for himself to see what he wants to emphasize.  The viewpoint each one has is important, and it is crucial not to confuse the message of one […]

Tags:

June 14, 2017

How a Non-Historical Account Can Be Meaningful: The Death of Jesus in Mark


I am now at a point where I can explain how I read the Bible when I was a committed Christian who was not, however, a conservative evangelical convinced that the Bible was a completely inerrant revelation from God without any discrepancies or differences in it.  As I have already indicated, my new way of reading of the Bible did not denigrate the Bible at all, as often happens when people realize there are mistakes in it and come away saying something like:  “It’s worthless, just a pile of contradictions!”  That wasn’t my view at all. On the contrary, the differences revealed the true richness of the Christian tradition.  The Gospels, rather than simply being completely accurate accounts of what really happened were theological reflections on the significance of Jesus.  Different reflections, by different authors, all of whom had something to teach me as someone who was himself wrestling with the significance of Jesus.  One way to see the true depth of these different reflections is to compare them carefully with one another.  I explain […]

Tags: ,

June 15, 2017