CADRE Comments

Kris Komarnitsky has a guest post on Common Sense Atheism, in which he summarizes the argument he made in his book of the same name, Doubting Jesus' Resurrection . I have not read the book yet and I am sure it contains much more detailed evidence in support of that argument, but if the blog post is an accurate summary I can't say that I'm impressed. What follows are some critical comments. Komarnitsky begins by noting that one of the most popular arguments for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus construes the latter as the only plausible explanation for the early Christian beliefs summarized in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7: For I passed on to you as of first importance what I also received – that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried , and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters a...

Please see here for part 1 of Round Two, where I assess Bishop Spong’s first appeal to silence in Q source, as positive "evidence" for Iscariot and his treachery having been invented no earlier than 70CE (with GosMark). Going back to the Pauline corpus, after briefly touching on it for his first round of evidence, Bishop Spong notes that the one place where St. Paul gives a brief narrative of the Last Supper (1 Cor 11:23-24), Paul only mentions “betrayal”--not who betrayed Jesus. This is quite true. In fact, Paul mentions no names at all there other than Jesus, including the names of any other apostles. Moreover, the form is that of a kerygma, which is primarily aimed at transmitting doctrine in an easy-to-memorize fashion, thus containing minimal amounts of historical information. An excellent example of this would be the accounts of Christ’s death provided in the Apostle’s and Nicean Creeds: crucified under Pontius Pilate. Period. (The last and most theologically ...

In response to a post by my colleague JD, a commenter -- Quixie -- rejected the notion that 1 Clement -- even if authentic -- betrays knowledge of Paul’s letters. On his website , he seems to concede some familiarity with Pauline thought as expressed in chapters 12 and 13 of 1 Corinthians but insists that the author had not read any of Paul’s letters. I think Clement is demonstrably reliant on 1 and 2 Corinthians as well as Romans and Galatians. In this post, however, I will examine Clement's reliance on 1 Corinthians. In particular, I will focus on Clement's explicit reference to Paul's first letter to the Corinthian church. Quixie’s analysis is conclusory so it is unclear what if any standards he applied in evaluating potential references to Paul’s letters. He also fails to cite any of the leading studies of this issue, instead conducting his own review based on a translation and notations by William Wake, who died in 1737. In any event, judging by his conclusions,...

Heh. {g} Some authors who have thrown out books claiming the Harry Potter series is anti-Christian, are going to have some serious levels of crow (or maybe owl?) to eat. This brief article from Religious Intelligence , synopsizes some things that Ms. Rowling has been more openly saying now that Book 7 is in release. She remains reticient about her beliefs, and that's probably just as well; but it's clear that she was seriously working, or trying to work, in a mythopoeic vein similar to Tolkien's (though hardly as overt as Lewis.) Hat-tip to Tübingen seminary scholar-in-training Chris Tilling at Chrisendom , for the link. (His series of commentary on Gordon Fee's newly published exhaustive analysis of Pauline Christology, is well worth reading, by the way.) Edit addendum: oh, there may be huge spoilers in this article, for those who haven't read Book 7 yet.