CADRE Comments

What ever happened to the Bible? Go on any message board where atheists congregate and start a discussion of any kind that invovles using the Bible as an authority and they will immediately say things that sound as though the Bible doesn't even exist. They regard it as such a pile of crap they wont even tolerate the possibility that it might be defended. One time on a message board (CARM) someone said that I have no way of distinguishing which passages are mythology and which are not. This is an atheist who knows me and knows I'm somewhat liberal. This guy was saying I can't distinguish true passages from ad ons but I just choose what I like. I listed a criteria for understanding mythology, it was a criteria based upon historical critical methods . This is what this other atheist responded. We also discussed the validation of the Bible as a historical artifact. I said the Gospels were historical artifacts that testify to the beliefs of the people who ...

The Jesus Project was started in 2007 as a forum for skeptical biblical scholars, both professional and amateur, to conduct a 'scientific' investigation of the historicity of the Jesus traditions in the New Testament. Their sessions resulted in an edited volume, Sources of the Jesus Tradition , published last year. In this post I want to take a closer look at an essay by classicist Justin Meggitt called 'Popular Mythology in the Early Empire and the Multiplicity of Jesus Traditions', which provides an alternative, skeptical model of the transmission of Jesus traditions in early Christianity. As Meggitt puts it: When the popular cultural contexts within which stories about Jesus were first told or retold are taken into account, it becomes apparent that they are likely to be characterized by far more creativity, improvisation, idiosyncrasy, and inconsistency than has hitherto been assumed by most New Testament scholars. Far from being careful and cautious in their hand...

Christopher Bryan is a biblical scholar noted for his work on the genre of Mark (as Chris Price has blogged about previously). In this volume , the culmination of decades of research, he presents his discussion of the resurrection of Jesus. Coming on the heels of Michael Licona's monumental tome on the resurrection, which itself was preceded by N.T. Wright's magnum opus , what sets this volume apart? One distinction is that, while it covers much of the same ground as Wright's book, it is much shorter and easier to digest. Much of the technical discussion is found in the endnotes, which take up nearly half the book (reminiscent of Craig Keener's book on the historical Jesus). The main text itself is concise and elegant, and it is obviously the mature distillation of a lifetime of research and thinking about related topics (indeed, one reason why the endnotes are so voluminous is that Bryan often digresses into discussions of literature, art and ethics, which all how...

The contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, Chapter 57, can be found here. If the reader arriving at the site for Easter Day wants a quick overview of why all the things I've been talking about for +700 pages matter, please see my Easter Sermon from last year 2010 ( "Why It All Matters" -- don't panic, it's only five minutes' reading tops. {g}) This book has been my testimony, for why I believe what I do. Despite its length, and its frequent complexity, it comes down to this: why am I a Christian? The thrust of my argument throughout my book, has pointed toward the conclusion that I should expect God to act in our history in certain ways. I have tried to allow for a potentially wide range of variables in how those actions will someday be (or have already been) carried out. I have even tried not to hang the story entirely on the timeframe in which I think the story actually was carried out. But I do think the story has been carri...

In this series of posts I want to record some quotes from Craig Keener's The Historical Jesus of the Gospels which I have found of value in answering apologetic challenges. I have decided it would be most useful to post these excerpts in a Q&A format, allowing quotes from the book to directly answer questions people sometimes have about the reliability of the Gospels and how much we know about the historical Jesus. Doesn't the fact that the authors of the Gospels were biased towards Jesus make them unreliable as sources for his life? Contrary to what modern writers sometimes suppose, 'bias' did not make biographies into novels. We take bias into account when we read works of ancient biography or history, yet at the same time we depend heavily on these sources to understand the persons about whom they are written (both because they are the only sources available, and because comparison shows such works to preserve substantial information). If this is true for other ...

In Parts 2 and 3 of this Round, I demonstrated that the actual data of the texts does not indicate the authors were using the name "Jud-", including with Judas Iscariot, to heap derision on orthodox Judaism; that there is no clear progression across the texts of exonerating Pilate while blaming the Jewish religious authorities; and (most problematic of all, perhaps), that Bishop Spong himself has less than no problem admitting that there was a fatal rejection of Jesus and his teaching (even on Bishop Spong's theologically truncated notion of Jesus' teaching) by the mainstream Jewish authorities of his day: a rejection leading to Jesus' death at the hands of the Romans via the Sanhedrin. Which admission of historical accuracy, radically undermines Bishop Spong's theory for the reason why the authors would invent a fictional character of 'Judas Iscariot', in order to promote rejection of orthodox Judaism among Jewish Christians. There is, of course, th...

Click here for Part 2 of this Round, where I cross-check Bishop Spong's theory about "Judas" being a codename used for denigrating orthodox Judaism in the eyes of the Jewish Christian audience of the Gospels, with actual textual details. (Readers can follow links back to the beginning of this Round, and of this series of analysis, too.) In an attempt to make this theory sound like it has a shred of credence, Bishop Spong writes: “The leaders of the orthodox party of that nation, who defined the worship of the Jews, were by the time the gospels were written increasingly the enemy of the Christian movement. It is simply too convenient to place the blame for Jesus' death on the whole of orthodox Judaism by linking the traitor by name with the entire nation of the Jews. […] The Romans killed Jesus, but by the eighth decade of the Christian era, when the story of Jesus was being written, something compelled the gospel writers to exonerate the Roman procurator, Pilate, and...

Part 1 of this Round can be found here. (With links tracing back to previous Rounds.) The concept being promoted by Bishop Spong for his fifth piece of evidence for suspicion of Judas Iscariot being a fictional character, is that "Judas" was too common a name among Jewish men in Jesus’ day, and therefore is too convenient to be used as the name of the traitor. Or, as he prefers to put it instead: it’s too convenient that the traitor is named after the whole Jewish nation. (The way a vast number of other Jewish men were named in that time. But he never bothers bringing that up.) His theory therefore is that Iscariot was created by Christians, starting around the time of GosMark’s composition (i.e. after the fall of Jerusalem), in order to bring orthodox Judaism into contempt in the minds of Jewish Christians; and then, from GosMark through Matt, Luke, Acts and John, the authors progressively develop Iscariot into an ever-more-sinister character, for the purpose of assassinati...