<snip>
TILL
>My argument all along has been that the NT gospels are so saturated with
>fantastic claims about this man Jesus that, without extrabiblical
>corroboration, it is impossible to determine what is fact and what is
>fiction. Unfortunately for the Christian position, there just are not any
>extrabiblical corroborations for its central claim of a resurrection from
>the dead.
<snip>
BEKKENHUIS
Mr. Till, I just don't get it.
It seems that you are implying that acceptance of the historicity of Jesus
based on the writings of the New Testament commits one to the acceptance of
the historicity of the miracles and the resurrection.
For the past several decades historical-critical scholarship has
distinguished the miracle or signs source (or sources) that were used by
the authors of the Gospels of Mark and John, the sayings sources
represented by the Gospel of Thomas and Q, and the Cross/Resurrection
kerygma (exemplified by "Mark" and the Apostle Paul) that provided the
structure for those miracles and teachings as they were used by the writers
of the four canonical gospels.
Whatever one makes of the rest (and as a Christian I probably make
something different of it than non-Christians), by isolating the sayings
source one can determine the earliest strata of the Jesus tradition and, by
looking for multiple attestation and those sayings which are dissimilar to
the teachings of both 1st century Judaism and the later church,
develop a picture of Jesus of Nazareth.
John Dominic Crossan, for example, has developed scholarly criteria by
which one may re-construct the teaching (if not the activity) of the
historical Jesus.
And whether one would quibble with his evaluation of this verse or that
verse, what we are left with is an itinerant preacher with some pithy
observations about life.
Now, I can see where a CHRISTIAN would reject an interpretation that so
de-valued the inherited orthodox picture of Jesus, but I'm not sure why a
skeptic would. There seems to be nothing in Crossan's reconstruction that
is patently unbelievable and, IMHO, it explains the existence of the New
Testament far more naturally than Well's hypothesis that the church at the
end of the first century, cut off from Palestine due to the disruption of
the Judeo-Roman war, simply "forgot" that Jesus didn't exist. (Michael
Martin, _The Case Against Christianity_, p.40 - 41)
Why must a modern reconstruction of the man Jesus be wedded to the miracles
ascribed to him in the first century?
Bill
a190@lehigh.edu (Bill Bekkenhuis) Myers-Briggs (INFX)
http://www.lehigh.edu/~a190/a190.html (Updated 6/17/97)
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