Some Bible scholars have a low Christology. That's becomes somescholars are highly secularized, so they don't believe we live in the kind of world that the Bible describes. They think that's fictional. So it's really less about interpreting the NT witness to the Trinity or the Incarnation but their belief that the world is a kind of snowglobe. There is no afterlife. There is no divine involvement in the world. There's no room in their worldview for a divine Incarnation.
Given their worldview, they don't think it's possible for the NT to have a high Christology that's true. They don't think we live in that kind of world. So their low Christology isn't really about what the NT teaches, but their understanding of reality. Given their closed-system worldview, they are bound to view NT Christology as legendary/mythological pious fiction. Even if the NT has a high Christology, that doesn't map onto reality
So a lot of this is driven, not by exegesis but by their view of historicity and reality. Although Hurtado was something of a theological moderate, he wasn't an inerrantist, he was heavy into redaction criticism, and I don't think he had a strong view of divine revelation, so for him there's bound to be an evolutionary Christology in the NT which has antecedents in speculative theological developments in 2nd Temple Judaism. He doesn't think the Enochian literature is historical. It's just pious fiction. I agree. Point, though, is he doesn't draw a categorical line between that and Scripture. It all has an element of legendary embellishment. It ranges along a continuum. So that's less about exegesis than his view of Scripture and the history of ideas.
This is even more pronounced in the case of James McGrath. I believe he used to be evangelical, but lost his faith in grad school and is now a progressive. It isn't possible for McGrath to have a high Christology because he doesn't believe we live in that kind of world. He's basically a secularist. His closed-system worldview precludes the possibility that the NT presents a realistic Christology. So this isn't about exegesis but his worldview. For him, NT Christology has to be pious fiction. There's a mismatch between the Bible and reality. The Bible tells stories about divine intervention, angels, life after death, God, Incarnation, the Resurrection, &c., but these don't correspond with what really happens.
So it's important when reading monographs about the historical supernatural Jesus to keep in mind that the conclusions are often predetermined, not by exegesis, but by the scholar's view of the supernatural and the historicity of Scripture.
I've spent the last few decades studying this stuff off and on as an interested layman, and I've come to the conclusion that far from being some exercise that requires the right credentials from the right institutions, most of the inferences of biblical scholarship are about thinking hard, fairly, and clearly about things. Is this a good argument? Is this actual evidence? Am I letting my conservatism give the progressive or liberal positions short shrift? Etc.
ReplyDeleteI don't need a PhD in NT studies to find the various criteria used by, say, the Jesus Seminar invalid or worthless. Nor do I need a PhD in OT studies to compare the arguments for or against Mosaic authorship/collation of the texts in the Pentateuch. To say that I do is not only false, but it is smug self-assured self-importance. What I need are the arguments and evidence for and against. Here, I trust my own judgement, though such judgement is formed by looking at and evaluating those of others. I may be in a very small minority that (say) thinks there is a strong case that John bar Zebedee as the essential source or author of the fourth gospel, but the evidence points where it points, and I think it points that way. Or if somebody like, say, Dr Rauser smugly condescends at my finding Mosaic authorship viable, it really doesn't affect me unless he has new arguments, new evidence, data, etc that I haven't seen that would upset the balance of plausibility I've assigned through study to the question.
I can defer to Ehrman or Wallace on matters of textual criticism, and I can defer to a liberal OT scholar when he says that the Assyrian tablet when translated says X. That is something I can and should do. But going from the translation or the text to some sort of authorship argument or historicity argument strikes me as more about critical thinking and being mindful of one's assumptions. I do not defer to Ehrman when he makes assertions on critical thinking matters, like purported errors/contradictions in scriptures. I can evaluate those myself with the appropriate study references. If he is going to convince me, it is by giving a good, plausible argument that is better and more plausible than my argument or the classical arguments.
So when you say conclusions are often predetermined, I agree that that is the conclusion I have reached as well. Because I think we live in a supernatural reality and a theistic universe, my understanding of the Bible is going necessarily to reach far different conclusions than a skeptic or progressive like (say) Dr Rauser would.
Really, the battle is over metaphysics. Whoever wins the metaphysical arguments wins everything else.