Tuesday, February 14, 2012
More Discussion Of The End Of Infidelity, Including Comments From John Loftus
Late last week, I linked to a thread at TheologyWeb in which The End Of Infidelity was being discussed. For those who are interested, the discussion is still going on, and John Loftus has been posting there. There's also been some discussion of paranormal phenomena in the modern world, mostly the Eusapia Palladino case, but some other examples have been brought up as well. You can read the thread here.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Study in contrasts
Which one is truer? Which one is more realistic?
"I will always love you"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QaI-M9sxW4
"Everyone I know goes away in the end"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go
"I will always love you"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QaI-M9sxW4
"Everyone I know goes away in the end"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go
The Orthodox Omertà
Perry Robinson says:
This is absurd. An oath to a body that has no real authority and professes contrary to divine teaching is lacks all binding authority. He is jsut begging the question as to whether it is a legitimate church and authority.
That’s an illuminating window into what passes for Eastern Orthodox morality. You don’t have to honor contractual agreements or other commitments as long as the second party to your agreement lacks “real” authority. You can go into the agreement with no intention of keeping the agreement.
Logically, this means Orthodox believers are only obligated to be honor agreements they enter into with Orthodox institutions or fellow Orthodox adherents. They are free to practice dissimulation with outsiders.
How to short-circuit priestly celibacy
Technically, the Roman church requires priestly celibacy. If a priest marries, he will be excommunicated. He has to choose between priesthood and marriage.
There is, however, an easy way to do an end-run around the official policy. If you marry before you swim the Tiber, if you were ordained in a Protestant denomination, then convert to Rome, there’s a grandfather clause. You can be a married priest with wife and kids.
So that’s the smart way to game the system and beat the system.
Roman Bait and Switch on “Orders”
In its
portrayal of the ordained ministry, the Catechism of the Catholic Church talks
about “orders” in the ancient Roman world.
The word order in
Roman antiquity designated an established civil body, especially a governing
body. Ordinatio means incorporation into an ordo.
In the Church there are established bodies which Tradition, not without a basis
in Sacred Scripture,4 has since ancient times called taxeis (Greek)
or ordines. And so the liturgy speaks of the ordo
episcoporum, the ordo presbyterorum, the ordo
diaconorum. Other groups also receive this name of ordo: catechumens,
virgins, spouses, widows,. . . .
At this
point, they give the disclaimer, “(On the institution and mission of the
apostolic ministry by Christ, see above, no. 874 ff. Here only the sacramental
means by which this ministry is handed on will be treated.)”
Moving back
to 874, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, at paragraph 874 says
(larded up here with the headers that appear in the text):
I. THE HIERARCHICAL CONSTITUTION OF
THE CHURCH
874 Christ is
himself the source of ministry in the Church. He instituted the Church. He gave
her authority and mission, orientation and goal:
“In order to shepherd the People of God
and to increase its numbers without cease, Christ the Lord set up in his Church
a variety of offices which aim at the good of the whole body. The holders of
office, who are invested with a sacred power, are, in fact, dedicated to
promoting the interests of their brethren, so that all who belong to the People
of God . . . may attain to salvation.”389
This
citation is from Lumen Gentium, so this is a Vatican II formulation. Note here,
it was “Christ the Lord” who “set up a variety of offices”. But clearly, Christ
did not set up the Roman offices.
What’s going on here?
In Trent’s Decree on Holy Orders, Canon
6 states that there is in the Church “a hierarchy instituted by divine
ordination, which consists of bishops, presbyters and ministers.” While this
teaching conforms to the idea of existence of such offices from the beginning
of the Church, it does not harmonize with the historical facts. The
Second Vatican Council’s Lumen Gentium [28] offers a more
realistic view based on a more secure historical consciousness and exegesis of
Scripture. Here we read “Thus the divinely instituted ecclesiastical ministry
is exercised in different degrees by those who even from ancient times (ab
antiquo) have been called bishops, priests, and deacons.” Hence
in no way does Vatican II affirm that the priesthood was instituted at the Last
Supper in the sense understood by Trent (pg 378).
From Edward
J. Kilmartin, S.J. (“The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology,”
Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, © 1998, 2004 by the Order of St.
Benedict. Edited by Robert J. Daily, S.J.)
And of
course, I’ve written about this “gap” in the past (John Reumann noted the
official discrepancy in official
Roman documents):
Biblical and patristic studies make
clear that historically a gap occurs at the point where it has
been claimed “the apostles were careful to appoint successors in” what is called
“this hierarchically constituted society,” specifically “those who were made bishops by
the apostles . . .,” an episcopate with an “unbroken succession going
back to the beginning.” [64] For that, evidence is lacking, quite
apart from the problem that the monepiscopacy replaced presbyterial governance
in Rome only in the mid-or late second century.[65] It has been noted above how
recent treatments conclude that in the New Testament no successor for Peter is
indicated.
See the
footnotes:
64. Lumen gentium 20 (Flannery
trans., Vatican Council II [Collegeville, MN: Liturgical
Press, 1975], pp. 371-372; Abbot trans., Documents of Vatican II [New
York: Guild Press, America Press, Association Press], pp. 39-40, “the
episcopate in a sequence running back to the beginning”). Cited are Iren. Adv.
Haer. 3,3,1 = PG 7:848; Tertullian,Praescr. Haer. 32 = PL
2:52f., and Ignatius of Antioch passim.
65. Gnilka 2002, p. 225. Ignatius had no “succession; bishop and presbyter correspond to Christ and apostles, not successors to the apostles (p. 223); the “succession lists” in Rome were of presbyters and bishops (pp. 242-50). (Referring to Gnilka, Joachim. Petrus und Rom. Das Petrusbild in den ersten zwei Jahrhunderten. Freiburg/Basel/Wien: Herder, 2002).
65. Gnilka 2002, p. 225. Ignatius had no “succession; bishop and presbyter correspond to Christ and apostles, not successors to the apostles (p. 223); the “succession lists” in Rome were of presbyters and bishops (pp. 242-50). (Referring to Gnilka, Joachim. Petrus und Rom. Das Petrusbild in den ersten zwei Jahrhunderten. Freiburg/Basel/Wien: Herder, 2002).
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Priorities
The image nearby was floating around on Facebook today; my
cousin’s son (also my cousin), who spent six months as a Marine in the Iraqi
desert (near Fallujah), at a time when things weren’t so nice there, had this
posted, and I shared it. The following text was attached to it:
“Whitney Houston died today, sad, sure. But the entire world
doesn't need to stop spinning for her. Do you know who else passed these last
few weeks that nobody will give a second thought about? ... These outstanding
men who fought and sweat and suffered and died, so that you all could live
peacefully. She met her own fate curled up in a Beverly Hills hotel nursing her
selfish drug addictions, not protecting your freedom as these Marines did. Semper Fidelis.”
Wallace/Ehrman debate
Andreas, thanks for carving out the time to come to the debate, for tweeting during it, and for your “wrap-up” comments. I am deeply concerned for laypeople’s understanding of these crucial issues; your affirmations about the Christian faith are an excellent complement to what I had to say in the debate.
I would like to take issue with some of your points (and agree with some of them, too), however, and also note a few items that you overlooked.
1. I spent too much time listing all the MS evidence. I disagree. Laypeople have time and time again expressed surprise at the wealth of material we have for the NT. Several folks came up after the debate and told me this, too. It is important to not only list the evidence we have for the NT, but also to compare it to classical authors. Although Bart attempted to insulate the crowd from what I was going to say, I don’t think he was entirely successful.
2. You said that Wallace “did not satisfactorily engage him on the theoretical question as to how we can say we have the original text of the NT.” I disagree. Here, again, are my five points:
(1) If the early MSS exhibit wild copying practices, then we are in an excellent position for recovering the original since there was no conspiracy to make just one kind of text. Further, those that were carefully produced in Alexandria reveal a careful copying process that reaches back to the earliest times. I illustrated this with Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and P75, and noted that when all three of them agree they probably reflect the original wording. Bart did not challenge this statement. I spoke at length about P75 and B, noting that the common ancestor was older than P75 and that B actually reflected a purer stream of transmission.
(2) The standard critical text used today, the Nestle-Aland 27, only follows conjecture in ONE place, and even there the two senior editors disagreed with the rest of the committee. This shows that conjecture is not needed for the NT like it is for virtually all other Greco-Roman literature. And when the MSS display coherence, this indicates that there are not gaps in the MS tradition.
(3) Not a single new reading from any of the 134 papyri has proven to be autographic. In the last 135 years, not a single new reading of any MS has such a pedigree either. This shows that the autographic wording is to be found among the MSS somewhere. I concluded this point by saying, “So, what would happen if we found MSS even earlier than our earliest papyri? They will no doubt confirm the wording that we already considered to be original. If all the NT papyri that have been discovered have not been able to introduce a single original reading, why should we think that more discoveries would be any different?” This cut into Bart’s main argument, and he did not respond directly to the point.
(4) The copy of Mark that Matthew used is a first-century Mark, and yet it differs from what scholars think the original Mark said in only a handful of non-translatable places. Bart himself had indicated (in Misquoting Jesus) that we have a first-century copy of Mark, but he concluded that Matthew and Luke were ‘just like the scribes’ in that they changed the text significantly. I argued that they were not like the scribes and that the scribes hardly changed the text at all.
(5) The first-century fragment of Mark was my final point. Not only does its existence contradict Bart’s claim that we don’t have anything from the first century of Mark, but “This papyrus fragment—just like the other new discoveries that we are preparing for publication—strongly confirms what most scholars have already said is the original text.”
I believe that these five points quite adequately answered Bart’s claim that we have no idea what the original wording was.
3. You claimed that my strongest argument was when I quoted from Misquoting Jesus to the effect that Bart agrees that none of the variants affects a major NT doctrine. Further, “If I had been in Wallace’s place, I would have kept reiterating this point several times, especially since Ehrman never responded to it.” I disagree. My quoting of Misquoting Jesus was technically outside the purview of the debate’s topic; I intentionally put it in because I knew that many Christian students would be concerned about the implications of what we were saying. So, to press this point would be counter to what the debate was purportedly about.
4. “Another golden opportunity missed on Wallace’s part, in my opinion, was that he never pressed Ehrman on his comment that there were several places in the NT where there were serious problems with the text.” I disagree. There was no such opportunity because I agree with Bart on this front. I had made the point that they didn’t affect cardinal doctrines, but much more than that I cannot claim.
5. As for 2 Corinthians, I actually did say that not all scholars agreed with Bart that it was a patchwork book. I did, however, state that 2 Corinthians is problematic (as you noted). I believe that it’s a unit, but also recognize that many good scholars have seen it as a patchwork document. I also focused on John 21, which Bart claimed was almost universally viewed as a later addition; I noted that a doctoral student at DTS is doing his work on this very question. Bart also mentioned Mark 16’s last page as having been lost, but I pointed out that the majority of scholars in the last fifty years would disagree with that viewpoint, and that it presupposes that the book was originally written on a codex, which most scholars who work in this field would find untenable.
I should also mention that Bart’s arguments about 2 Corinthians, John, Luke, Acts, and Mark were all related to composition criticism, not textual criticism per se. It seems to me that Bart wanted to employ this tactic to divert the discussion from the real issue. I think he was partially successful at this, but not entirely.
6. You are quite right that I should have asked Bart to lay out what he needed to believe that we had the original text of the NT. This was asked in our debate last October, and Bart said that he would need to see ten MSS of Mark, written within a week of the autograph, and having no more than a 0.001% deviation. I called him on that skepticism in the TC-List, and he conceded that he was speaking off the cuff and that it was an exaggeration. I noted that the question asked had to do with the minimum he would need to believe, so if he gave an exaggeration he was not really answering the question asked. Further, I noted that since there are only 57,000 letters in Mark, to require no more than 0.001% deviation would mean half a letter at most! Since then he has backed off on his skepticism, and this debate was the result.
7. As for the mention of the Mark fragment, this actually was in direct response to what Bart said in his opener—viz., we have no first-century MSS of Mark. I also noted that this fragment, along with the other six second-century fragments, demonstrated that the text was stable.
8. Regarding Zuntz’s collection theory in AD 100, you are right that I should have objected. However, Zuntz’s view has a great amount of scholarship behind it. What may well be its undoing is four of the new fragments discovered—all of Paul’s letters! But since the data are not out on them yet, I couldn’t comment on this specifically. However, you also have to keep in mind that we each had five minutes to respond to the other person. One has to choose what to focus on.
9. As for Ehrman’s agnosticism, that was off the table. The rules of engagement laid down ahead of time specifically noted that we could not speak of each other’s faith or lack thereof.
10. As for your suggestion that I speak of my faith at the end, this again was not part of the topic. But you didn’t note what I did say. When Bart spoke of the bloody sweat verses in Luke as a later addition, noting what the author’s viewpoint of the passion was all about, I pointed out that this presupposed that Bart knew what the original text of Luke was saying. I think this was perhaps my strongest point in the debate. Even Bart ultimately has to claim that the original wording is available to us. Further, I noted that the scholarship of the last two thousand years has presupposed that we have the original wording in broad strokes and even in most particulars. In that respect, Bart’s views are indeed those of a radical skeptic.
11. Your comment that “some seemed unsure why the issue even mattered” is rather poignant. In many respects, it doesn’t. That is, I think that Bart was arguing on a technicality—viz., that some of the NT books may have been patchwork documents and thus the original form is difficult, if not impossible, to locate. But how important this is in terms of the real issue that people are wrestling with—whether we have a NT that is reliable—is a different matter.
12. Finally, one other comment: I asked in my opening statement, “How does [Bart know that these early MSS do not give us the original wording]? What criteria does he use to determine that they made mistakes? Either such errors are patently obvious—like “Onion” for “Union”—or he is judging these early papyri by later MSS that have an excellent pedigree—later MSS whose wording reaches back to the time before our earliest papyri.” Bart said I pitched him a softball because he was able to determine that the MSS were defective by patristic comments from the second century. I responded that this was overstated—that is, he was using the great uncials as well as patristics to point to the autographic wording. And precisely because of the majuscules of the fourth century scholars have concluded—with Metzger—that the wording of their texts is hundreds of years older than the MSS themselves.
http://www.biblicalfoundations.org/ehrman-wallace-debate-wrap-up/
What are possible worlds?
If God is freely creative, then outside him there exists nothing except what he freely chooses; there are not even possibilities, there is nothing at all…McTaggart’s argument…may fail to strike people because they have some false imagination of God’s being confronted by a magazine of possible entities, between which he has to choose. This is an old error, on which I have spoken and written before; I shall not now waste time discussing it; enough to say that the phrase “the possibility of a rational cephalopod” (for example) can only relate to the same as the phrase “the possibility of God’s making a cephalopod rational,” and this in turn is a nominalization of the proposition (be it true or false) “God can make a cephalopod rational.” We have to do only with some aspect of God’s almighty power, not with some possible but unactual rational cephalopod or with some logical fact that confronts God. P. Geach, The Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 73-74.
Richard Carrier on Robert Price
Likewise, Price does not do a good job of articulating his meta-theory (that there are so many possible explanations fitting the evidence that we can’t claim the certainty scholars have been), and thus gives the impression of constantly contradicting himself by defending several completely different theories, of varying merit. For example, he has even attacked the historicity of Paul, and regardless of what you think of that, such a position is still more radical than merely questioning the historicity of Jesus. Although I know Price does not mean to say that Paul definitely did not exist, but that his existence is at least questionable, but Ehrman might simply conflate everything and conclude Price is a nut job even more extreme than the real crazies, by assuming, for example, that “Paul did not exist” is a premise in Price’s overall case against historicity. That would be a mistake, but it would be a mistake Price must partly take the blame for, having not consistently made his meta-position clear.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/255/comment-page-1#comment-4461
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Were the gospels anonymous?
John Moles
Hengel does/did use the first argument you cite but others as well (e.g. the very rarity and distinctiveness of the traditional titles). As for the Ignatius (and others) argument, Hengel retorts that Christian writers could still do this in the period when the titles were undoubtedly known. The arguments on both sides seem to me finely balanced, unless of course one thinks one can find internal ‘self-inscriptions’ within the Gospels (as, for example, Bauckham thinks in the Fourth Gospel, with complicated numerological arguments which I can’t possibly assess). I just think the general assumption of anonymity is a little glib, especially considering the huge proportion of internally anonymous texts in the ancient world, even in relevant related genres like historiography and biography, only a tiny proportion of which were actually anonymous, naming normally being conveyed by existing reader knowledge or by the titulus (whether on papyrus or codex).
http://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/newly-identified-early-new-testament-fragments/#comment-2182
I assume this is the commenter:
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/historical/staff/profile/john.moles
Type/token
I’m going to respond to this post:
The real problem for anyone passing from the OT to the NT is what to make of the “newness” of the Church (cf. Eph. 2:15; Cf. Matt. 16:18; Jn. 7:39, etc.). Dispensationalists, by and large, are not given to seeing the Church in the OT. There may be vague adumbrations in the OT (per the Progressives), but the Church as the Body of Christ is not there. Therefore, Israel in the OT is not in any sense the Church (of course, Stephen, in Acts 7:38 is not referring to Israel as the Body of Christ, despite the best efforts of Bishop Bancroft. The word ekklesia simply refers to Israel as “a called assembly”). Covenant Theologians (CT’s), in the thrall of the “covenant of grace,” see only one people of God in both Testaments, which must be the Church. From this conclusion OT Israel has to be understood as being the Church in the OT, whether the Bible says it is or not. I realize CT’s do recognize a change from OT church to NT church, but that is another matter.
It's true that I see one people of God in both Testaments. I don't have to call that the "church." The "church" has more specific connotations. If you restrict the "church" to the NT, then, by definition, there is no OT church. But that's semantic.
I'd use a more general term: we have covenant communities in both Testaments. There are continuities and discontinuities between the two based on similarities and dissimilarities between the respective covenants that govern them. Yet they are one people of God inasmuch as both groups are saved by grace; both groups share a common destination.
What ultimately unites both groups is divine election. The elect of all ages.
Once this view is adopted, any unity cannot, of course, be arrived at via plain-sense, law of identity interpretations. The only way unity can be saved is by making the Apostolic authors identify OT objects as “types” and such, to be realized in different form in the NT (i.e. via reinterpretation).
As I just explained, I don't think we have to view Israel as a type of the church to ground their unity.
Let's take a borderline case. Take 1C proselytes or Godfearers. These are ethnically Gentile, but religiously Jewish. They belong to the OT covenant community. When they convert to Christianity, they now belong to the NT covenant community. There's "newness" in their Christian identity, but Cornelius the Godfearer is the same person as Cornelius the Christian. And his conversion from Judaism to Christianity is a continuum rather than a quantum leap.
One of the frustrations some of us encounter when dealing with CT’s is their habit of redefining words like “literal,” and “replacement,” and “transform,” and even “reinterpretation.”
In my experience, "replacement theology" is not a term that CTs generally use to designate their own position (although Waltke is a partial exception). Rather, that's a term of abuse which dispensationalists use to characterize covenant theology. So I don't see that CTs are "redefining" the term "replacement."
And, as an aside, it is hard for me to comprehend men like C. Venema when they write about the First Resurrection of Revelation 20 as “not a physical but a spiritual participation with Christ,” while insisting we take “the thousand years of Revelation 20 as figurative, rather than literal,” – ( R. D. Phillips & G. N. E. Fluhrer, These Last Days, 122, 121).
i) For the record, I think the "first resurrection" in Rev 20 has reference to the intermediate state. The martyrs go to heaven to be with Christ during the church age. That’s distinct from the final state.
ii) One factor we must take into consideration when we interpret the "first resurrection" in Rev 20 is the OT counterpart in Ezk 37.
iii) In addition, there's an implicit analogy in Revelation:
The first resurrection is to the second resurrection
as
The first death is to the second death
But unless the second death is the same type of event as the first death, then there's no presumption in treating the first and second resurrection as the same type of event.
As G. Goldsworthy says, “Some literalists have an aversion to spiritualizing, but it is clear that there is a real sense in which the New Testament spiritualizes the Old.” – Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics, 248, n.14.
I don't think the NT spiritualizes the OT. Rather, I think NT writings understand OT writings the same way later OT writings understand earlier OT writings. I think there's a common typology which carries over from the OT to the NT.
Be that as it may, some Covenant Theologians do say that the NT “reinterprets” the OT (e.g. K. Riddlebarger, A Case for Amillennialism, 37). To re-interpret something is “to interpret in a new or different way.” Is that not an accurate description of the position of those who teach that the NT is needed to understand the OT when it speaks of “Israel” and “land” and “temple” etc.? Isn’t that exactly what we are often told the NT writers did with OT contexts?
i) Some CTs do view the fulfillment scheme in terms of reinterpretation. Bruce Waltke is a case in point. I think that's a mistake.
ii) Using the NT to interpret the OT doesn't presume that the NT is reinterpreting the OT. For one thing, promises and prophecies are inherently future-oriented. So it makes sense that we'd grasp them better retrospectively than prospectively. You have a better understanding of the future when the future becomes the present or the past.
In a promise/fulfillment scheme, living in the time of fulfillment gives you a better perspective on where the promise was heading.
iii) At the same time, the starting point isn't the key issue. Whether we begin with the OT or the NT, at the end of the day we need to integrate both. We can't compartmentalize apostolic exegesis as if that's sui generis. Both dispensationalists and CTs are in the same boat in this respect. Even if we begin at different launch sites, we need to arrive at the same destination.
It's not as if there's a special problem for CT. Dispensationalists have the same duty to come to terms with apostolic exegesis. Dispensationalists must also understand OT promises and prophecies consistent with how NT writers understood them. If you want to make the OT your benchmark, so be it. But even if you take the OT as your point of departure, your understanding of the OT can't be at odds with how the NT understands the OT.
To be clear about this, Beale, as Goldsworthy, and most contemporary CT’s, thinks Jesus is Israel (thus, the church is “new Israel” in Him). Jesus is also the temple (ditto the church).
I think the identity language ("is") is shorthand. If you press the identity language, that's reductionistic. It's not that Jesus is (i.e. identical with) Israel, but that Jesus recapitulates Israel. Yet where Israel is the faithless son, Jesus is the faithful son.
That, however, doesn't eliminate Israel as an entity distinct from Jesus. Rather, it's a vicarious principle, where the Redeemer acts on behalf of, and in place of, the redeemed. But we're not actually collapsing two parties into one.
Once this view is adopted, any unity cannot, of course, be arrived at via plain-sense, law of identity interpretations.
“39. This view, which teaches a God who prevaricates in the promises and covenants He makes, also tempts its adherents to adopt equivocation themselves when they are asked to expound OT covenantal language in its original context.
There are two basic issues here:
1) A promise involves two parties: the promisor and the promisee. For a promise to be a sincere, good-faith promise, it must mean the same thing to both parties. If the promisor intends the promise to mean something different to him than it does to the promisee, then that's deceptive.
Take the classic Delphic oracle: "If you cross the river, a great empire will be destroyed."
Croesus took this to mean he'd defeat the Persians–whereas the Persians defeated Croesus.
The oracle was equivocal and treacherous. The oracle fostered a misimpression.
2) Apropos (1), what would a land-promise mean to Abraham? Is the land just a place? An address? A set of GPS coordinates?
Don't space and time go together? Is the land the same land in every century or millennium? Doesn't the same place change over time?
Take a crooked realtor with a time-machine. Suppose he sells a customer a view property in Santorini. It has a spectacular view of the Aegean Sea.
Only there's a little catch. He sells them the same place, but not at the same time. He shows them the property before the eruption, but sells them the property after the eruption. They buy the same plot of land, but it's timing makes all the difference!
Did he cheat them? It's the same address.
When Dispensationalists appeal to the Abrahamic land-promises, what did that mean to Abraham? Is the Dispensationalist indexing the land-promises to Abraham's world? To the world Abraham knew? Is modern Tel Aviv equivalent to that address in c. 2000 BC? What could be more equivocal than that?
Is that the "plain sense" of the promise to the promisee? Isn't that interpretation highly anachronistic?
3) Let's put this another way. Suppose God fulfills the land-promise to Abraham in the world to come by recreating a replica of the ANE, minus the damned. Wouldn't that be a more “literal” fulfillment of the promise to Abraham than reassigning the promise to the modern state of Israel?
4) Dr. Henebury is also glossing over the meaning of meaning. This is a complicated issue in hermeneutics. According to Henebury, what is the locus of meaning? There are several candidates:
i) Sense
ii) Reference
iii) Authorial meaning
If (iii), that breaks down into the following options:
a) The intention of the human author
b) The intention of the divine author
c) The actual author
d) The implied author
e) The editor (e.g. Psalter)
iv) Audiencial meaning
If (iv), that breaks down into the following options:
a) The actual audience
b) The implied audience
c) The intended audience
v) The narrator
vi) A normative character
viii) Canonical context
Again, he may not be interacting with my piece, and I have yet to get to his examples. But does a resort to a debatable typology solve the problem? As I shall show next time, Hays’ examples of “recapitulation” from Isaiah 11 & 35 & Jeremiah 16 seem to exemplify a reinterpretation along typological lines.
If the land always had a typical significance, if that was frontloaded, if there always was a one-to-many relation between the type and its multiple tokens, then we're not "reinterpreting" the land.
More about the New Testament fragments
Larry
Hurtado has a post suggesting caution with regard to the new manuscripts. He
says, “With many others, I await further news, and even more so I await more
forthcoming scholarly work on these mooted items. Additional early New Testament
fragments? As someone said when asked
what he thought of the French Revolution:
“Too soon to tell.”
Hurtado provides a link to the owner of the collection, Green Collection, whose
scholarly impetus is provided by Scott
Carroll, PhD. The story is, “Using a new technology developed by The Green
Collection in collaboration with Oxford University, scholars have uncovered the
earliest surviving New Testament written in Palestinian Aramaic — the language
used in Jesus’ household — found on recycled parchment under a layer in this
rare manuscript”.
That said, here’s what’s going around:
In one of the comments Steven Carr
notes “You can already read about this frament …” The link is to an article
that discusses 7Q5 – a fragment that has so little extant that its identification
is generally held ot be questionable, and that has nothing to do with the Green
Collection papyri that Dan Wallace was referring to.
From what I’ve been able to glean
there are now in the Green Collection 7 unpublished NT papyri
1. 2nd century frg. with Hebrews 1
2. 2nd century frg. with I Corinthians 8-10
3. 2nd century frg. with Matthew
4. 2nd century frg. with Romans 8-9
5. 2nd century frg. with part of a Pauline Epistle, from what I know it is from Hebrews
6. 2nd century frg. with Luke
7. 1st century frg. with Mark
2. 2nd century frg. with I Corinthians 8-10
3. 2nd century frg. with Matthew
4. 2nd century frg. with Romans 8-9
5. 2nd century frg. with part of a Pauline Epistle, from what I know it is from Hebrews
6. 2nd century frg. with Luke
7. 1st century frg. with Mark
Rearding Mark Stevens question as
to where they were found, it appears most of these have been recently extracted
from mummy cartonnage, but I don’t know any details as to where these were
found.
As Hurtado notes, “With regard to NT writings, we are
already in an enviable and unparalleled situation, with substantial early
papyri copies of a number of them (e.g., the Chester Beatty papyri, and the
Bodmer papyri).” Still, the early word is, “caution”.
Edit: Links fixed, 10:00 am
Friday, February 10, 2012
Solar submarine
i) There are many variations on this familiar diagram. That, itself, is rather telling. The same basic diagram is reproduced ad nauseum. So we’re being treated to thirdhand scholarship. Scholars copying other scholars copying other scholars. We’re not getting original, independent research. What we’re getting, instead, are scholars who unquestioningly reproduce earlier scholarship. Indeed, that isn’t real scholarship. It’s just handing down rote tradition.
You have to wonder who produced the initial diagram. How far back does this go?
ii) However, let’s examine this diagram on its own terms. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that this is how Bible writers viewed the world. What are implications of this depiction?
How does the sun restart in the east every morning? It has to go under the earth. But what’s under the earth is the primordial sea. So, in order for the sun to rise in the east and set in the west every day, it must go under water at night. A solar submarine.
Suppose the ancients thought of the sun as a giant ball of fire. What would be the effect? Well, there are two possible effects:
iii) Submerging the sun in the ocean would cause the ocean to boil. In fact, Revelation plays on that sort of imagery:
8 The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood. 9 A third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed (Rev 8:8-9).
Question: was that the daily experience of folks living on the Mediterranean coastline?
iv) Conversely, the sun would be extinguished by sustained submersion. And I daresay ancient Near Easterners had experience dousing fire with water. That’s not very hitech.
So how did the soggy sun reignite every morning?
v) I’d add that these aren’t mutually exclusive explanations. (iv) could naturally follow (iii).
vi) In sum, this diagram isn’t realistic even from the perspective of somebody living in the ANE.
Did ancient Near Easterners believe the world was flat?
One stock objection to the Bible is the claim that Bible writers thought the earth was flat. This objection is supported by the further claim that ancient Near Easterners in general adhered to a triple-decker cosmography. Bible writers were simply operating with the same antiquated framework. So goes the argument.
Charles Halton challeges that facile assumption:
One caveat I have with his discussion is when he says, “How else would ancient people have approached a topic that was so beyond their technological capacities to understand? ”
While that’s true for ancient Near Easterners in general, it fails to take into account the inspiration of Bible writers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)