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Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Epistemology and historical arguments

http://www.craigkeener.com/epistemology-and-historical-arguments-a-few-thoughts/

5 comments:

  1. Gosh, it's a terrible shame that a professional epistemologist has never done any hard work on the historical Jesus and the Gospels and made it available. Someone ought to get right on that, so that New Testament scholars can have something to read and take account of on epistemology and historical Jesus scholarship.

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    Replies
    1. Lol, the sarcasm is laid on thick here. 🤣

      By the way, I think your book has been (highly) recommended on Triablogue. 😊

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    2. Oh, certainly. The sarcasm was *not* directed at Steve. I'm sorry if that was unclear.

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    3. I never thought otherwise

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  2. Btw, the post gives the impression that Keener merely "does not defend" certain passages in the Bible. But in point of fact, he actually *explicitly considers it likely* that certain passages are *not historically veracious*, which is not the same thing as merely prescinding from their defense. Some illustrative examples:

    --The ever-popular idea that John, contrary to historical fact, deliberately *changed* the Temple cleansing within his "story world" to a time when it *did not happen*. Popular it may be, increasingly so, but taking that position is not merely "not defending" the historicity of the Gospel at that point.

    --That John changed the day of Jesus' crucifixion.

    --Keener implies, though he does not take a firm position on, the idea that John invented the incident where Jesus breathes on his disciples and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit."

    --He thinks Luke invented a portion of Gamaliel's speech in Acts, giving rise to an anachronism in the mention of Theudas, but that Luke wouldn't have cared that this was inaccurate and that Gamaliel couldn't have referred to Theudas.

    --He thinks that John theologically exaggerated the extent to which Jesus carried his own cross, deliberately suppressing the role of Simon of Cyrene for theological effect.

    --He states in his Matthew commentary that Matthew invented an extra blind man for Jesus to heal as well as an entire extra incident of Jesus' healing the blind in order to "compensate" for not telling an entirely different healing story in Mark.

    --He thinks that Matthew doubled up on demoniacs healed in order (similarly) to compensate.

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