Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Was Jesus self-deceived?

Tentative Apologist
@RandalRauser
I had a nice exchange with @RTB_FRana but I was disappointed to learn that he holds Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. That thesis is to biblical studies as young-earth creationism is to geology. When Christian apologists endorse fringe views they weaken their credibility.

James Anderson
@proginosko
Replying to @RandalRauser @RTB_FRana
Yeah, it's so embarrassing when Christians endorse the sort of fringe views that Christ himself held!

Tentative Apologist
@RandalRauser
Tentative Apologist Retweeted James Anderson
James should try this out at the Society of Biblical Literature. That will surely put all those liberal "scholars" in their place.

Tentative Apologist
@RandalRauser
Replying to @proginosko @RTB_FRana
I suppose you also think the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds?

James Anderson
@proginosko
Replying to @RandalRauser @RTB_FRana
I think whatever Jesus affirmed about the mustard seed is true. I also think whatever Jesus affirmed about the OT scriptures he quoted is true. Moreover, I believe I have good rational justification for these beliefs, despite what the fine folk at SBL might think of me.

Tentative Apologist
@RandalRauser
Jesus said the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds (Matthew 13:32). So it's settled for you then?

James Anderson
@proginosko
If Jesus affirms p, I take that as decisive grounds to affirm p. Does that shock you? Of course, there's a reasonable question here about what p is in the case of Matthew 13:32. I take it that "all" is qualified by the conversational context.

1. Wow. Rauser actually trots out the mustard seed objection to inerrancy, as if that's comparable to Mosaic authorship. The mustard seed statement is proverbial or hyperbolic. It's not erroneous to use hyperbole or proverbial sayings (e.g. "a fish rots from the head down").

And it's not remotely analogous to the question of Mosaic authorship.

But this also goes to Rauser's kenotic Christology, where Jesus, as a child of his times, unwittingly taught falsehood. 

The issue is whether the target audience recognizes hyperbolic or proverbial expressions. Then analogy would then be whether the same audience recognized that Mosaic authorship was just a conventional attribution. There the comparison breaks down. 

I'm sure Rauser's real position is that 1C Palestinian Jews believed in Mosaic authorship, but modern scholars know better. 

2. While Jesus may have held false beliefs qua his human nature, that's in union with the divine nature, and in his capacity as a teacher, the divine nature would inform, correct, or censor false beliefs of the human nature/mind when it came to teaching others.

One issue is whether the divine nature would function, among other things, as a screen or quality control mechanism, to preempt Jesus from unwittingly misleading billions of Christians over the centuries. It's serious business to say Jesus was an unintentional deceiver, due to his fallibility.

But if anything, it's worse than that since on Rauser's theory, Jesus is self-deceived. If he's fallible in the way Rauser says or allows for, then he could be self-deluded about his mission, about his understanding of God, about who he himself is, about salvation and damnation. 

3. Regarding Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch:

i) If the Pentateuch was actually compiled during the Babylonian Exile, how did the entire Jewish community forget the origins of the Pentateuch? Is social memory that weak? How did Mosaic authorship ever become the unquestioned tradition in 2nd Temple Judaism?

ii) The most natural assumption is that Genesis-Chronicles are written in chronological order. It's a continuous history, so you'd expect books recounting later events to be written later than books recounting earlier events. But if the Pentateuch was compiled during the Babylonian Exile, then doesn't that push the composition of the other books into the Intertestamental period? It really bunches up, like a log jam.

iii) What were pre-exilic prophets talking about when they indict Israel as covenant-breakers and threaten the curse sanctions of Deuteronomy if, in fact, the Pentateuch was compiled after the fact?

iv) If the Pentateuch is pious fiction, why say the Israelites are carpetbaggers who invaded Palestine from Egypt, and ultimately go back to a progenitor from Babylon? Why not just make the Israelites indigenous to Palestine? 

v) For that matter, if the Pentateuch and Historical Books were really written during the empires of neo-Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Alexander, and Republican Rome, why people them Canaanite adversaries?

3 comments:

  1. On your item i), I do think that it's possible for a false history to be foisted upon the populace and enforced enough to make them believe it is true.

    Cases in point: The oral Talmud supposedly originating from Moses making it unnoticed for centuries before it was written down; the fabricated origins and history of Muhammad, the Quran, the Hadith etc.

    Give our modern world enough decades of leftist indoctrination and I'm pretty sure future generations will accept as unquestioned fact that Christianity (especially by Whites) was the greatest evil of all human history, humanity has always accepted LBGTQ+, and America was the archvillain stopping/sabotaging the true socialist utopia. (Millenials already believe that Winston Churchill was a fictional character... Thanks, JK Rowling!)

    Also, vi) Archaeology has confirmed many major and minor (even incidental) details that a captivity-period work of fiction would not have gotten correct. Even if the tales had originated as oral retellings based on actual historical events, many details are so minute and unimportant to the larger narrative that they would have been lost if not written down - offhand I can think of examples like the walls of Jericho falling 'underneath' itself and Israelites going 'up' into the city, Canaanite customs that died out after the 1800sBC, 1800-1400sBC Egyptian practices that exiles cloistered way off in Babylon would not have known about.

    For constrast, look at any forgery spinning tall tales about earlier times (Gospel of Barnabas, Quranic versions of Biblical characters, Hadith & Tarikh accounts versus the physical evidence, the non-existence of Mecca prior to the 700-900sAD) and their grossly anachronistic oddities.

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    Replies
    1. How widespread was belief in the oral torah? That was repudiated by the Karaites (although there's a question of how far back that movement goes). But wasn't belief in the oral torah confined to the one sect of the Jews–the Pharisees? And even among the Pharisees, did they think their entire common law tradition went back to Moses? How could they when they made new rulings?

      Good observations under (vi)

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  2. Note that Rauser feels no need to hide or disguise what he believes the gold standard of whether a belief is credible or not is.

    "If anyone should be ashamed of the words of the Society of Biblical Literature in the year 2020, then Randal Rauser will also be ashamed of them in the presence of his fan base when he spews out upon social media" - book of Twitter, chapter 19, verse 21. Be afraid!

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