Thursday, March 14, 2019

Against All Assumptions

Three Pillars of Radical Criticism (source unknown)
Today I feel like venting. So I am going to lay out what I see as the six primary assumptions made in New Testament scholarship, none of which should be assumed. Assuming even one of these to be true will lead bad results.

I mean this post to be something of a conversation starter, and I am open to refinement of what I see as being the root of the problem with New Testament studies today.

New Testament Studies and Christian Origins in the modern sense took over as Scholasticism began to fade. But the methods and assumptions of that middle ages approach linger and even dominate the field to this day. We see this mostly in two forms, the constant harmonizing of disagreeing texts, and in bias against results or even directions that lead away from the basic assumptions.

The basic assumptions I have identified are these below, feel free to comment or add your own:

1. the stories in the NT are based on actual people and actual events
     - this is independent of whether one thinks the miracles and such were real or can be explained by natural phenomena

2. the temporal setting is more or less accurate
3. the depiction of the Jesus, his disciples, the Roman and Jewish officials and others is more or less accurate
     - I would even include in this category those who argue for alterante personalities, such as Jesus being a Jewish Nationalists

4. the books were written by the generation which witnessed the events, or were orally passed down for a generation or two
      - this is particularly the view of the gospels, that they are the product of juniors at the time of Jesus, "hangers on" as  memories faded and splits arose
      - the scholarly assumption of an "oral gospel" is born of the above assumption

Note: the oral gospel is heavily relied on by Q theory, which has also led to the explosion of the "field of study" about naive Jesus communities of the 1st century. There is zero archeological evidence for any such communities ever existing.

5. the NT letters, at least those of Paul or the "authentic core" of Paul, were written by the actual individual and are actual letters
      - scholarship has steadily abandoned the Catholic letters as admittedly "fraudulent" from latter era with latter concerns
      - but it has hung on doggedly to the notion that Paul is different, that the "personal" elements are authentic

6. Patristic and Pagan Historical Documents also are also mostly what they claim to be

The above can be summed up as the "eye witness account" theory of Christian origins.

There is another assumption, which gives extra weight to tradition. This includes reliance, especially in apologetic arguments, to the approach of Scholasticism. This is a methodology which dominated Christian intellectual study from the 12th century into the 17th century, but still lingers today. While the useful tool of dialectical reasoning developed from this, the primary purpose was to resolve "seeming" contradictions in the texts, to show by inference that the same position is actually held. Today we refer to such playing down or making opposites the same as harmonizing. It is a methodology which is considered unacceptable in all academia except NT studies.

I think Darrell J. Doughty's Pauline Paradigms and Pauline Authenticity is a good read for a counter to at least item 5. 

 -sgw

1 comment:

  1. "From the fact that the 'Jesus Stories' were written from Source Stories, it does not follow that these Source Stories were about 'Jesus'."

    Thnx,

    CW

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