Theology for the Masses

Honzo October 15th, 2007

BOOK REVIEW : A Review of “Become a Better You” by Joel Osteen from Challies Dot Com
A scathing review of our favorite Bible exegete.

Osteen seems unable or unwilling to bring the power of the gospel to bear on life–real life. Life, he teaches, is not a meant to bring glory to God, but is meant to bring blessing and ease to the individual.

CHRISTIAN HISTORY : Skarsaune and the Jerusalem Council from The Forbidden Gospel’s Blog
DeConnick talks about a plausible explanation of the Jerusalem council, given the contradictions in Paul’s letters and Acts.

1. Paul’s first visit to Jerusalem: Gal 1:18=Acts 9:26-30
2. Paul’s second visit to Jerusalem: Gal 2:1-10=Acts 11:30; 12:25
3. Antiochean Affair: Gal 2:11-14=Acts 15:1-3
4. The writing of Galatians: before the council in Acts 15
5. Paul’s third visit to Jerusalem and the Jerusalem Council: Acts 15:2-29

DeConnick thinks that there are some problems with this, but that it is a good start. She follows up this post with What about this scenario? where she proposes a new sequence of events that is too long to quote here.

RELIGIOUS THINKING : Inerrant, infallible, inspired from 4Simpsons Blog by Neil
A devotional conclusion on Christians and the [un]holy trinity of loaded i-words: inerrant, infallible, and inspired.

We can read the Bible with confidence that God has transmitted his Word to us accurately. Sometimes the words inerrant and infallible are too loaded with various meanings to be helpful, so I like to emphasize that the original writings of the Bible turned out just the way God wanted them to.

RELIGIOUS LIVING : The Center from Bentch.com

“Each day you have to decide, am I going to be Christ-centered or self-centered?”
I love this because it reminds me that life is not all about me. It is about showing others Christ’s love.

BIBLE TRANSLATION : Gender language literally speaking from the Better Bibles Blog

I have to wonder if most people really do think that gender neutral language is less literal than gender specific language. Each case has to be assessed in isolation and then the group as a whole.

First, brothers and sisters…

• Culture , History , Links
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Honzo October 14th, 2007

Is the Acts of the Apostles history?¹ Boy, I bet that could set off a good debate `round these parts! (But please see the first footnote and the links contained therein before you jump all over me.) This is an interesting and valuable question indeed. Late last month a couple of scholars that I enjoy reading brought up this very issue.

April DeConnick, at the Forbidden Gospels Blog, brought this topic up in her post: Is Luke a trustworthy historian? In the post, she asks why Acts is written off as a Lukan myth. She acknowledges that in the past people have trusted in its historical value a little too much and not treated it as histories should be treated. However, the conception of Acts as history has shifted to the other extreme. She argues that Acts must have been based off earlier sources and that understanding these sources is valuable in learning about the earliest Christians traditions and as a consequent constructing the earliest Christian history. Her argument is as follows:

1. When Luke uses Mark, he does not rework Mark as much as Matthew.
2. When Luke uses Q, Q-scholars tell us that he retains Q better in terms of verbage and order than Matthew. In fact, our reconstructed Q is versed according to Luke.
3. Luke tells us in the beginning of his gospel that he relied on older sources to rewrite the Christian narrative which we apparently trust given our hypothesis that Luke is a second edition of Mark.
4. If we think that Luke used Mark and Q as literary sources, wouldn’t the best assumption be that he also used older traditional sources for the composition of Acts?
5. If 4 is valid, then shouldn’t we be trying to figure out what those older traditions are and what they tell us about Christianity earlier than Luke?

The first comment on DeConnick’s post summed up my thoughts on this issue quite nicely. Judy Redman asked why do people think that Luke’s gospel is reasonably accurate but that in writing Acts Luke engaged in “wild flights of fancy“? Judy points out that just because something is written “from the perspective of a particular faction of the early church does not make it myth.”

Mark Goodacre, over at the NT Gateway Blog, picks this question up and first goes into a critique of the use of Q (an interesting discussion in its own right) and ends with a rather positive view on Luke as a historian with qualifications. It is quite obvious that there is no video taping of history in Luke or Acts (or in any of the Biblical books for that matter), but that the situation is not as bleak as some modern scholars might think.

One of the other comments on April’s original post, left by JC Baker, asked the excellent question: What, if anything, can we know about history from our texts? DeConnick wrote up a great post in response that is worth reading now matter you interest in the Bible²³: How can we know anything from our texts? She outlines four steps everyone should take when glistening a text’s modern historical value.

First, one should seek to identify the “authorial revision of received tradition” because every furthered tradition has been recieved by an earlier tradition and most likely been edited to some extent. After this is accomplished, one must “read against the grain” to seek out the parts of the narrative that are inherently troublesome for the author. These troublesome bits are most likely to be historical.⁴ Next, one should try to identify the back story that the author does not give, but the recipients would be familiar with. Lastly, use contemporary texts to compare and identify agreements (more likely to be history) and disagreements (most likely to be functions of the point of view of the author or community than history). Using these methods one can begin to ascertain a text’s historical value.

In conclusion, Acts is not a history in the modern sense of the world. Acts is useful in many respects for building a history of the early church before 100CE but is not completely authoritative as history⁵ and should not be used in lieu of a history book. There just was not the intention there to write the same sort of thing we look for in a modern history. However, that is not to say that Acts has zero historical value. Instead, through the processes outlined above, one can sift through Acts and use it to piece together a modern history of the early Christian movement.

Further reading: Danny at Danny’s Blog Cabin takes up the issue of the Harmony of the gospels and comes to a very negative conclusion. While I disagree with some of his conclusions and demands of the text, it is a very open and honest approach to the issue and worth reading and wrestling with.

1. I am talking about what our idea of what history is, namely an accurate description of events, both in chronology and substance from an unbiased 3rd-person perspective, not the way the ancients viewed history, which were stories that were designed to illustrate lessons to be learned by the reader. [↩]
2. devotional, scholarly, or any mix of the two [↩]
3. or of any text, for that matter [↩]
4. note, this does not by itself invalidate the bits that serve the author’s purpose, but the bits that don’t we can be more sure about their historicity [↩]
5. See the conflict between Acts 9 and Gal 1 for an example [↩]

• History
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Honzo September 11th, 2007

Danny, over at Danny’s Blog Cabin has a poll up asking about the nature of the bible. I encourage the readers and authors to go and vote in the poll.

• History , Literature , The Bible
• Comments(7)

Honzo August 2nd, 2007

Click this link.

It is an early paper that serves as a beginning point of exploration of my master’s thesis on Syrian Christianity.

• Church Fathers , History
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Honzo July 12th, 2007

In preparation for some posts I am working on, I want to talk about history in Antiquity. It is very easy to import modern ideas and standards of history writing onto Ancient texts. However, to do so, will skew one’s reading of the text in a way that the author did not intend. The following are several concepts to keep in mind when reading ancient texts.¹

1) Lost in Translation Often the only copies of texts that we have today are copies of copies. Furthermore, they are often translations of the original text. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas was probably written in Syriac, but the earliest copy we have is written in Greek. On top of this, sometimes the original texts were translations of the speeches being recorded. An example of this last point are Jesus’ speeches recorded in the Gospels. Jesus spoke Aramaic; the Gospels were written in Greek.² It is important keep this process in mind when the exact order of words is being scrutinized.

2) History was for instruction, not for tracking details Ancient histories were not designed to be modern ones. Their primary focus was not on keeping track of historical minutia, nor was it designed to show a character’s development throughout time. Instead, it was designed to illustrate lessons to be learned by the reader. There was “… great freedom with which many ancient writers adapted their materials to achieve such goals…”³ This frame of mind should be accounted for when when studying ancient texts of all origins.

3) Look - Peter wrote this; hence it must be true Ancient authors had no problem with attributing works to authorities in order to give their work credibility. Christians have not been immune to this phenomenon. As early as the middle part of the first century, Christian leaders were complaining about letters being written in their name that contradicted with their positions.⁴ The problem for “Christian texts” only got worse as the years went on. Robin Fox writes:

In the period c.400-600, “aggressive forgeries” added false letters to the collection of almost every early Christian Letter writer. These fake texts of theology helped to enlist the great authorities of the past on this or that side of a contemporary schism or unorthodoxy.⁵

Imagine someone finding a letter from Paul where he argues quite clearly for each of the five points of Calvinism. The problem was so bad that it was not until the 1500s that people could begin to sort the forgeries from the authentic letters. ⁶

4) Good Forgeries Even when people were not outright co-opting authorities for the sake of their own positions, there is the problem of attribution. It was common in Classical and Hellenistic Greek culture for a student to classify their own positions and work as their teacher’s work. For example, there are more texts attributed to Aristotle that he could have humanly wrote. It is hard to determine in some cases where the teacher’s writing ends and the student’s begins. James H. Charlesworth has delineated the above idea into seven rough categories:⁷

1. Writings not by an author, but containing some of the author’s own thoughts
2. Writings by someone who was influenced by another work whom the work is attributed
3. Writings influenced by someone who was influenced by the earlier works of another author to whom the work is assigned
4. Writings attributed to an individual, but actually deriving from a circle or school surrounding that individual
5. Christian writings attributed by their authors to an Old Testament personality
6. Once anonymous writings that have been incorrectly attributed to another individual
7. Writings that intentionally try to deceive the reader into thinking the author is someone else

Quite naturally, the accuracy, dependability, ect, depends on which category the text being examined falls.

5) Recording Speeches There were not any tape recorders or stenographers around in Antiquity. Because of this, not all of the speeches recorded in ancient texts are verbatim copies of the original works. As a matter of fact, people recording the speeches often either gave abridged or paraphrased versions of the speech in question. Sometimes, the speech was elaborated on for the sake of effective rhetoric. Thucydides, an ancient Greek historian, admitted as much in his History of the Peloponnesian Wars.

I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches I have listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for in each situation.

After about 300 B.C.E speakers issued written copies of their speeches to combat this problem.⁸

6) Say it enough, and people will think it is true Remember Hitler’s idea of the “Big Lie?” Same principle at work. If an author had a agenda to push, there was nothing to keep the author to fudge the facts to push their version of history. In a less deliberate manner, if errors crept into the historical record and subsequent authors relied on erroneous accounts of history for their facts, the resulting account will carry or perhaps magnify the original error, intentional or not.

Despite these difficulties, it is still possible to sift through historical manuscripts to uncover the most likely account of history by our modern standards of accuracy. My next post will deal with how to correct for these errors.

1. The above list was taken from Novak. Christianity and the Roman Empire: Background Texts. pp 3-7 [↩]
2. The Canonical ones were all written in Greek. There is a slight chance that the Gospel of Matthew was written in Hebrew, but it is most likely that it was written in Greek like the rest [↩]
3. Novak. Ibid. p.4 [↩]
4. See Second Thessalonians 2:1-5 [↩]
5. Novak. Ibid. p.4 [↩]
6. Fox. Ibid. p. 154. [↩]
7. James Charlesworth. “Pseudo-Epigraphy”. Encyclopedia of Early Christianity. p.765-767 [↩]
8. Novak. Ibid. p.6. [↩]

• Archeology , Church Fathers , History , Post Series
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Honzo June 6th, 2007

Yesterday, I posted an open question about how our authors and readers view scripture. I replied that I did not hold to the doctrine of inerrancy. While this may seem shocking at first to some of our readers, allow me to flesh out my position with this post.

First, I need to give my definition of inerrancy. In this post, I am primarily concerned with the Chicago Statement’s position on inerrancy, hereto referred to as Chicago Inerrancy. According to this view, inerrancy implies that the Bible is completely true and accurate – historically, scientifically, and spiritually. In order for this to be the case, every book, every sentence, and every word must be the literal truth. :”(If this precludes your definition of inerrancy, please let me know in the comments.)”: I don’t think the Chicago position allows for any other definition of inerrancy. Consider the following portion of the Chicago Statement:

Article XII. We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.

We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.

All it takes to demonstrate the falsehood of the above statement and the Chicago position is to demonstrate a single historical or scientific error. I will provide two.

Example 1: The healing of Peter’s Mother-in-law

Was Peter’s mother healed before or after Peter was called to be a disciple? According to Luke 4:38-40, Jesus healed her hand before he called Peter as a disciple in Luke 5:10. However, Matthew gives us a different story. According to Matthew 8:14-15, Peter’s mother-in-law was healed after Peter was called to be a disciple in Mt 4:18. Both cannot be true at the same time. And before someone tries to say that Peter’s mother-in-law was healed twice, consider two additional problems this would bring up. First, Jesus would be healing the same person’s fever twice in a relatively short period. This implies that the first healing did not stick – was Jesus’ first healing ineffective? This is more of a problem than differences in editing bring up. The second issue is literary in nature. If you examine each pericope, one finds that they are really the same pericope, just out of order in each narrative.

Details were changed for the sake of the narrative. The events are not called into question, just the order of events. Peter’s mother-in-law was healed; Peter was called to be a disciple. However, the gospels themselves disagree on the order of events. Both cannot be true; rather, both cannot be historically accurate. One of them is errant on the answer to the following question: “Was Peter’s mother healed before or after Peter was called to be a disciple?” Notice that both do give an answer to that question. Both are not accurate down to the littlest detail. Both accounts can be inspired, but not inerrant. :”(At least not inerrant according to the Chicago position.)”:.

Example 2: The Day and Time of Jesus’ Crucifixion

What day and at what time was Jesus crucified? If one goes by the events in Mark 14:12-20, the Last Supper happened on Passover. Jesus was then crucified the next day at 9AM (Mk 14-15). This differs from the account in John, the last gospel to be written. In John 19:14-16 the narrative is explicit that Jesus was crucified on Passover at 12PM, not the day after at 9AM. The last Supper was the day before. John has a very good reason for moving the crucifixion a day up – one of the themes of the gospel of John is that Jesus is the Passover lamb.

Once again, the historical details were changed for the sake of the narrative.:”(Or, they were recorded differently by two different sources. No matter which one is the case, the historical record differs between the two.)”: Just like in the earlier example, there is no question that the events happened. Jesus was crucified; the Last Supper did take place. However, the gospels themselves disagree on the dating of the events. Both cannot be completely historically accurate to the smallest detail. One of them is errant on the answer to the following question, “What day and at what time was Jesus crucified?” Again, but accounts can be inspired, but are not inerrant, at least the way that the Chicago Statement suggests.

Conclusion

The Chicago Statement and a sizable number of Christians hold that the Bible is inerrant in all matters, including its historical claims. This includes all historical claims. I have demonstrated, through two examples, that the Bible is internally conflicted on a historical matters. These examples can be easily explained away by the editing process and the need to argue spiritual points. However, if these explanations are allowed, Chicago’s strict historical inerrancy claim must be abandoned for a more nuanced claim.

What might be such a claim? I think that the Fuller Statement of Faith gives a good view of inerrancy and infallibility. While the statement does not come right out and give their position on this matter, Parableman has summed up their view quite succinctly (emph added).

So what the Fuller view has done is co-opt a term about the nature of inspiration, a term used for describing the impossibility of God’s word containing errors, to use it to apply to a view about the scope of inerrancy or infallibility, i.e. the view that scripture can or does have errors about some matters while not having, or being unable to have, other kinds of errors. A more accurate description of their view, then, would be that the Bible is infallible or inerrant about matters of faith and practice but not infallible or inerrant about matters of history and science. Calling that infallibility as opposed to inerrancy is wildly confused.

Notice that the Chicago Statement explicitly denies this a good way to view scripture.

It should be noted that the Gospels were ancient biographies, not modern histories. As such, they were primarily concerned, not with historical minutia, but with demonstrating the character’s static personality through examples. Because of this, one should not expect there to be a unified narrative time line among the different accounts, for that was not their purpose. Their purpose was to demonstrate who Jesus was and why he was important to their audiences. In this, they are inerrant.

The authors were not trying to write scientific treatises or modern histories, but something else. As such we should not import our modern categories onto them.

The danger with creeds and statements like the Westminster Confession and the Chicago Statement is that they lead to divisions in the body of Christ. Don’t get me wrong, they are useful in clarifying and communicating positions, but we should be wary in judging other believers in light of them.

• History , Literature , The Bible , Unity
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Honzo June 5th, 2007

I want to open this post up for a discussion on how you view the scriptures. Here are some starter questions.

• Which books do you allow and why?
• Were the authors trying to write scripture?
• Do you think the scriptures are infallible?
• Do you think the scriptures are inspired?
• Do you think the scriptures are inerrant?
• Is there a difference between inerrant/inspired/infallible?
• Are all seemingly historical accounts supposed to be taken at literally as possible?
• Can some of the seeminly historical accounts be figurative in some fashion and the scripture still be inerrant, inspired, and infallible?

Here are my short answers to get the conversation started.

• Protestant Bible
• Some were, some weren’t - but they all did.
• Yes.
• Yes.
• No. See the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’s arrest and trial and see John’s narrative vs the Synoptics.
• Not entierly.
• Yes.

• History , Literature , The Bible
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Honzo May 20th, 2007

This is Henry (Honzo) Imler. I’ll be on vacation for the next week. My wife and I are celebrating our 5th wedding anniversary. I am sure some of the other authors will be posting while I am gone.

Here is a little something to keep you occupied while I work up some posts on grace in Restorationist Theology.

A New Testament Student: A Question

Did the authors of the New Testament understand that they were writing Scripture?

• History , Literature , The Bible
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Honzo May 17th, 2007

What is different from the Old Testament to the New?

When doing exegesis, theology formation and the like, do you give priority to the New Testament over the Hebrew Bible? Why or why not? Are there conflicts? Are there new ways of doing things? Why or Why not?

Stated another way:

How does the Church relate, minic, or deliniate itself in relation with Israel?

• History , Practices
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Honzo May 12th, 2007

I came across this today at slackivist via katagrapho. Slackivist is trying to discuss the purpose of origin stories. He begins by looking at a question of why crow’s feathers are black and then looks at the ultimate answer to the question:

Q: Why are the crow’s feathers black?

A: Courage and helping others are good. Remember that every time you see a crow.

Fred then suggests that the same thing happens in Genesis.

Q: Where do rainbows come from?

A: Selfishness is destructive — to you and to every living creature. Remember that every time you see a rainbow.

Again, the answer isn’t directly related to the apparent question because the apparent question isn’t really what the story is about. This may seem complicated, but if you read these stories it’s quite obvious. They’re not subtle about it. Their message is not some hidden meaning that needs to be decoded. It would be very difficult, in fact, to read or hear such stories without taking away the meaning they are meant to convey.

Thoughts? I can’t really give any of my own analysis of anything until next week (note the question posing nature of all most posts the last few months). Is this a good way to approach the book of Genesis? What are the pros? What are the cons? What are the ramifications/implications of each? Can one maintain inspiration and view some of the Bible stories in this manner? Once again, merely saying it is a Liberal Christan idea only sidesteps the issue. There may be things of value in Liberal Christianity. There may be things that desperately need to be changed in Conservative Christianity. Don’t just sling mud, help us understand the issues.

• Archeology , Genesis , History , Science
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