Honzo April 6th, 2008
As I am sure some of you know, there is a nice little conference going on at Lincoln College in Oxford on the Synoptic Problem starting Monday. There are quite a high number of high-quality papers being presented. Here are some that caught my eye.
April DeConnick has some harsh, but true words about the fundamental problem with synoptic problem scholarship.
To put it plainly, we have no idea what the Gospel of Mark actually said in the first century, or the Gospels of Luke or Matthew. We might act like we do. But the truth is we don’t. Our manuscript tradition is at best 3rd century, and variable particularly by geographic locations. To be honest, I don’t even know where Mark was written, although I can make a fairly educated guess. Textual criticism has created a wonderful eclectic Greek text for all of us to use. But it isn’t what Mark wrote. It isn’t what Matthew wrote. And it isn’t what Luke wrote. How we should handle this fact as a guild has yet to be worked out with any satisfaction. I think we mostly ignore it because dealing with the manuscript tradition is, well, just too complicated.
A part of me acknowledges this, but I think that as long as we recognize the nature of our physical sources and not become too dogmatic in our view of the manuscripts, then we can sucessfully work around this problem. We can only work with what we are given.
What are your thoughts on the synoptic problem? Do you buy it? Like/hate Q? Don’t think it is a worthwhile problem?
Honzo March 31st, 2008
I, like a lot of the Christian side of the blogosphere, have taken more than a fleeting interest in the Enns/Westminster controversy.
For a run down of what the hub-ub is all about, check out Kingdom People :: The Peter Enns Controversy:
- Enns has been criticized for emphasizing the human nature of Scripture over against the divine.
- Enns has written that the first chapters of Genesis are firmly grounded in ancient myth, which he defines as “an ancient, premodern, prescientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins in the form of stories.”
- Enns claims that Scripture is inspired and inerrant, however the way he describes Scripture seems to counter that belief.
- Enns does not seek to harmonize seemingly-contradictory parts of Scripture because he believes the diversity of Scripture is complementary.
- Enns rejects the idea of objective unbiased historiography.
Here is an exchange between Paul Helm and Enns about Helm’s review of Enns’ book.
Here is an interesting (and instructive) review of Helm’s review by Cdero’s Weblog entitled Bible Monopoly. Here are the central tenets of Bible Monopoly:
* An unwillingness to deal with the plural complexity of interpretation
* A failure to wrestle with the difficult matters of Biblical scholarship
* A failure to see the provisional nature of scripture
* An obsession with turning honest interaction with extra Biblical data into an evil foe of orthodoxy
* A tendency to use past theologians (the one’s they agree with) as the standard of Biblical interpretation
To say on top of what people are saying about this situation, check out Google’s Blogsearch and Technorati’s watchlist.
Andrew Pflaum December 8th, 2007
Here is an interesting (new?) Bible that is published by the International Bible Society, called The Books Of The Bible. It is very interesting. What it does is it first takes out all of the chapter and verse titles that you would see in a standard Bible. Then it places the books in Chronological order. I think that it is very interesting because it takes away many distractions that are in the Bible and allows for a better reading, because it reads more like a novel. Some differences in order seen is that the New Testament starts with Luke-Acts, two volumes of the same history, the follows into Paul’s letters. The Old Testament ends in Daniel.
While this may not be the best study tool, it appears to be a better read than a typical Bible. It uses the TNIV translation. It may also make it much easier for a new Christian to read and understand. I encourage everyone to check it out.
Honzo September 12th, 2007
Does God wants bond-slaves:
God does not want people to be “in love” with Him. This carnal phrase is a sick way to refer to our Lord. God desires bond-slaves who worship Him and adore Him as their sovereign Master, not who are in love with Him as one is with their lover.
or does God want “lovers?”
Yes, according to this post, God prefers slaves rather than people who are in love with Him. That would come as a surprise to Jesus, I guess, who in John 15:15 said,
“I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”
It also misses the point of much of the Biblical narrative. It seems to me that even in the Old Testament, God was looking for people who loved them with all their hearts. When David wrote,
As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?
was it sickening to God? Too wishy-washy and touchy-feely?