Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Bible Backgrounds

  • The Bible Video Series: Not Too Bad

    As I watched The Bible last night I had in mind titling my note this morning, “not as bad as I expected.” Unfortunately for my title, Peter Enns managed a better one: “The Bible” on the History Channel: Not the Absolute Train Wreck I Thought it Would Be. I also generally agree with his comments, though I think he may be reading a bit more into the minds of the producers regarding Abraham’s visitor as the pre-incarnate Christ than is actually there. Considering neither of us can read the producers’ minds, however, we’ll have to wait until one of them says something about it.

    The History Channel is my greatest disappointment on television since I switched to cable. I had excessively high expectations of the value of having that channel, and all of those expectations have been repeatedly disappointed. Further, I’m terribly skeptical of Bible related movies and shows. I watch them mostly because people in my Sunday School class are likely to ask me what I thought. I judge them by whether I’d prefer that students have watched them or not.

    In this case, I think I’d prefer students watch the series. Yes, there are abbreviations and dramatizations, but overall the movie is faithful to the broad themes of the scriptures involved. Considering the abysmal level of biblical literacy amongst Christians, that has to be helpful.

    I would note that the series is not attempting to adjust the story to history, or consider the possibility of miracles (or not). It is just telling the story with some dramatic license.

    I’ll continue to watch. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than average.

     

  • February 2013 Biblical Studies Carnival Posted

    … at Delving into the Scriptures.

  • A Wife for Jesus?

    Interesting Coptic Text. Be sure to read all the warnings in the article. One shouldn’t conclude this is historical evidence that Jesus had a wife. One should wait for further scholarly study. But it’s still a very interesting piece. The article also does a good job of qualifying the find.

     

  • Roman Letter of Recommendation

    This letter is worth looking at for those interested in ancient letters, particularly Philemon.

  • Reading the Bible Chronologically

    A number of bloggers have responded to Marcus Borg’s article at the Huffington Post on reading the New Testament chronologically. Responses include Gaudete Theology, Bill Heroman, and Philip J. Long. I’d suggest reading those responses before reading my few comments.

    Here are some points that struck me:

    1. Borg contends that there is a trajectory of conformity to the culture. The earliest materials are radical while the later items have accommodated. I’m wondering how much this would differ from simply the fact that early Christians found themselves having to continue living in the empire, and that there would be more questions to answer about culture. In other words, if Jesus or Paul were to answer enough questions from people living from day to day, they might appear less radical than the distilled essence we get from them now.
    2. The New Testament, as a “book,” is the creation and possession of the church. I happen to believe that it is God’s creation through the medium of the church, but nonetheless without the church there is no New Testament. At a minimum, we need to recognize that reading it in a way so substantially different from the way the church created it will result in seeing a different picture.
    3. The historian may want to see the individual documents and read a history. I have great sympathy with than enterprise, but as I noted in point #2 the reading becomes different.
    4. If one postulates a different chronology, the book changes again. For example, folks like William R. Farmer and David Alan Black don’t accept Markan priority. While I am not fully convinced of this position myself, I do believe they have each, in very different ways, poked some serious holes in the consensus view.
    5. Viewing the gospels as products of the church rather than formative of it seems to privilege the written word above the oral at a time when that probably was not the case. In other words, the stories of Jesus told in the gospels were likely formative, and because of that became part of the written record. The gospel writers didn’t choose which stories to record in a vacuum. They were aware of which stories were more influential.
    6. I think #5 holds whether the gospels were written by eyewitnesses or not. Eyewitnesses will have been telling the stories for decades before writing them down. What was formative for the church would be in the gospels because of that, if nothing else.

    Obviously, I’m not recording well-researched and supported theories. I’m just noting some questions and observations.

     

  • What Makes a Doctrine (of Creation) Christian?

    I put “of creation” in parentheses, because the question might be answered in similar ways for other doctrines. What follows is a short quote from a book, Creation: The Christian Doctrine by Edward W. H. Vick, my company is about to release. I’m doing a number of “final” things on it right now. This caught my eye.

    The Christian doctrine of creation is not simply an explanation of the origin of the universe. It holds that God is transcendent and free, that the creatures are contingent and free, that the ongoing world of history and events in the world are purposive, that within that human history the purpose of creation is being revealed, that the Redeemer is the Creator. It also teaches that the creation reaches its fulfilment at the end, at the eschaton.

    All statements of faith are statements about God and his activity.

    Christian statements about God are at the same time statements about Jesus Christ.

    The Christian doctrine of creation results from addressing these questions: What is the meaning and significance of Christian faith? How are we to understand that faith? What is entailed in the fellowship with God that constitutes Christian faith?

    Note that Dr. Vick continues in great detail. The whole book is a bit over 130 pages (it may vary by a page or two once formatting is complete), and is intended as a companion volume to Creation in Scripture by Herold Weiss.

    What do you think?

  • Michael Bird on Studying the Gospels

    Michael Bird has a really excellent post on critical and faithful study of the gospels. I’m not going to extract from it, though my hat tip goes to Darrell Pursiful who extracted an excellent quote.

    I was reminded of a book my company published recently, From Inspiration to Understanding: Reading the Bible Seriously and Faithfully. I haven’t had time to write the “reflections” post I usually write regarding each book I publish, but some of those reflections would surely reflect the attitudes that Bird expresses.

  • March Abnormally Interesting Biblical Studies Carnival Posted

    … at — you guessed it — Abnormal Interests!

  • The Earliest Gospel of Mark Has NOT Been Found

    I’m trying to correct some headlines. OK, my headline is wrong also, intentionally so. Here’s what happened: Dan Wallace said in a debate that a fragment of Mark has been found which one paleographer dated to the 1st century. There has been a good deal of discussion of this on the biblioblogs, for example, John Byron comments (accurately) here.

    Today in my Google Reader I find the headline Gospel of Mark found dating from 1st century. The first line of the post attributes this to Christianity Today: “Christianity Today has just published news that the earliest copy of the Gospel of Mark has been found.” The link, however, goes to Christian Today (India), (not Christianity Today) where the headline is the not quite yet accurate “Earliest manuscript of Gospel of Mark reportedly found.”

    Note that the TEXT of both the post and of the Christian Today article is largely accurate. It’s the headlines I’m complaining about.

    Now I’m not trying to beat up on the blogger who posted this, but I do want to correct some false impressions. First, this is not “the gospel of Mark.” It is a fragment, a tiny piece. Finding an early fragment is extremely exciting, but it is not the same as finding a whole manuscript. I think this is important because very often when speakers tell Christian audiences that there are thousands of Greek manuscripts, people assume that these are all complete copies of the various Bible books, or even complete copies of the New Testament. In fact, they vary from fragments containing portions of a couple of verses up to complete copies of the New Testament. Not surprisingly, the complete copies tend to be later.

    Second, this fragment of Mark has not yet been published. The claim is simply that one paleographer has dated it to the 1st century. We need to wait for publication and study by other scholars before we jump on the dating of this manuscript.

    It’s important to keep all this in mind, because misinformation lives forever once it makes it onto the Christian circuit. There will be claims years from now that there is a copy of Mark that comes from the first century even if further study shows that the fragment is not from the 1st century.

    Since I write this blog primarily for non-scholarly readers, I want to make these things clear. Please don’t believe every sensational headline about the Bible. Let these things be tested.

     

  • It’s right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases

    The Christian Post has a portion of an interview with John Piper in response to the question:

    Why was it right for God to slaughter women and children in the Old Testament? How can that ever be right?

    And the first sentence of his answer is the title of this post.

    I can hardly tell you how many ways this bothers me. I say that just in order to get on the nerves of the folks who like to quote Paul “Who are you, o man, to answer back to God?” (Romans 9:20). I’m just this human who, like many people in the Bible, including prophets, isn’t satisfied with leaving all the questions unanswered, even when I know I’ll hardly get started on finding the answers. It’s interesting how certain Christians quote Paul in Romans 9, while others are more likely to quote Habakkuk or one of the Psalms where people question God quite a lot.

    Unless you add that God will never “please” to do something wrong, Piper’s statement makes nonsense of any idea of right and wrong. It is not meaningful to say that God is good or God is loving, both statements found in the Bible, and then to suggest that no matter how unloving or ungood an action of God may appear, it’s really OK because God willed it, or “pleased” to do it. But if mass slaughter isn’t wrong, what is wrong?

    Thus the first half of Piper’s answer is, in effect, a non-answer. It states simply that whatever God does–and I’m fairly certain that for him, whatever is alleged in scripture that God does is something God actually does–that is acceptable. And for many people this seems to be adequate.

    In one way I don’t mind that. I too believe God does what is right (ignoring, for now, the question of whether it’s right because God does it or God does it because it’s right), and if he doesn’t do what’s right, there’s nothing I can do about it in any case.

    But in this case we’re bringing different arguments in scripture together.  The Bible says both that God has commanded the death of many, many people, or has killed them himself, and also that God is good and that God is love. Put up against what I might think about God, perhaps Piper’s answer has a point. Put alongside the Bible’s indications of how God cares about humanity, I think it fails completely.

    It’s beyond a simple blog post such as this to give my own response, but I will point to a book I publish, by my former teacher Dr. Alden Thompson, Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?. Alden takes quite a conservative approach to scripture and yet takes both of these items, the stories of God’s destructive acts, and the assertions of God’s love, care, and goodness. Piper, on the other hand, empties any assertion of God’s love and goodness of any meaning.

    Piper regards the question of God’s commands to kill as more difficult than that of God killing directly, but I think with this he makes an even more dangerous error:

    With Joshua there was a political, ethnic dimension, God was immediate king, and he uses this people as his instrument to accomplish his judgment in the world at that time. And God, it says, let the sins of the Amorites accumulate for 400 years so that they would be full (Genesis 15:16), and then sends his own people in as instruments of judgment.

    From this I would conclude that being ruled closely by God would make atrocities committed right, and very likely more common. This is consistent with the first part of Piper’s answer. I must concede to Calvinists this: They are philosophically consistent. I just don’t believe that consistency is a very good indicator that a philosophy reflects actuality.

    On the contrary, I believe that we must either find some better reason why these stories occur in the Old Testament, or we must seriously back off of any pretension that “God is good” or “God is love” has any meaning at all.

    We regularly argue that it must be that all the Canaanites deserved to die. A Calvinist will certainly note that we all deserve to die. Yet what is the basis for this? Were they more wicked than others? Pointed out the 400 years, as Piper does, suggests that. But I don’t think the evidence would support such a claim. What effort was made to bring them to God? What reason might there be to suggest that Israel could not have brought the Canaanites to repentance through proclamation?

    This latter is not, in fact, what I would suggest as a solution. But I do think it points out the difficult with Piper’s solution.

    As I have time, I do intend to address this topic some more. Even the smallest portion of an answer requires many threads brought together.