Why was Jesus Baptized?

[IrishAidan07]

Q is not the only solution to the "synoptic problem."

[+Sherapy]

Biblical scholarship is the field that created a completely hypothetical document, Q, in order to try and explain the Synoptic problem. A problem that only exists if you believe that the gospels were independent accounts, written by independent authors who spoke to eye-witnesses of the events.

What does that say?

i studied the gospels in depth in a course last year and the inconsistencies and contradictions are hard to dismiss or brush away.......

its a huge problem and a slippery slope when trying to determine soundness of the jesus lore posit , if anything the gospel support the lack of jesus then they do the evidence of him IMO.......*shrugs*

what are your thoughts on this tiggs???

Edited January 14, 2009 by Tangerine Sheri

[IrishAidan07]

I really think someone should make a thread entitled: Biblical Inconsistencies: Real or Imagined. I think it's necessary because so many people say there are inconsistencies, but they never elaborate further. I think we should put it to rest once and for all. Let the skeptics present the "inconsistencies" and see if the believers can't explain them sufficiently.

I, for one, would love such a thread. What do the mods think?

[Beckys_Mom]

I, for one, would love such a thread. What do the mods think?

Well if you are a good boy and write to santa..you just might get it

Quit being lazy just make the thread LOL and proove they wernt really dreaming...should be a lark!!!!!!!!!

[Tiggs]

Q is not the only solution to the "synoptic problem."

It is, however, the one that the vast majority of Biblical scholars promote.

[+Sherapy]

I really think someone should make a thread entitled: Biblical Inconsistencies: Real or Imagined. I think it's necessary because so many people say there are inconsistencies, but they never elaborate further. I think we should put it to rest once and for all. Let the skeptics present the "inconsistencies" and see if the believers can't explain them sufficiently.

I, for one, would love such a thread. What do the mods think?

this would be a great thread irish , with your depth of biblical knowledge as you are purporting, I am assuming you yourself have compared the gospels, correct/

the thing is that its real hard to establish factual with the bible using the bible as proof its biased for one and the bible is assumed to be true ..the faith thingy, its not fact its faith....

now if you were talking beleiver to believer this would suffice as it is a 'matter' of giving a reason and that clears things up.... end of story.

but for the skeptic its only the beginning, ones reason have to be meritorious and of value and sound to be considered in the first place so knowing what actually is based in fact and isn't is important...

Edited January 15, 2009 by Tangerine Sheri

[IrishAidan07]

It is, however, the one that the vast majority of Biblical scholars promote.

Yes, that's true. But two things: 1). As mentioned earlier, it's not the only solution; and 2) The Q Solution isn't really a poor one, especially if you consider the Gospel of Thomas. Many of Jesus's sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are out of order when compared to Luke, Matthew, and Mark, which, according to Catherine Murphy PhD., author of The Historical Jesus, indicates an independent source; albeit, undiscovered - much like Q. She further indicates its likely that many sayings, parables, and eyewitness testimony circulated among early Christians.

Edited January 15, 2009 by IrishAidan07

[momentarylapseofreason]

There's no such thing as an unbiased source, and I'm not trying to prove or say there are. However, the texts of the New Testament are considered far more valuable in the scholarly community than most give credit for. Of course, they take into consideration the inherent "Christian bias" in the source, but any ancient historical text is used the same way. When historians read Josephus they take into consideration his Jewish bias.

Peer-reviewed scholarship on history, archaeology, the Bible and such is done regularly, and as most here are happy to attest, peer review is the process by which people decide that the paper is scholarly and truthful (not based on personal opinions of Faith). There are the apologists, and the hardcore skeptics, and it might surprise you to see that even the Christian scholars in the mainstream detest the apologists and their "abuse of history" (as some have worded it).

I find it funny that scientists can talk about science and be accepted as reliable, but religious talking about religion in a scholarly context (not a theological context, mind you) are not to be trusted. Double standards much?

That said, I have already addressed the status of these people. I didn't look into their history beyond "Founder of the Jesus Seminar", which was all the information I needed to know to show it wasn't a biased apologists rhetoric. These are not "apologists" trying to prove to non-Christians that Jesus existed. They simply do the work that scholars are supposed to do. Get down to the task of looking at the texts and how they reflect the society. They look at the oral traditions, the history of the Jews, the compilation of the texts, the cultural setting in which it all takes place. The nature of Christ's divinity is left unanswered because it is not the providence of the scholarly community to address - and no journal article arguing for the miracles Jesus did as if they were true, or any article saying Jesus was the Messiah prophesied in the Bible, or any other such article would EVER pass peer review, I guarantee that! I've found that enough in my research so far. Arguing whether Jesus was the son of God is the providence of Faith and religion, not history and archaeology.

~ PA

Here from the society of Biblical Literature

Bible Scholarship and Faith-Based Study: My View

Recently, claims have been made for the legitimacy of faith-based scholarship in the forum of academic scholarship (on a related issue, see the recent FORUM article by Mary Bader and the responses to it). In my view, faith-based study has no place in academic scholarship, whether the object of study is the Bible, the Book of Mormon, or Homer. Faith-based study is a different realm of intellectual activity that can dip into Bible scholarship for its own purposes, but cannot contribute to it. I distinguish faith-based Bible study from the scholarship of persons who hold a personal faith. In our field, there are many religious individuals whose scholarship is secular and who introduce their faith only in distinctly religious forums.

Faith-based study of the Bible certainly has its place—in synagogues, churches, and religious schools, where the Bible (and whatever other religious material one gives allegiance to) serves as a normative basis of moral inspiration or spiritual guidance. This kind of study is certainly important, but it is not scholarship—by which I mean Wissenschaft, a term lacking in English that can apply to the humanities as well as the hard sciences, even if the modes and possibilities of verification in each are very different. (It would be strange, I think, to speak of a "faith-based Wissenschaft.")

Any discipline that deliberately imports extraneous, inviolable axioms into its work belongs to the realm of homiletics or spiritual enlightenment or moral guidance or whatnot, but not scholarship, whatever academic degrees its practitioners may hold. Scholarship rests on evidence. Faith, by definition, is belief when evidence is absent. "There can ... be no faith concerning matters which are objects of rational knowledge, for knowledge excludes faith" (thus Aquinas, as paraphrased by the Enc. of Philosophy 3.165). And evidence must be accessible and meaningful apart from the unexaminable axioms, and it must not be merely generated by its own premises. (It is not evidence in favor of the Quran's divine origin that millions of people believe it deeply, nor is it evidence of its inerrancy that the it proclaims itself to be "the Scripture whereof there is no doubt.") To be sure, everyone has presuppositions and premises, but these are not inviolable. Indeed, it is the role of education to teach students how to recognize and test their premises and, when necessary, to reject them.

Faith-based Bible study is not part of scholarship even if some of its postulates turn out to be true. If scholarship, such as epigraphy and archaeology, should one day prove the existence of a Davidic empire, faith-based study will have had no part in the discovery (even if some epigraphers incidentally hold faith of one sort or another) because it starts with the conclusions it wishes to reach.

There is an atmosphere abroad in academia (loosely associated with postmodernisms) that tolerates and even encourages ideological scholarship and advocacy instruction. Some conservative religionists have picked this up. I have heard students, and read authors, who justify their biases by the rhetoric of postmodern self-indulgence. Since no one is viewpoint neutral and every one has presuppositions, why exclude Christian presuppositions? Why allow the premise of errancy but not of inerrancy? Such sophistry can be picked apart, but the climate does favor it.

The claim of faith-based Bible study to a place at the academic table takes a toll on the entire field of Bible scholarship. The reader or student of Bible scholarship is likely to suspect (or hope) that the author or teacher is moving toward a predetermined conclusion. Those who choose a faith-based approach should realize that they cannot expect the attention of those who don't share their postulates. The reverse is not true. Scholars who are personally religious constantly draw on work by scholars who do not share their postulates. One of the great achievements of modern Bible scholarship is that it communicates across religious borders so easily that we usually do not know the beliefs of its practitioners.

Trained scholars quickly learn to recognize which authors and publications are governed by faith and tend to set them aside, not out of prejudice but out of an awareness that they are irrelevant to the scholarly enterprise. Sometimes it is worthwhile to go through a faith-motivated publication and pick out the wheat from the chaff, but time is limited.

The best thing for Bible appreciation is secular, academic, religiously-neutral hermeneutic. (I share Jacques Berlinerblau's affirmation of the secular hermeneutic [The Secular Bible, Cambridge, 2005], review here, but not his ideas about what it constitutes or where it leads). Secular scholarship allows the Bible to be seen as a rich and vital mixture of texts from an ancient people in search of God and moral culture. Its humanness—and primitiveness—can allow us both to recognize and make allowances for some of its uglier moments (Lev 18:22, for example or Deut 20:10-20, or much of Joshua). These things would (in my view) be abhorrent coming from the Godhead, but tolerable when viewed (and dismissed) as products of human imperfection and imagination in an ancient historical context.

We are in a time when pseudo-scientific claims are demanding a place in the science curriculum, and biologists and zoologists cannot afford to ignore them. Similar voices wish to insert themselves into academic Bible scholarship, and serious adherents of Bibelwissenschaft should likewise offer opposition.

Michael V. Fox, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The Unspeakable in Biblical Scholarship (another viewpoint-but similar)

I read Professor Michael Fox's recent contribution to the SBL Forum ("Biblical Scholarship and Faith-based Study: My View") with appreciation and glee. Appreciation, because the piece evinces his characteristically level headed, sober, albeit provocative, style. Glee, because Professor Fox has called attention to a topic that is virtually taboo in biblical scholarship. I disagree strongly with some parts of his analysis. Yet I sense that his remarks may be a cause and an effect of a significant change. We are, after all, conducting this dialogue on the web page of the Society for Biblical Literature—an organization that has traditionally shown itself to be somewhat impervious to the charms of both self-reflexive scrutiny and secularism.

The unspeakable that I allude to in my title concerns what we might label the demographic peculiarities of the academic discipline of biblical scholarship. Addressing this very issue thirty years ago, M.H. Goshen-Gottstein observed: "However we try to ignore it—practically all of us are in it because we are either Christians or Jews." [1] In the intervening decades, very little has changed. Biblicists continue to be professing (or once-professing) Christians and Jews. They continue to ignore the fact that the relation between their own religious commitments and their scholarly subject matter is wont to generate every imaginable conflict of intellectual interest. Too, they still seem oblivious to how strange this state of affairs strikes their colleagues in the humanities and social sciences.

Be that as it may, we Biblicists—perhaps I should say you Biblicists—are a fascinating and sometimes laudably heretical lot. How many times have exegetes inadvertently come to conclusions that imperiled the dogmas of the religious groups to which they belonged? In The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously, I ascribed a heroic function to biblical scholars, depicting them as (unwitting) agents of secular modernity.

I would note that Julius Wellhausen and William Robertson Smith were most decidedly not Voltaire and Marx. They were not cultured despisers of religion, but profoundly pious individuals. It is a world-historical irony that their heresies played a role in the continuing secularization of the Occident. Subsequent generations of Biblicists have followed suit, and by dint of their efforts they have legitimated and routinized the right of an individual to criticize the sacred. [2] As recent current events indicate, this is no mere cartoon heroism.

All honor, then, is due to believing critics past and present. This is why, incidentally, I deplore the current secular chic of denigrating all forms of religious thought. Indeed, the tendency of today's Celebrities of Nonbelief to depict theistic thinkers as dupes and imbeciles actually exemplifies the cultural impoverishment (and desperation) of today's freethinking movements. Secular intellectual culture is moored in the 90s, and by this I mean the 1890s. A more serious engagement with religious thought would serve it well.

But this does not mean that all is well with modern biblical research. For believing criticism should not be the most extreme form of religious criticism. In order to expand upon this point, let me return to Fox's piece. In his article he drew a distinction between faith-based Bible study and the "secular, academic, religiously neutral hermeneutic." We would both agree that faith-based Bible study has every right to take place in seminaries and religiously chartered institutions. I am a bit concerned, as I imagine he might be, by the degree to which explicitly confessional researchers sit on editorial boards of major journals, steering committees, search committees, and the hierarchy of the Society of Biblical Literature.

To their credit, however, faith-based scholars are often cognizant that they are engaged in a confessional enterprise. It is another category of Biblicist that, to my mind, is far more problematic. It is comprised of researchers who in every facet of their private lives are practicing Jews or Christians, but who—somehow—deny that this may influence their professional scholarly work (which just happens to concern those documents that are the fount of Judaism and Christianity!). This category extends to researchers in ancient Near Eastern Studies, who, anecdotally, are often very conservative in their religious views. It also applies, with some sectarian modifications, to many members of the American Academy of Religion. I am always amused to hear how some higher-ups in the latter society complain about the religious conservatism of the SBL—as if the AAR embodies the blasphemous spirit of Jean-Paul Sartre, Chairman Mao, and the Oakland Raiders of the 70s.

But I am digressing. When Fox speaks of a "secular academic, religiously-neutral hermeneutic," I can only wonder from where this hermeneutic is supposed to emerge. In this discipline, there is no organic sociological base from which such an approach can develop. And this is because nearly every single one of my colleagues has entered this discipline qua Christian or Jew. (True, they sometimes exit as something else, but that's another story altogether.) What results is a situation in which biblical scholarship's "secular" wing is more like a reform religious or liberal religious wing. If one of the classic definitions of secularism centers on the holding of agnostic or atheistic beliefs, then biblical scholarship (and religious studies in general) is "secular" in a way that no other discipline in the Academy is secular. Does this invalidate the findings of biblical scholarship? Absolutely not. It does, however, point to a collective ideational drift in the field, one that makes it difficult to think or speak about Scripture in certain ways.

Now we can better identify what is not well with biblical scholarship. Composed almost entirely of faith-based researchers on one extreme and "secularists" on the other, the field itself is structurally preconditioned to make heretical insight difficult to generate and secular research nearly impossible. To the non-believing undergraduate who tells me that he or she wants to go into biblical studies, I respond (with Dante and Weber) lasciate ogni speranza. This is not so much because they will encounter discrimination. They might, but if my experiences are representative, they will more frequently be the beneficiaries of the kindness of pious strangers. There is a much more mundane reason for prospective non-theist Biblicists to abandon hope: there are no jobs for them.

Assume for a moment that you are an atheist exegete. Now please follow my instructions. Peruse the listings in Openings. Understand that your unique skills and talents are of no interest to those institutions listed there with the words "Saint" and "Holy" and "Theological" and "Seminary" in their names. This leaves, per year, about two or three advertised posts in biblical studies at religiously un-chartered institutions of higher learning. Apply for those jobs. Get rejected. A few months later learn—preferably while consuming donuts with a colleague—that the position was filled by a graduate of a theological seminary. Realize that those on the search committee who made this choice all graduated from seminaries themselves. Curse the gods.

Before this response begins to sound like the prelude to a class-action suit, permit me to observe that the type of discrimination encountered by secularists in biblical studies is precisely what believers working in the humanities and social sciences have endured for decades. The secular bent and bias of the American research university is well known. It is undeniable that many of its workers are prejudiced against sociologists, English professors, and art historians who are "too" religious. I do not know what the solution is, but I do know that two major neglected questions in our profession concern how religious belief interacts with scholarly research and how secular universities manage the study of religion.

In closing, let me mention that in recent years I have increasingly noted the presence in both societies of a small, but growing cadre of non-believers, heretics, and malcontents. Whether we have anything of substance to offer our disciplines remains to be seen. Of course, this begs the question of whether our colleagues will ever consent to listen to us.

Jacques Berlinerblau, Georgetown University/Hofstra University http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/artic...x?articleId=503

Edited January 15, 2009 by momentarylapseofreason

[Beckys_Mom]

Interestingly - the more research I do for our debate, the more convinced I am that the New Testament is almost worthless as a historical document.

TIGGS & PA...........I just want to add - GOOD LUCK TO YOU BOTH on your formal debate...........

I have sat and read a lot of it and i'll be honest I can't say who will win.............but I can say this for sure............ - Regardless who wins the debate.........BOTH will still be winners, for the hard efforts you BOTH have put in is outstanding

I just hope no one is dumb enough to go in after it's all done and rant about it....but you guys have worked so hard and I wish you BOTH GOOD LUCK

Heck I don't even mind how you have used this thread to debate LOL I enjoy reading BOTH your posts...

Way to go PA & TIGGS you both are winners lol

I guess that's an impartial opinion LMAO