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This is where we come to delve into the biblical text. Theology is not our foremost thought, but we realize it is something that will be dealt with in nearly every conversation. Feel free to use the original languages to make your point (meaning Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic). This is an exegetical discussion area, so please limit topics to purely biblical ones.

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Can We Trust the New Testament? by J. A. T. Robinson

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Beginning of Chapter 2

    FACTS AND FALLACIES

    One of the most powerful factors in distrust is ignorance, and I find in talking to laymen that there are all kinds of misconceptions about the New Testament, and what scholars do, that lay them open to believing anything―or nothing. So it may be useful to start with an elementary collection of facts and fallacies to clear the ground on which to build.

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE CONSERVATISM OF THE COMMITTED

    The conservatism of the committed is probably more entrenched in the sort of people likely to read this book―and, if I am honest, deep down in myself―than any of the other attitudes. It therefore behoves us to be especially wary, and respectful, of it. The plea is often heard not to 'disturb' the faithful or make it 'all too complicated'. 'Why can't you leave us alone?'―or at any rate leave the Bible alone. In a simpler, pre-scientific age this might have been enough―as it doubtless is for millions of people still, in many parts of the globe. Yet we live, for good or ill, especially for those of us who read paperbacks and watch television, in a world where everything else is being questioned; and in an increasingly revolutionary society a pre-critical faith will come to be seen as a harmless if beautiful relic. It is sobering to reflect that it is mainly in those areas of Christendom where biblical criticism has made least impact, in eastern Orthodoxy and peasant Catholicism, that Marxism had made most. This is not a reason for doing biblical criticism; indeed the most militantly fundamentalist are often the most blindly anti-communist! But it could help to shake us out of our dogmatic slumbers―if the sight does not do so of so many thousands of young people merely passing us by. Moreover the resurgence of fundamentalist attitudes in our day, even in educated countries and in charismatic circles that supposedly prize the spirit above the letter, speaks judgements on the churches for failing to present an intelligent authority of the Bible as a viable alternative to non-biblical spiritualities. But the best and ultimately the only valid reason for taking the quest seriously is the love and trust of truth for its own sake. And that, with whichever predisposing attitude we may begin, is finally the sole test and judge of us all.

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE CONSERVATISM OF THE COMMITTED

    For positions that look safe in a storm may turn out to be dubious refuges. A hundred years ago the conservatism of the committed was quite sure where the defense of the faith lay. It lay with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and his allies in insisting that the opening chapters of Genesis were literally and historically true: to allow that they could be true as myths, while Darwin's views could also be true as science, was to sell out. Yet had these good men won the day against Thomas Huxley and his allies, it would be impossible now to be a Christian and a scientist. The cause of the faith would have suffered irreparable damage―whereas in fact the stories of the creation and the fall have now been liberated to become far more meaningful than when they were true simply of a single remote period of time. The truth of the Gospel stories involves indeed a more complex interrelationship of fact and interpretation―for Jesus, unlike Adam, was a historical individual. The task of disentangling the strands in them demands therefore greater critical discrimination, not less. The way in which we can 'trust' the New Testament is less simple than the way in which we can trust the Old Testament, let alone the Koran or the Bhagavad-Gita. For the 'mix' in the Christ-event is richer. It calls for the full assurance of conviction and criticism, not their mutual distancing in guarded distrust.

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE CONSERVATISM OF THE COMMITTED

    For like the fundamentalism of the fearful, it takes cover behind a suspicion of scholarship―except, that is, where this is thought to come out the 'right' way, when its 'assured results' (usually stated with far too much confidence) are triumphantly cited to prove that after all 'the Bible is true'. Yet the only healthy attitude can be to trust to impartial scholarly investigation whichever way it comes out. For those who are genuinely committed to Christ as the truth must be prepared for the risk which God himself took when he committed himself to history, that is, to the contingency of events and to the fallibility of records. They more than others must believe that 'great is truth and it shall prevail' and never be tempted or driven back into equating orthodoxy with ignorance: that way lies betrayal and defeat.

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE CONSERVATISM OF THE COMMITTED

    No one can be both a teacher in the university and a preacher in the Church without being aware of the strong conservative 'undertow' in the country at large. The 'reassuring' sermon is that which tells people that they can after all believe that Jesus said or did what he is supposed to have said or done, that the Christmas story is 'true', that the tomb was empty and that 'the critics' have been proved unfounded. For such people, whether clergy or laity, who from time to time break out in letters to The Times or The Church Times, scholarship is basically a threat to be weathered. I believe that in many of their conclusions (if not in the way they reach them) they are right, and I discover that the sermons that I preach on these questions often take people agreeably by surprise. In fact the upshot of this book will probably seem to many of my critics unexpectedly, perhaps suspiciously, conservative. Particularly on St John I find I have long had strange allies―I remember being sent an article by a Southern Baptist from the United States who was using me, I think in all innocence , as a stick with which to beat the liberals! On the dating of the New Testament (as will become evident) I derive a certain innocent merriment from outflanking my more conservative pupils when they serve up what the textbooks say. Yet for all this, I believe that the conservatism of the committed is a seriously reactionary force in the field, and I would never dream of abetting the obscurantism of those letters. It too can generate its opposite and contribute to the kind of polarisation that seldom in my experience produces more light than heat.

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE CONSERVATISM OF THE COMMITTED

    It can best be illustrated in the area of the New Testament by the ordinary lay Christian's attitude to 'the Fourth Gospel'. The very title indeed is a bit of scholarly affectation. For no one talks in ordinary speech about the first or other Gospels. But critical susceptibilities have been respected to the extent of allowing the scholars this circumlocution, though it is certainly no more agreed among them (in fact even less) that Matthew wrote St Matthew than that John wrote St John. But apart from the question of authorship there is a stubborn conviction among the silent majority that has refused to let the critics 'take away' St John. All the time that the scholars have been telling them that St John's Gospel is, of course, factually quite unreliable and that its picture of Jesus is simply a mystical meditation of much religious but of no historical value, they have quietly bided their time. And they are beginning to look like being justified. This is not to commend their critical faculties, which have largely been dormant. But it is to draw attention to their horse sense.

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE CONSERVATISM OF THE COMMITTED

    Despite all the storms and waves that have gone over it, there remains especially in England, a deep mass of water that has steadfastly refused to be shifted by anything much that has happened on the surface. This body of opinion is not fundamentalist, but it is conservative; and it really hasn't believed what the critics have been saying. The winds of fashion come and go, but the committed have their anchors and are content to ride out the storm. Of course in the process they are changed more than they think and certain things are silently modified. But there is a supple strength in this attitude such as is traditionally supposed to serve and to save the Chinese: bend before the gale and when it has passed over you can stand upright again.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE SCEPTICISM OF THE WISE

    We must return to many of these questions, and I shall be wishing to take issue also on a number of purely factual points with what I have called this scepticism of the wise―for instance, with what seems to me the excessively long 'tunnel period' they envisage during which the traditions about the life and teachings of Jesus was lost to sight before they finally emerged (by then uncheckable) in out Gospels. But here I would simply record it among the attitudes to be taken into account, especially since the assumptions I have mentioned have tended to dominate some of the most widely read paperback commentaries. But this attitude again has to be set and understood against its shadow image, to which lastly we must turn.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE SCEPTICISM OF THE WISE

    Or let me give another example of what seems to me unwarranted scepticism. One technique that has been used in recent New Testament criticism is applying to the teaching of Jesus the test of 'dissimilarity'. Is there anything, it asks that cannot be put down to the Judaism out of which he came or to the Christian Church that took him over? If so, it may confidently be attributed to him. This, as I have already suggested, is obviously a useful test. But if made the sole or even the dominant criterion, it does not take much to see that it reduces all that we can be sure he said to what no one else said before or since. If one applied that test to any other great man or creative teacher, not only would one be left with very little indeed but one would unquestionably distort him by isolating him from his times. For originality so often consists in drawing out what was there all the time and in inspiring what others immediately recognize and take up. A man has to come upon his hour in order to say anything about it.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE SCEPTICISM OF THE WISE

    Let me illustrate this by a modern example. George Orwell wrote a collection of what he called Critical Essays, in which he started from the question, What does literature tell us, not of the things it is written about, but of the socio-economic attitudes of those who wrote it? He brought this approach in a most illuminating and entertaining manner to a whole range of 'literature' from Dickens and Kipling to Boys' Weeklies and seaside postcards. The question he put is one that can be applied to anything, including the New Testament. But to put it does not rule out or even diminish the fact that the writings concerned may also tell us a great deal about the subject they are meant to be on. Indeed an analysis of the writers' largely unconscious class assumptions may enable us the better to discount the distorting influence of these on their subject matter. Similarly, in the study of the Gospels, the more we know of the factors, conscious and unconscious, that gave the early Christians an interest in applying and adapting the life and teaching of Jesus to their own message and conflicts, the better position we are in to discount these influences, and, as it were, strip away that superimposed layer. We can see also what there is no reason to think they would have introduced, and this actually strengthens rather than diminishes our confidence in getting back to Jesus. The whole process may end in telling us more about him rather than less.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE SCEPTICISM OF THE WISE

    Yet it is not simply a matter of 'you pays your money and you takes your choice'. I believe there are certain false assumptions and deductions written into the negative attitude which make it unwarrantedly skeptical. Thus, you can say, quite rightly, that the New Testament writings, Gospels as well as Epistles, tell us a great deal about the early Christian communities for whose purposes and needs they were written. They allow us to see what were their interests and concerns―in preaching, teaching, liturgy, discipline and the rest―which made them select and slant what they recorded of Jesus so as to meet and serve these ends. But it is easy to slide from that recognition into the conclusion that the more they tell us about the early church the less they tell us about Jesus, and even to end up by saying that you cannot get behind the early Church at all. Yet this is logically fallacious.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE SCEPTICISM OF THE WISE

    In this matter so much can turn on where a scholar puts the burden of proof. If you ask, Is there any reason why Jesus should not have said or done this?, you may find very little reason why Jesus should not, and your conclusion will be positive. If you ask, Is there any reason why Jesus should have said or done this?, you may find equally little reason why he should, and your conclusion will be negative. Adopt one or the other approach all the way through, and the resulting picture will be dramatically different, although neither question is in itself more scholarly than the other. Thus, in the contemporary German scene, the great New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann tended to start with the question that leads to the negative conclusion, laying the burden of proof on those who would claim that such and such a saying, for example, 'You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church' (Matt. 16:18), has its origin in Jesus rather than the Christian community. The equally great New Testament scholar Johachim Jeremias tends to start with the question that leads to the positive conclusion, noting the Palestinian background to the phrasing and asking why it should not be dominical. Neither for that reason is more scientific in his approach than the other.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE SCEPTICISM OF THE WISE

    As we go on we shall have to look at these things in greater detail and try to interpret one side to the other. But at this point I would want to say that in the gap between the scholar and the layman the faults are not all on the side of the latter. There is, I believe an undue scepticism of the wise, which, perhaps by overcompensation, seems especially characteristic of biblical scholars. They are so conscious of the fact that they are dealing not with 'straight' history but with what, before it became a dirty word, could be called 'propaganda' (as in 'the Society for the Propaganda of the Gospel'), that the discount they introduce is the greater. Thus we are reminded constantly, and absolutely rightly, that the Gospels are not biographies. That is to say, they are not primarily written from the point of view of what any biographer would properly be interested in. (It has been observed, for instance, that they never think to tell us whether Jesus was married―or, if he wasn't, to say so.) Rather, they are 'gospels', good news about God, and everything in them is given this slant. They tell us primarily about what the Church was interested in preaching and teaching. Similarly the Book of Acts is not straight history: it is 'the gospel of the Holy Spirit'. The tendency therefore both outside and inside the Church has been to regard these as 'loaded' sources, and New Testament scholars have often seemed to lean over backwards not to appear less skeptical that the rest. This at any rate is how it has looked to some entering the field from another discipline. For instance, C. S. Lewis, coming from English literature once gave a talk to theological students on 'Modern Theology' and Biblical Criticism' (now reprinted in his Christian Reflections) in which he enjoyed himself at the expense of biblical scholars who are so busy looking between the lines that they never see what is in them. 'Everywhere, except in theology,' he said, 'there has been a vigorous growth of scepticism about scepticism itself.' Yet his own approach, which was confessedly that of the layman in the field, had much of the fourth and last attitude about it which we will go on to describe, and indeed it a good example of how the two can provoke and rile each other. More impressive is the judgement of A. N. Sherwin-White, the Oxford classical historian, who in his Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament chides New Testament scholars for failing to recognize what, by any comparable standards, excellent sources they have!

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE SCEPTICISM OF THE WISE

    It is difficult to write about this without seeming to sound depreciatory. But scepticism like criticism is an ambiguous word. The first definition of 'skeptical' in the dictionary is 'inclined to suspense of judgement, given to questioning truth of facts and soundness of inferences'. The word comes from the Greek for to 'examine', and, as Plato said long ago, the unexamined life is not worth living. To suspend judgement, to question, is the proper attitude of the philosopher and the scholar; and the Church should be grateful for it in her scholars. To take history seriously, for instance, is not to believe everything in the tradition. You may indeed take history more seriously by saying that Alfred and the cakes is not history but legend. Similarly in the Gospels the scholar does not take everything as 'gospel'. He discriminates. He recognizes that there are different sorts of statement, different levels of truth, in this as in all literature. There are purely factual statements and there are statements designed to give the interpretation of the facts. And this interpretation may be given through a variety of means―for instance, by recognized poetic imagery or symbolism (such as sitting on the right hand of God, or clouds of glory, or angels) or by imaginatively told stories (like that of the star stopping over where the young child was: you have merely to look up at a star to realize that it can't literally stop over anything). Their purpose is to open up new dimensions within the history. But to talk of 'myth' or 'legend' as scholars do in any field, is to appear to ordinary people to be saying that it is not true. and the difficulty deepens when you try to discriminate and disentangle just what is true at what level, what is bare fact and what is myth or word-picture to deepen and draw out its meaning―as for instance, in the accounts of the birth or the resurrection or the ascension of Jesus. Peeling back the layers of interpretation looks like a process of reduction, and the feeling gets around that 'they' have left us very little. The 'skeptics' who began as neutral are seen as threats to the faith: 'they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him'.

    To be continued...

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  • John Reece
    replied
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    So far we have been looking at two positions [i.e., THE CYNICISM OF THE FOOLISH & THE FUNDAMENTALISM OF THE FEARFUL] that are poles apart yet which meet as extremes often do. Indeed one is the obverse of the other, and they have only each other to blame―which for the most part is all they ever do. But there are two further attitudes [i.e., THE SCEPTICISM OF THE WISE & THE CONSERVATISM OF THE COMMITTED], both powerful within the Church, which can coexist in a relationship of tolerant yet guarded suspicion.

    To be continued...

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