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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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  • #16
    Can We Trust the New Testament?

    Continued from the last post above↑

    THE CYNICISM OF THE FOOLISH

    This might be ignored as the lapse of an individual who should have known better, were it not part of a widespread tendency to accept in the area of Christian origins judgements and constructions that anywhere else would be laughed out of court. There has been a whole series of titles such as The Nazarene Gospel Restored, The Passover Plot, The Sacred Mushroom, presented to the public by reputable publishers as serious historical contributions. It is hardly surprising that confidence has been eroded in our capacity now to say anything objective at all. When a sympathetic scientist writing on popular Christianity can say that preference for another view of Jesus over that of The Sacred Mushroom is 'only speculation on my part', he is saying that the sort of controls that he would apply anywhere in his field just do not exist here. This represents the abdication of the scientific method, not its conclusion.

    To be continued...

    Comment


    • #17
      Can We Trust the New Testament?

      Continued from the last post above↑



      THE CYNICISM OF THE FOOLISH

      This attitude is but the other side of the penny of the view that if you can't believe everything you can't believe anything―that if Alfred and the cakes isn't factual, then every historical statement is likely to be as true or false as any other. This is not a response we should adopt anywhere else. It is in fact part to the backlash to the second attitude we must go on to consider, which has again been stronger and more persistent here than in any other field.

      That ends the section titled 'THE CYNICISM OF THE FOOLISH'; the next post will begin the section titled 'THE FUNDAMENTALISM OF THE FEARFUL'.

      Comment


      • #18
        Can We Trust the New Testament?

        Continued from the last post above↑

        THE FUNDAMENTALISM OF THE FEARFUL

        Fundamentalism, as an 'ism', is an astonishingly modern phenomenon―dating from since the first world war (the word occurs only in the Supplement of the Oxford English Dictionary, being first recorded in 1923!). Though the conservative attitude it buttresses is of course as old as the hills, it came in as an 'ism' as a reaction of fear to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biblical criticism―and there was plenty in the wilder extremes to which that swung to induce if not justify the fear. But the answer to bad criticism was, as the great English biblical scholars like Lightfoot, Westcott, and Hort saw, better criticism, not none. The defensive response was however to close the hatches, and both the Roman Catholics and sections of the Protestant Churches tended to seek refuge in a verbal inspirationalism which depended on the all or nothing mentality we have mentioned. If every syllable in the Bible represented the direct dictation of the Holy Ghost, there would be no place in it for error of any kind. Once admit the slightest possibility that anything might not be literally true or the actual words of our Lord, and where would you stop? Indeed, unless you had some other criteria, where would you stop? You might wind up with nothing left to believe. This fear has always been one of the strengths―and of course weaknesses―of the fundamentalist position. I have often said that the fundamentalist and the radical share the same concern―to go to the foundations or roots. But it is not accidental that the one uses an inorganic and the other an organic metaphor. Digging around foundations can have a very different effect from digging around roots: dislodge one stone and the entire building may collapse.

        To be continued...

        Comment


        • #19
          Can We Trust the New Testament?

          Continued from the last post above↑

          THE FUNDAMENTALISM OF THE FEARFUL

          I recall a student contemporary of mine telling me the point at which he was forced to give up such a verbal inspirationist view of the Bible. If every word, every syllable, every letter was inspired, then in the Hebrew of the Old Testament you must obviously believe that the vowel pointings were authenticated in the same way. Otherwise the consonants by themselves could obviously, as in English, be made to form very different words, yielding sometimes an entirely different sense. For example, in Isa. 49:17 the AV reads 'thy children', the RSV (Revised Standard Version) 'your builders': it simply depends on which vowel you supply. But the vowel-pointings were not written in any ancient Hebrew manuscripts; they were supplied in the reading of it and passed on by oral tradition. They were finally codified in an 'official' text by Jewish scribes in the ninth and tenth centuries AD, and it is this text that is translated in the AV. A good and careful job they did, though variations in any modern version of the Old Testament will frequently depend on judgements about how a word should be 'pointed', i.e., what vowels should be inserted between the consonants. (This does not apply to the New Testament as the vowels in Greek, as in English, were always written.) The dilemma in which my friend found himself was that if the text of the Old Testament was inspired by God 'just as it left him', then he must had inspired those mediaeval Jewish rabbis with the same inerrant judgements―or the entire exercise would have been frustrated: one would never know what he 'really' said. But this meant attributing to them an infallibility which he would not have dreamt of attributing ot the Fathers of the Christian Church. The contradiction was too great, and he was compelled to abandon the assumption on which it rested. Yet so far from everything collapsing, he came through like so many like him to a much more widely and deeply based Christian conviction, whose strength is far less brittle and includes the freedom to sift and test everything

          To be continued...

          Comment


          • #20
            Can We Trust the New Testament?

            Continued from the last post above↑

            THE FUNDAMENTALISM OF THE FEARFUL

            Literalist fundamentalism of this narrow sort has in my experience, at any rate in the student world where it was once very strong, almost, though not entirely, disappeared. Like the Roman Catholics, whose Pontifical Biblical Commission has effectively gone into reverse (without, of course, actually saying so), the Conservative Evangelicals have changed more than most of them would admit. There are still indeed blinkers and blockages and some fairly powerful hang-ups. It is still difficult, for instance, for them even to be open to the possibility that Jesus might have been mistaken on anything. A stock example of this is the authorship of Psalm 110. In a typically rabbinic argument in Mark 12.35-7 Jesus cites the first verse of this psalm, 'the Lord said to my Lord'. The point he makes depends on 'David himself' having said it―for how, he argues, can the Messiah be David's son if he himself calls him 'Lord'? Yet it is probable (or at least possible) that this psalm comes not from David's time but from hundreds of years later. But the ascription to David simply shows Jesus to be a true Jew of the first century. If he had any other view of the authorship of the psalms, or the motion of the planets, or the cause of epilepsy, he would not have been. It is entirely compatible with Christian belief that he could (by our standards) have been mistaken on this and other factual matters and still be the Word of God to that generation―and to ours.

            To be continued...

            Comment


            • #21
              Can We Trust the New Testament?

              Continued from the last post above↑

              THE FUNDAMENTALISM OF THE FEARFUL

              Or take another point where the fundamentalist is on the horns of a dilemma―Jesus's reported predictions about the end of the world coming in his generation. Now, if he said this, and his words are to be interpreted literally, then clearly he was wrong―and the possibility of this would be accepted by the mainstream of Catholic and Protestant scholars today. Once more it would mean he thought and spoke in the categories of that form of contemporary Jewish thinking, which we call apocalyptic, that did believe that God would intervene and bring things to a head very shortly. On the other hand, it is possible―I would think probable―that his words have been adapted and interpreted to fit such ways of thinking in the early Church. In this case, our Bibles do not contain what Jesus said or meant.

              To be continued...

              Comment


              • #22
                Can We Trust the New Testament?

                Continued from the last post above↑

                THE FUNDAMENTALISM OF THE FEARFUL

                The point is that neither possibility can be ruled out in advance. If one then asks, Well, how do we know what Jesus said and what is to be put down to the early Church?, the only way to assess the probabilities (we shall never get certainty) is to go to the evidence, as the archaeologist would go the strata in his dig or the picture-restorer to the layers of superimposed paint, and patiently reconstruct what is likely to be most original. We shall later be having a closer look at this process and the methods available. But for now it is enough to recognize that Jesus may indeed have been reinterpreted or misunderstood by his friends. So what? Unless we are free to admit this is a possibility and then to sift and sort out where and how it happened, we shall not be able to meet those who say that we can know nothing―or even that there is nothing underneath at all.

                To be continued...

                Comment


                • #23
                  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...

                  Comment


                  • #24
                    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...

                    Comment


                    • #25
                      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...

                      Comment


                      • #26
                        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...

                        Comment


                        • #27
                          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...

                          Comment


                          • #28
                            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...

                            Comment


                            • #29
                              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...

                              Comment


                              • #30
                                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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