Posted: May 05, 2012 5:55 pm
Ian Tattum wrote:proudfootz wrote:This author seems to suggest that perhaps bible scholarship is ready to undergo a sea-change as the methods of the last century have exhausted their utility:
Maybe the defensiveness among established scholars is in part the natural reaction of those whose era is coming to a close...
Or it could be a type of recycling? Just as an earlier generation of scholars shrugged-' nothing historical is certain so let's consider the meaning of the myth' a new generation might decide that literary criticism is more interesting than the more boring task of trawling through texts. It is as much about frustration as futlility, possibly, but is also much less demanding, as literary criticism has a history of embracing the latest fashion and lumping it on to texts without much respect for the material being so treated.
I don't doubt there's a kind of 'eternal recurrence' in all kinds of human enterprises: the hard-won revolutionary consensus of one generation is overturned by the next which must have its own revolution.
But it could be interesting; I don't agree that the historicity of Jesus is the only matter worth investigating, because how the texts evolved and were used could be a fruitful subject to explore whether or not the existence of a literal ( non literal) Jesus is considered to be fact of history.
Even for those who subscribe to any of the various HJ hypotheses it seems pretty much agreed that very little can be known about the man or his teachings (at least this is the impression I get from the fact that there are contending schools of thought as to whether Jesus taught this or that, or was a rebel or a pacifist, etc etc etc).
What has an impact on the present day is how the 'magic Jesus' evolved and mutated and was interpreted.