The quest for the historical Christian communities

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Peter Kirby
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Re: The quest for the historical Christian communities

Post by Peter Kirby »

It's possible that the original comment is just an oblique paraphrase of Bultmann's own barest outline of an argument to the historicity of Jesus:

"Of course the doubt as to whether Jesus really existed is unfounded and not worth refutation. No sane person can doubt that Jesus stands as founder behind the historical community whose first distinct stage is represented by the oldest Palestinian community." (Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, p. 17)
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A_Nony_Mouse
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Re: The quest for the historical Christian communities

Post by A_Nony_Mouse »

Peter Kirby wrote:Victor Paul Furnish has some brief words to say against a crop of writers questioning the historicity of Jesus, including:

http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/revi ... carpenter/
"Moreover, most of the contributors take little account of the role of the Christian communities within which the New Testament writings originated, to which they were directed, and for which they provide, unquestionably, firsthand historical evidence."

This just makes me curious to know what can we know about the Christian communities within which the New Testament writings originated? Hopefully more than the mere dass ("that they existed") to which German scholarship in Bultmann had retreated concerning the question of the historical Jesus.

I ask because I've seen several writers say pretty much the flat opposite to Furnish: that we can't blithely assume that any particular Christian writing is evidence for a Christian community and that, if it is, we may know nothing else about it. (We have immediate evidence for an author but only indirect evidence for any possible community or communities of which the author was a part.)

What do we know about the Christian communities?

How could this support Furnish's contention that contemporary ideas about Christian origins without a historical Jesus neglect to account for them?
Maybe I am dense and I know of at least two people here who will agree but on reading that my first thought was, what documents are associated with which communities? And I start reading the responses and I find no one mentioning any specific associations. And then I consider the attributions of the NT documents and they are all individual not community.

Can anyone help me and identify the specific documents they are talking about? The specific communities which are known to have produced documents?
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ficino
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Re: The quest for the historical Christian communities

Post by ficino »

"Community produced document" is a phrase that requires a lot of unpacking, no? Something like Dei Verbum is a document that was authored by a committee and voted by a group at the Second Vatican Council. But no one means this model to apply to any book of the NT. We have to imagine a lot of stages behind any community's "production" of any NT text, as perhaps:
Jesus said and did stuff
eyewitnesses passed on accounts of what Jesus said and did, whether orally or in writing or both (each one adding a twist, presumably)
other people compiled these and wrote them up
others did a sort of review and produced new write-ups

the above is a picture that Luke seems to want to present in the prologue of his gospel.

To the above scenario one can postulate further stages, such as liturgical formulae that became incorporated into NT passages. Usually no one knows who was the author of a liturgy, and we just say it arose from or in "the community." But some leader or leaders will have given voice to the first instance of a liturgical formula.

So, one question is, do NT texts present clear markers of a genesis such as the process postulated above? Can we plausibly explain them instead as products of single minds - e.g. Mark sat down and wrote up a story using the Odyssey and lots of other models. I've always been skeptical of the claim that, for example, I Cor. 15:3-8 incorporates an early "creed" that will have been spoken by converts in an assembly. But what do I know. I don't publish on the NT.

Anyway, my point is that scholars who argue that some portion of the NT reflects earlier stages of the preaching or liturgy or memoirs of a community need to demonstrate this and show it's the best explanation.
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A_Nony_Mouse
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Re: The quest for the historical Christian communities

Post by A_Nony_Mouse »

to ficino: Thanks

Community produced means "growed up on spectators" like Topsy. Do we need a Clintonian It Takes A Village joke here? They must be running out of things to argue about. That is about as anti-Christian and revisionist as you can get. Apparently the academic veneer saves them from condemnation as heretics that any layman would suffer. The named people did not write the documents? Burn him! There is no evidence of the authors? Disembowel before burning.

Anyway it reduces the entire exercise to the kids' game of whispering a phrase around a circle. Once something goes public it always goes wrong. Other than publishing papers one has to ask what they might expect to accomplish with this exercise. Once it goes wrong all trace of origin disappears. Which kids in the circle changed what? (For Americans: the national media was all over Florida's "stand your ground" law in the Zimmerman/hoodie killing. It was never any part of the case or the trial. Who invented the connection? Same guy who invented the fig tree curse? Eat Philippi figs. Figs Jesus would never curse.)

It never ceases to amaze me what academic types will do to maintain the facade of being intellectual.
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Re: The quest for the historical Christian communities

Post by Kunigunde Kreuzerin »

There is a new book by german scholar Sandra Hübenthal about the Gospel of Mark as a text of collective memory. The idea seems to be one of the new darlings of the scholars. My Google search for "collective memory" + "gospel of Mark" received a good number of results from recent years.

The new twist seems to be: All right, we know that Mark was not an eyewitness and not the interpreter of Peter. But please, let's make the deal to study the Gospel of Mark as an impersonal text of collective memory. :roll:
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Re: The quest for the historical Christian communities

Post by Clive »

Follow the money!
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MrMacSon
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Re: The quest for the historical Christian communities

Post by MrMacSon »

Peter Kirby wrote:.
Victor Paul Furnish ... http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/revi ... carpenter/

"Moreover, most of the contributors take little account of the role of the Christian communities within which the New Testament writings originated, to which they were directed, and for which they provide, unquestionably, firsthand historical evidence."

This just makes me curious to know what can we know about the 'Christian communities within which the New Testament writings originated'? ...

... several writers say pretty much the flat opposite to Furnish: that we can't blithely assume that any particular Christian writing is evidence for a Christian community and that, if it is, we may know nothing else about it (We have immediate evidence for an author, but only indirect evidence for any possible community or communities of which the author was a part).
Do we have immediate evidence for "an author"?

This post by maryhelena with a quote from a blog-post by Ehrman seems relevant to this OP
  • - and somewhat, in my mind, reinstates Ehrman as a rational biblical scholar (after DJE?) -
maryhelena wrote:
Bart Ehrman
External Evidence in Textual Criticism

The number of manuscripts that support one reading or another. ... – if lots of manuscripts have one of the readings and only a few have the other, then the majority should win, right? Well, not actually. Here’s why. ...

Suppose the original copy of a book (say, Mark) was copied by two scribes, call them Scribe A and Scribe B. Both of them made some mistakes, but B more than A. And suppose the copy made by A is itself then copied by two other copyists, but copy B is copied by twenty. And then each of the two copies of A is copied three times, and each of the copies of B is copied ten times. What then? There are 9 copies with the A kind of text, but 221 copies of the B kind of text. And suppose then that A, B, and the first copies of each were all destroyed, so that all you have are 206 copies, 6 of them reading one way in one of the verses and 200 reading another way. Does the fact that far many more copies have the text of B make it better than the text of A? Quite the contrary, B was a worse copy than A. In this hypothetical case, the 6 manuscripts have a better text than the 200.

This is a purely hypothetical case, of course, but it shows clearly that because of the exigencies of copying, you can’t base a textual decision on the numbers of manuscripts that attest one form of the text over another.

The age of manuscripts that support one reading or another. This is almost always conceded to be a better criterion. If one form of the text is attested in a bunch of early manuscripts, nearer in time to the original, and the other is attested only in later manuscripts, then the later reading – even if it’s in the majority of surviving manuscripts – is more likely to be a later alteration of the text.
This rule cannot be applied woodenly, however. Suppose you have a hypothetical manuscript that we’ll call X and another that we call Y. Manuscript X is from the 5th century and manuscript Y is from the 7th century. You would think that Manuscript X is therefore innately better, since it’s 200 years earlier. But what if Manuscript X was itself a copy of a manuscript made in the 4th century, but Manuscript Y was a copy of a manuscript made in the 3rd century? In that case, the text of the 7th century manuscript is actually older than the text of the 5th century manuscript. Isn’t this fun?

The Geographic Distribution of Manuscripts. Suppose you have one form of the text that is found in manuscripts (and, say, versions and church fathers) that come from all over the place: Rome, Alexandria, Gaul, Spain, North Africa, and one that comes from only one place, say, Caesarea. Then it seems likely that the widely distributed reading is more likely original: the other could well be a local variant.

These are simply some of the external criteria that scholars use to decide which form of the text, if there are two or more forms available, is most likely the original one (well, two of the criteria, since the first is not of much use). There are other kinds of external evidence that are a bit more tricky ... If you have two forms of the text, and one of them, say, is found in almost all of the early manuscripts from a wide range of places, then that is more likely the original form over against the other, if it is found only in later manuscripts, or only in manuscripts of a certain region.

But there is much more to a textual decision than looking at manuscripts .... being a textual critic ... requires the scholar also to be an exegete.

So, while the words are important - so too the necessity for interpretation...the forest is as important as any of the trees! The story, the context, has to be taken into account.
There could be number of permutations - eg. subsequent scribes being in different geographical locations, decades later
.
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MrMacSon
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Re: The quest for the historical Christian communities

Post by MrMacSon »

stephan happy huller wrote:I was just reading Ehrman's blog and find it odd the way these scholars defend the historicity of Jesus ... Ehrman in his latest post argues that only 'qualified' people can write about the question of the historical Jesus.
Peter Kirby wrote:It's posturing. First you'll need a PhD to have an opinion, then you will need peer-reviewed publications, then you will need tenure, then you will need a headcount of like-minded peers, then you will need a session at the SBL for the subject, and then they'll slap you on the back and say you were one of them all along, but boy oh boy are you dead wrong anyway!
It's special-pleading based on ego & grandiosity. It's unethical, but it's the status-quo based on tradition, & a tradition of appealing to authority.
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Blood
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Re: The quest for the historical Christian communities

Post by Blood »

Oh, it's an old thread. For a minute there I thought "A Nony Mouse" had somehow slipped back into the forum.
“The only sensible response to fragmented, slowly but randomly accruing evidence is radical open-mindedness. A single, simple explanation for a historical event is generally a failure of imagination, not a triumph of induction.” William H.C. Propp
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Re: The quest for the historical Christian communities

Post by neilgodfrey »

Peter Kirby wrote:It's posturing. First you'll need a Ph.D. to have an opinion, then you will need peer-reviewed publications, then you will need tenure, then you will need a headcount of like-minded peers, then you will need a session at the SBL for the subject, and then they'll slap you on the back and say you were one of them all along, but boy oh boy are you dead wrong anyway!

It's a game that is played only because it is a winning move in the eyes of some observers and because both sides are playing mainly for the sake of the sideline observers, winning hearts and minds and airtime.

(It's rather annoying that way. Presentations aimed at people who know their shit and just want to dig into the evidence are few and far between.)
Alvar Ellegard responded to this nonsense with:
Still, all these comments about the possible failings of the outsider really belong under the heading of argumentum ad hominem, as long as we are not told just how the alleged omissions, or the bias, or this or that piece of back ground knowledge, has vitiated the theory presented. What specific argument is refuted by the omitted works? What specific argument has relied on a work whose views have been proved untenable? Where has the use of a faulty translation led the author astray?
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