archibald wrote: ↑Sun Jan 07, 2018 12:46 pmI will say this though, he sounds (I mean reads, though I have seen him speak in videos).....rather convinced...at times...about stuff which to me does not necessarily warrant it (and it might not be much of a stretch to say that includes almost everything about the entire field of study) and I generally feel I should add more salt when I encounter certainty in these matters.
Well, that's how Eisenman works. On any given subject he explores just about every single angle that he can measure in the tangle, like how a passage is worded in the various eclectic texts of the NT (like W&H, NA, and the Received-Majority-Byzantine texts) and spins hundreds of possible scenarios.
To me it seemed to be like throwing plates of spaghetti against the kitchen wall to see if anything sticks. You get a strand to stick here and there, usually the ones with more sauce, and if you are lucky, a bit of meatball or something as well. Hmmm, yum. To him, though, I think he hoped that by breaking down the data into the smallest possible bytes, he will be better able to use them to construct a really useful historical explanation. So far, that has eluded him.
As a person (we've conversed a few times, although I have not been on his boat like Mr. Alias has), he seemed to be a nice guy. I do think in his first book on JtB he came up with a few good ideas. I think he gets most traction not so much in the arena of John the Baptist, but on Paul and his social world. He is fairly sure on the basis of name dropping that Paul was connected to a Herodian household, and may have been promoting the royal claims of the head of that household. There were dozens of Herodian Princes, all of whom had control of the gift estates that fell their way, while others were bona-fide tetrarchs of various city-kingdoms along the border with the Parthians, mainly near lower Syria and Damascus (Chalcis, Commegene, etc).
Any of them, if lucky enough to fall into favor with the ruling Roman dynast, could one day be appointed king of a revived Judean kingdom like Herod used to rule (worked for Agrippa I). Many didn't want any part of the intrigues of building a kingdom, since it didn't work very well for some of Herod's sons while he was alive, but there were others who were not doing so bad and may have wanted to take on such a challenge.
I toyed with the idea that some of the references to Christ in Paul's letters may have referred to one of the Herodian princes. There was a "play" thread in the Lounge not too long ago where I suggested Paul was associated with the household of Herod Antipas in Galilee with the antichrist being Herod Agrippa (or was that the other way around?), making this explanatory nexus datable to around the mid to late 30's CE, but I came to the conclusion that the dogmatic statements were far too developed to be made to work in such a setting.
My "play" thread above was an attempt to poke fun at how many of the explanations that happen in this forum are easy to spin but hard to justify. However, long ago (early 1990's), I had concluded that all the Christology and related dogma was actually not part of Paul's world (most likely a retainer in a lesser known Herodian household), but that it was added to the letters many years later, after the Judean rebellion of 66-73 CE, by a group that had once followed a "pretender" pursuing the royal anointment (yes, Jesus) but who became disillusioned with the anointment of a human ruler and transformed their view of the pretender, Jesus, into the role of a divine actor in a cosmic mystery play.
My wife calls me to grocery shop ... and I must obey.
DCH