Posts tagged as:

early church

Pluralism, prejudice and power in reading early Christianity

February 2, 2010

Dan Reid has an interesting post on the IVP blog on some of his bête noirs.

Lately I’ve been experiencing moments of speechlessness. Over the years it’s been a recurring condition for me. It’s triggered by comments—sometimes from church folk, no less—who mention that, of course, we now know that there were many Gospels—such as the [...]

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A fragmentation too far?

January 15, 2010

I had a conversation last week with a really pleasant and very interesting specialist in philosophy and theology about the Christian use of the codex, Irenaeus and the canonisation of the fourfold gospel. I was fascinated to find that neither he, nor the other two systematics guys around the table, ever seemed to have heard [...]

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Rescuing priesthood from Witherington’s “perfectly clear” NT

October 26, 2009

Ben Witherington has a post up today on Why arguments against women in ministry aren’t biblical. I shall assume that in his discussions of the arguments offered by evangelicals on the basis of specific texts he knows what he is talking about. I find them rather bizarre but I imagine he must have those arguments [...]

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DeConick’s one-sided suspicions

September 21, 2009

April DeConick continues her argument about methodology. In today’s post she sets out “the 10 ‘commandments’ or ‘operating principles’ for the historical-critical interpretation of ancient texts” as she seeks to practice them.
There are two significant problems with these as they stand. I would see the correctives I’m suggesting as nuancing her principles rather than overthrowing [...]

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Why DeConick is wrong about history and scholarship

September 17, 2009

April DeConick writes another of those posts on the resurrection which conclude with their own initial presuppositions. So, for example, she writes:
There is a big difference between confessional scholarship and its working assumptions and historical-critical scholarship and its working assumptions, and we must never confuse the two. Confessional scholarship is willing to compromise and apologize [...]

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