methodology

Keeping our caricatures of Judaism?

July 16, 2010

Mark Goodacre notes today how difficult biblical scholars have found it to correct the popular prejudices shared among Christians about the Pharisees. There would seem to me to be an number of factors at play, but perhaps the three most significant are these. The sources are problematic. Perhaps the only first-hand writings we have from [...]

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Hendel’s farewell: faith, evidence and SBL

June 23, 2010

I have been observing from the sidelines the latest spat about the membership and purposes of the Society of Biblical Literature. Joseph Kelly has a very helpful summary post with good links to the main players. I find I have a couple of observations to make. First up, I agree with those who say this [...]

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Humpty-Dumpty Hobbins and conservative liberalism

March 23, 2010

Humpty-Dumpty, of course, famously used words to mean what he chose to mean, irrespective of how other people used them. I sometimes feel like that when reading John Hobbins’ blog. Today he writes at length (twice) defending himself from james McGrath’s claim that in his use of Scripture he’s a liberal. I have increasingly come [...]

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Early Christian history, postmodernism and imaginary texts

December 30, 2009

There has been a kind of long Christmas rumble going on about doing early Christian history in relation to postmodernism (whatever exactly is meant by that). April DeConick posted a week before Christmas defending the historian’s approach. (The comment thread – especially Christ Chris Weimer’s – is well worth a read too.) James Crossley yesterday [...]

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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 [...]

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Hey, help you Paul scholars (and others) out there!

August 27, 2009

Does anyone out there know of any serious post-Sanders attempt to use Paul (and a kind of mirror-reading of him) as a primary source for reconstructing first-century Pharisaism? I’m aware that would be a risky business and need a very careful methodology. However, it seems to me that, if you are persuaded by Steve Mason’s [...]

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Write off the Bible, why don’t you?

August 16, 2009

I can understand why Duane Smith wishes to treat Scripture both as needing to be put in scare quotes and as any other literary corpus. And in fact he has a serious and oft-unnoticed point when he decries the false dichotomy between confessional readings and a relativist free-for-all. I am intrigued that David Ker wants [...]

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Faith seeking redefinition: beginning with God

July 27, 2009

(The second post in a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles) At the risk of a gross generalisation, there are two broad approaches to thinking about life, the universe and everything. One is to start with where we are, and the other is to look for a secure place to begin our [...]

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I swear I’m embarrassed by these criteria

June 16, 2009

Yesterday Loren Rosson returned to Meier’s Marginal Jew (part 4) to pick him up on his use of criteria. I’m not a great fan of the criterion of discontinuity, on this topic or elsewhere, but Meier is not as inconsistent as Rosson proposes. It would be perfectly possible to have a strand represented by Matthew [...]

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Creating Jesus and inventing sources

June 8, 2009
Joseph Mawle as Jesus

In yesterday’s post I discussed some of the ways in which presuppositions and methodology are hopelessly entangled in Jesus research. One of the areas (as one would guess from her blog title) where April DeConick is particularly critical of presuppositions is with the way in which canonical texts are implicitly or explicitly privileged by the [...]

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