Historical-Criticism

This month, Verbum has Joseph Fitzmyer’s Impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Paulist, 2009) available for free. The $0.99 companion volume is Fitzmyer’s Interpretation of Scripture: In Defense of the Historical-Critical Method (Paulist, 2008). ...

[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“125” caption=“Image via Wikipedia”] [/caption] According to Todd Bolen, The Memory and Identity Working Group, University of California, Berkeley is hosting a lecture entitled “Mining for Solomon” by Professor Steven Weitzman (Stanford University) on Tuesday, September 6, 2011. For more information, see here. ...

While reading Darrell Bock’s Studying the Historical Jesus in preparation for class this fall, I came across the following, insightful comment: Every culture has its “cultural script” that is assumed in its communication. These [Second Temple Jewish] sources help us get a reading on the cultural script at work in the time of Jesus. They also help us understand the reaction to Jesus and his ministry. They also deepen our own perception of Jesus’ claims ( 40–41). ...

The mid-year issue of Themelios is now available, and it includes: Carl Trueman, “Minority Report: Not in the Public Interest” Fred G. Zaspel, “B. B. Warfield on Creation and Evolution” Denny Burk, “Why Evangelicals Should Ignore Brian McLaren: How the New Testament Requires Evangelicals to Render a Judgement on the Moral Status of Homosexuality” Stephen Dempster, “A Member of the Family or a Stranger? A Review Article of Jeffrey J. Niehaus, Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology” William Edgar, “Parallels, Real or Imagined? A Review Article of Jeffrey J. Niehaus, Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology” Jeffrey J. Niehaus, “How to Write—and How Not to Write—a Review: An Appreciative Response to Reviews of Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology by Dempster and Edgar” D. A. Carson, “Pastoral Pensées: Motivations to Appeal to in Our Hearers When We Preach for Conversion” Book Reviews

In his Jesus Remembered, James Dunn makes the following, insightful observations about the interplay between the study of Jesus and the study of history: For those within the Christian tradition of faith, the issue [of Jesus’ relationship to history] is even more important. Christian belief in the incarnation, in the events of long ago in Palestine of the late 20s and early 30s AD as the decisive fulcrum point in human history, leaves them no choice but to be interested in the events and words of those days. For the incarnation, by definition, means the commitment of God to self-manifestation in Jesus at a particular time and place within human history, and thus places a tremendous weight of significance on certain events in Palestine in the years 28-30 (or thereabouts) of the common era. Christians cannot but want to know what Jesus was like, since he shows them what God is like. . . . [T]he new questers of the third quarter of the twentieth century showed that faith could and does have a theologically legitimate interest in the history of Jesus. Honest historical inquiry may be granted insights regarding Jesus which are crucially (in)formative of honest (self-critical) faith. . . . The point of [this historical] otherness of Jesus is, in part at least, . . . the otherness in particular of Jesus the Jew—again something we ‘moderns’ have forgotten at our cost. Without that sense of Jesus ‘born under the law’ ( Gal. 4.4), of Christ ‘become servant of the circumcision’ ( Rom. 15.8), with historical awareness of what that means in terms of the particularities of history, then the humanity of Christ is likely to be lost again to view within Christianity and swallowed up in an essentially docetic affirmation of his deity. Although the failures of earlier lives of Jesus at this point . . . are now widely acknowledged, the instinctive compulsion to extricate Jesus from his historical context and to assume his [a-historical,] timeless relevance still has to be resolutely resisted ( 101–102). ...