They also equated the Holy Spirit with divine Wisdom, as in Proverbs.
While I’m not bothered at all by using “she” for the Holy Spirit, and do it myself sometimes, it does seem that it should be pointed out that while early Christian writers did sometimes equate Divine Wisdom with the Holy Spirit, they much more commonly equated Divine Wisdom with Christ.
I’d also be leery of equating grammatical gender with actual gender, or assuming the former consistently reflects the latter. Since you mentioned German, you may be aware, for example, that a standard example of how grammatical gender may not reflect actual gender is Mädchen—girl—which is neuter, not feminine, for reasons that have nothing to do with actual gender.
Sure. Whatever the case, I'm not sure what bearing it has on our discussion of the Gospel accounts or Lamb Chopped's latest post on the issue of authorship etc.
Sure. Whatever the case, I'm not sure what bearing it has on our discussion of the Gospel accounts or Lamb Chopped's latest post on the issue of authorship etc.
Nor I. I don’t know what lead to the comment, but as long as it was there . . . .
@Lamb Chopped you'll know far more about this than I do having studied all this stuff, but would you agree that having a 'single author' and the Gospels (and perhaps other NT writings) also emerging 'in community' are not necessarily incompatible?
I'm thinking both/and as is my wont.
To have a Gospel 'emerge' from a Johannine community say, doesn't necessarily mean it self-generated as it were. It may simply mean that John 'gave voice' or represented the beliefs about Christ that were current among the particular group of early believers he was involved with.
That's rather different to the Gospel 'writing itself' as it were.
You can see where I'm going with this of course. The NT was written in community and received in community. It was canonised in community.
It didn't drop out of the sky.
Not that you've suggested it did.
This doesn't remove the 'woo woo' aspect, the sense of the Holy Spirit working in and through the process. FWIW I think we've got a very vibrant, active and multi-faceted process going on which includes much - or perhaps all - of what you've outlined and way, way, more besides.
'Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it ...
I believe I have opined in the past my suspicion that the Gospel of John was written by committee. By which I mean a community designated a group of people to record the Good News as they had received it , the group spent a good year fannying about wondering what to include until one member took it upon themselves to write a draft, fully expecting it to form the basis of discussion, only to be met with nods of relieved approval from the rest of the group. The draft duly became the finished version and the author was too embarrassed to admit, and everyone else too polite to point out, they'd forgotten to include the institution of Holy Communion.
There is something about the shape of John's gospel which feels liturgical to me. This is what makes the idea that it emerged from a community who worshipped together, and worked the stories which shaped their faith and their common life into that worship. The gospel is therefore a record of that tradition, which, though it was compiled by particular people at a particular time, was not originated or even collated specifically by them.
If you want evidence of that liturgicality, I would send you particularly to the account of holy week, which seems to me to be far a sort of narrated creed than a biography or an account of historical events. It is too full of relationships not recorded elsewhere, and events which mirror very closely the accounts set out in Second Isiah's suffering servant narratives and the psalms, for it to be an accurate records of events. It also strains every sinew to make those events fit into a week, and around Passover. It is an accurate account of that community's faith, and their understanding of the impact of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
About the beginning of John. In the beginning was the Word. In Wisdom literature, the greek work was Logas. Feminine. The writer of John, though, changed the gender to logos in his rendition.
I wanted to point out the feminine gender word for Holy Spirit in reaction to Lamb Chopped continual use of the second person male pronoun for the third person of the Trinity.
And, no, I do not refer to the Holy Spirit as "it," though the Greek word, pnuema, is neutered.
About the beginning of John. In the beginning was the Word. In Wisdom literature, the greek work was Logas. Feminine. The writer of John, though, changed the gender to logos in his rendition.
To the best of my knowledge, this is simply incorrect. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no Greek word logas. (If I am wrong, I would be glad to see the authority for this statement about about John’s gospel.)
The standard Greek word logos long predates the Gospels and is grammatically masculine. There are adjectives derived from it, both masculine and feminine (because that is how grammatical gender works). As Nick Tamen has pointed out, however, with the classic exemplar, we shouldn’t read too much into grammatical gender.
About the beginning of John. In the beginning was the Word. In Wisdom literature, the greek work was Logas. Feminine. The writer of John, though, changed the gender to logos in his rendition.
I wanted to point out the feminine gender word for Holy Spirit in reaction to Lamb Chopped continual use of the second person male pronoun for the third person of the Trinity.
And, no, I do not refer to the Holy Spirit as "it," though the Greek word, pnuema, is neutered.
Citation needed(TM) - I can find no reference to a Greek Fem. noun *logas. I can find Logia, which looks superficially feminine but is in fact a neuter plural.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, in languages with grammatical gender there isn't necessarily a direct correlation between that and natural gender. It's words that have gender, not the the things they refer to - the Classical Latin word for head, Caput, is neuter, but the Vulgar Latin word was Testa (origin of eg French Tête), which is feminine.
My mistake. I should have pointed out that the phrase In the Beginning was the Word, parrallels similar phrases in Jewish wisdom literature which uses the term Sophia, which is definitely feminine. See. https://ehrmanblog.org/johns-logos-and-jewish-wisdom-for-members/
It has been suggested that the material of John's gospel was partly derived from a play.
I’ve heard a compelling analysis of John suggesting that it is structured to invoke the seven days of Creation in the first creation story of Genesis. Unfortunately, I can’t remember details now, beyond the obvious beginning of John’s gospel with “In the beginning . . . .” I’ll see if I can track more down.
However we approach these things, it's intriguing to see the different devices and structuring of material between John's Gospel and the Synoptics.
But as I think I've noted on these boards before, @Arethosemyfeet, whilst we don't have the 'institution of communion' in John we do have John 6 which is assuredly Eucharistic. Unless you are going to tell us otherwise.
the Hebrew for Spirit/spirit/wind/breath, "ruach", is feminine.
the Greek is pneuma, which is neuter, not neutered, thank-you-very-much, splutter.
Anyway, you got me curious, so I went looking in John 14-16 for the bits where Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit, and in some places his pronouns follow the grammar (so if the antecedent is neuter "spirit," the pronouns that follow are neuter; if the antecedent is masculine "parakletos, paraclete or helper," we get the masculine forms.) Which tells us basically nothing at all, you'd kind of expect that.
But there is one bit, John 16:13-14, where the masculine pronoun ἐκεῖνος precedes the noun describing the Spirit (τὸ πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, which is neuter), and then the masculine pronouns continues to appear in verse 14, even after that neuter noun gets introduced. Jesus doesn't revert to the neuter, which is what you'd expect grammatically. Instead he uses ἐκεῖνος again. (Note: ἑαυτοῦ is no good to us in this discussion, as the same form is both masculine and neuter, so it tells us nothing either way.)
As you all know from previous fights debates, I take a very high view of the text, down to the word level, and I'm also an inerrantist as regards the autograph manuscripts. (Translation: I think the pronoun thingy I just mentioned is no accident, either of the writer or Jesus; I think it's in there because God intended it to be there.) Y'all can eat me alive for this again, if you like; but it means that, as far as my own personal practice goes, I'm going to continue with the masculine for the Spirit, because the way I see it, Jesus (as recorded by an inspired writer/translator) did so on at least one occasion when it meant going against the normal grammar. There's also the fact that it's been the normal practice of the Christian church as a whole since yonks, and to me, messing around with something like that is WAY above my pay-grade.
So do I draw patriarchal / misogynist / generally nasty and ugly conclusions from this? Nope. There ARE plenty of passages that indicate Christians ought not to behave like assholes, and I take those as normative too. So the pronoun thing is something I find interesting, but anybody who makes a baseball bat out of it and proceeds to abuse their neighbors is likely to wind up in deep crap with Jesus, and I don't want that to be me.
PS I also checked Acts 2, but found no pronouns that would help us out either way. Anybody who wants to do a concordance study on the Holy Spirit and his pronouns is welcome, but I'm too lazy to do that today, so I just hit the high points in John and Acts.
However we approach these things, it's intriguing to see the different devices and structuring of material between John's Gospel and the Synoptics.
But as I think I've noted on these boards before, @Arethosemyfeet, whilst we don't have the 'institution of communion' in John we do have John 6 which is assuredly Eucharistic. Unless you are going to tell us otherwise.
Shh don't tell the angy ani-sacramentalist mob.....
So do I draw patriarchal / misogynist / generally nasty and ugly conclusions from this? Nope. There ARE plenty of passages that indicate Christians ought not to behave like assholes, and I take those as normative too. So the pronoun thing is something I find interesting, but anybody who makes a baseball bat out of it and proceeds to abuse their neighbors is likely to wind up in deep crap with Jesus, and I don't want that to be me.
This, this, this.
Which is why this:
Y'all can eat me alive for this again, if you like; but it means that, as far as my own personal practice goes, I'm going to continue with the masculine for the Spirit, because the way I see it, Jesus (as recorded by an inspired writer/translator) did so on at least one occasion when it meant going against the normal grammar.
ain’t gonna come from me. I’m very happy to let this be something everyone approaches in the way that they find faithful and helpful. I’m quite confident God can deal with any messiness that results.
No, I do not want to discuss any gender of God, but I just want to point out that J think we should be more inclusive in our descriptions of the Divine.
But more to the thrust of the thread, I think it should be noted none of the Gospels have similar endings to the resurrection story. Matthew has Jesus appearing to the disciples, telling them they should go out into the world, baptizing the nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, assuring them he will be with them until the end of the ages.
Mark depicts the women fleeing the tomb out of fear, not telling anyone what they had heard and seen.
Luke can't even get his story right. At the end of his Gospel, he claims Jesus ascended into the heavens almost immediately after the resurrection. But then at the beginning of his book on Acts, he says the resurrection happened forty days after the resurrection. And even then, did Jesus ascend into heaven, or did the clouds just cover him and he disappears.
And then there is John. After the resurrection Jesus ends up popping up everwhere, notably when the disciples are gathered together. First there is Mary of Magdala, then the disciples locked behind closed doors, the first time without Thomas, the second time with Thomas. Then the disciples leave to Gallilee and Peter announces he is going fishing.
A sceptic points out there is no common ending to the witnesses. I would think lawyers just would not want to use these conclusions to prove Jesus did indeed rise from the dead.
The point is none of the gospel endings can be applies to modern rules of evidence.
But more to the thrust of the thread, I think it should be noted none of the Gospels have similar endings to the resurrection story. Matthew has Jesus appearing to the disciples, telling them they should go out into the world, baptizing the nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, assuring them he will be with them until the end of the ages.
Mark depicts the women fleeing the tomb out of fear, not telling anyone what they had heard and seen.
Luke can't even get his story right. At the end of his Gospel, he claims Jesus ascended into the heavens almost immediately after the resurrection. But then at the beginning of his book on Acts, he says the resurrection happened forty days after the resurrection. And even then, did Jesus ascend into heaven, or did the clouds just cover him and he disappears.
And then there is John. After the resurrection Jesus ends up popping up everwhere, notably when the disciples are gathered together. First there is Mary of Magdala, then the disciples locked behind closed doors, the first time without Thomas, the second time with Thomas. Then the disciples leave to Gallilee and Peter announces he is going fishing.
A sceptic points out there is no common ending to the witnesses. I would think lawyers just would not want to use these conclusions to prove Jesus did indeed rise from the dead.
Frank Morison, famously, was one lawyer who, beginning as a sceptic, did not find these differences problematic. Val Grieve was another (UK, I believe) lawyer who found them convincing.
As a former trial lawyer myself, while I can see the issues you raise, I still find the overall case convincing.
But more to the thrust of the thread, I think it should be noted none of the Gospels have similar endings to the resurrection story. Matthew has Jesus appearing to the disciples, telling them they should go out into the world, baptizing the nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, assuring them he will be with them until the end of the ages.
Mark depicts the women fleeing the tomb out of fear, not telling anyone what they had heard and seen.
Luke can't even get his story right. At the end of his Gospel, he claims Jesus ascended into the heavens almost immediately after the resurrection. But then at the beginning of his book on Acts, he says the resurrection happened forty days after the resurrection. And even then, did Jesus ascend into heaven, or did the clouds just cover him and he disappears.
And then there is John. After the resurrection Jesus ends up popping up everwhere, notably when the disciples are gathered together. First there is Mary of Magdala, then the disciples locked behind closed doors, the first time without Thomas, the second time with Thomas. Then the disciples leave to Gallilee and Peter announces he is going fishing.
A sceptic points out there is no common ending to the witnesses. I would think lawyers just would not want to use these conclusions to prove Jesus did indeed rise from the dead.
Frank Morison, famously, was one lawyer who, beginning as a sceptic, did not find these differences problematic. Val Grieve was another (UK, I believe) lawyer who found them convincing.
As a former trial lawyer myself, while I can see the issues you raise, I still find the overall case convincing.
As another former trial lawyer, I don’t find those differences—the significance of which seem a bit exaggerated to me, to be honest—particularly problematic.
The thing is, there's a difference between having four stories that each focus on different bits of the whole, and having four contradictory stories.
I look at the resurrection accounts, and what I see is 40 days of wonderful, overwhelming and fast-moving chaos. Of course Mark focuses on the fear, while John gives us an idyllic picnic beside the sea! Of course Matthew (and Luke, in Acts) focuses on the instructions Jesus gave them for what comes next! There's plenty of time for all those things in 40 days. And in fact, I would have doubts about a resurrection in which nobody was terrified, nobody got freaked out at all. Equally I would be surprised if by the fifth or sixth time they had seen Jesus, the disciples hadn't managed to pull themselves together a bit, certainly enough to go fishing and enjoy breakfast. You can only stay in total freak-out mode for so long. The instructions are only to be expected; after all, this is the same Lord who took such care to prepare his disciples for the crucifixion, warning them several times and even making plans for Galilee at that stage, not that they paid attention (Matthew 26:32, Mark 14:28). Naturally he's giving them instructions for the next stage too--in this case, Pentecost.
[As for what you say about Luke, it's clear that he's writing a summary at the end of the Gospel, to tie everything together neatly. That word "And" in 24:50 is doing a lot of work--more than you think it should, apparently. It's basically skipping over everything between Day 1 and Day 40, and why? Because Luke is hitting the high points--a. That Jesus rose, b. That various disciples saw him, c. that he gave instructions, and d. that he ascended. As the author of a Gospel that is already 24 chapters long, he has every right to do that--all the more as he intends to immediately start Part 2, the book of Acts. And when he DOES begin Acts, he's no longer at the tail end of a long work--he's at the very beginning of a new work, and so he's more inclined to relax and stretch himself, if you see what I mean. That's where we get more details, like the bits of dialogue (like the disciples STILL expecting a political kingdom), the reference to the 40 days, and the detailed description of what the Ascension was like. Psychologically, it makes sense to me. But then, I'm a writer too, and I know the pressure to just END THIS STORY ALREADY, as opposed to the relative freedom you feel when you're just starting out on something new.]
You do realize that the New Testament is a very human book, as well as a divine one, and was intended to be so from the start? Christianity never subscribed to all that “delivered on a set of golden plates nonsense,” unlike the Book of Mormon or the Quran (there not a set of plates but rather a delivery from the angel Gabriel). No, the standard explanation for the nature of the New Testament (and Old) is “that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Peter 1:20-21). Scripture has its origin in the work of the Holy Spirit, the Third member of the Trinity, speaking through very human people—and so you find both imprints, human and divine, all over it. And so we should expect. And this, of course, leads to endless scandal from those who would prefer a … purer… product?
In any case, God—this God—seems to like things messy, or at least not to mind it. And so the coming of the New Testament into the world bears some resemblance to childbirth—a messy, bloody process, with pain and joy mixed. And probably a lot of swearing…
To the extent that it's divine, to what extent do you believe it (the text we read) reflects God's divine will?
Does the influence of the Holy Spirit mean that it is sufficient (though not perfect) to relate God's divine will to us? Or does the human involvement corrupt it to the point where aspects of God's will are obscured to the point where some of us can't see them? Is the ambiguity and confusion that we experience reading and understanding it just a consequence of how it came to be, or intentional?
My observation, and ignore it take it any way you like, is that believers focus on bits of the text in any way that they feel comfortable. There's sufficient ambiguity to allow personal interpretation as to what is or isn't important, god-inspired, human or any other category.
Which seems interesting in the sense that other religious books don't seem to offer this level of subjectivity.
My observation, and ignore it take it any way you like, is that believers focus on bits of the text in any way that they feel comfortable. There's sufficient ambiguity to allow personal interpretation as to what is or isn't important, god-inspired, human or any other category.
Which seems interesting in the sense that other religious books don't seem to offer this level of subjectivity.
You don't Muslims argue endlessly about how to interpret the Qur'an?
My observation, and ignore it take it any way you like, is that believers focus on bits of the text in any way that they feel comfortable. There's sufficient ambiguity to allow personal interpretation as to what is or isn't important, god-inspired, human or any other category.
Which seems interesting in the sense that other religious books don't seem to offer this level of subjectivity.
You don't Muslims argue endlessly about how to interpret the Qur'an?
My observation, and ignore it take it any way you like, is that believers focus on bits of the text in any way that they feel comfortable. There's sufficient ambiguity to allow personal interpretation as to what is or isn't important, god-inspired, human or any other category.
Which seems interesting in the sense that other religious books don't seem to offer this level of subjectivity.
You don't Muslims argue endlessly about how to interpret the Qur'an?
I'm not sure, but I doubt any Muslim believes that the Koran includes parts that are human in origin given that they believe it is written by the fingers of Allah and then descended from the clouds. I don't remember the exact details.
My observation, and ignore it take it any way you like, is that believers focus on bits of the text in any way that they feel comfortable. There's sufficient ambiguity to allow personal interpretation as to what is or isn't important, god-inspired, human or any other category.
Which seems interesting in the sense that other religious books don't seem to offer this level of subjectivity.
You don't Muslims argue endlessly about how to interpret the Qur'an?
I'm not sure, but I doubt any Muslim believes that the Koran includes parts that are human in origin given that they believe it is written by the fingers of Allah and then descended from the clouds. I don't remember the exact details.
I was saying something in response to a discussion about the bible being both divine and human in origin. You've introduced a point about the Koran, which as far as I understand is incorrect, at least in the sense that Muslims accept the Koran as divinely written.
And now you seem to be rowing back and saying 'ah but that's the Hadith'.
It isn't. Whatever the Hadith is or isn't, Muslims believe the Koran to be divinely written. So it cannot then be humanly written at the same time. I don't think there is any debate on that point.
I thought your original point was that interpretation of sacred text was subjective. Apologies for the confusion. Even within the Qur'an Muslims will argue about what is universally applicable and what is specific to e.g. Mohammed's immediate family.
IMHO this is a mistake. Nothing as long and complicated as a Gospel just "emerges" from a community, even in separate units of text. Maybe you could have a nursery rhyme do so, though I tend to think those have actual single authors too. But something like Mark or Luke? No.
At some point, somebody was forced to put pen to paper and write the thing down. And when that happened, the writer made choices--what to include, in what order, with what details, using what level and type of language, etc. etc. etc. These are authorial choices; and they come out of a single human brain.
But that human brain is not working in a vacuum. We can attribute several Arthurian romances to Chrétien de Troyes, but that doesn't mean he wasn't working from pre-existing material or that the authorial choices he made didn't emerge from the time and place in which he lived.
Those who wrote the Gospels etc. were also bilingual to greater or lesser degrees and capable of producing a decent translation; and returning to the "woo woo" aspect of New Testament development, it has always been understood in the church that the Holy Spirit watched over this textual process just as he did all the rest of them. We take it that he safeguarded the translation process sufficiently that we are not getting nonsense or mistakes in what Jesus said, just because it is put into koine Greek instead of what was probably Aramaic.
I'm wondering how this works. There are numerous translations of the Second Testament and they differ from each other in sometimes significant ways. (From my perspective the biggest is whether dikaiosune and other dik-stem words is translated as "righteousness", as it is in most English language translations, or as "justice", as it is in just about every other language.) Did the Holy Spirit get tired of making corrections, or are some of these translations simply unholy?
As you all know from previous fights debates, I take a very high view of the text, down to the word level, and I'm also an inerrantist as regards the autograph manuscripts.
I'm not sure what this means, given that we don't have the autograph manuscripts for any of the Second Testament documents. If the Holy Spirit intended you to have access to the inerrant autographs, couldn't the "woo woo" preserve them?
Time for me to eat dinner. Is there anything else on this thread subject anyone would like to hear about? I'll tell you up front that I don't have the technical background to talk about the dating of when individual books were written; to do a decent job on that, I'd have to do a full survey of the existing manuscripts and also dig into other data that would frankly take me years I don't have at this point. I will say that it's never safe to set a Biblical text as "late" solely on the grounds that it contains prophecy in it (you know the sort of thing: "This section clearly refers to the fall of Jerusalem in the form of a prophecy of Jesus, but we all know true prophecy doesn't exist, so this must be spurious, composed by someone other than Jesus and put into his mouth; and it actually dates from some time after 70 AD"). To rely on that reasoning for your date-setting is to bow to your own anti-supernaturalist worldview (when dealing with an avowedly supernaturalist text!) and also rather lazy, unless you do the textual and cultural work you ought to do along with it.
I think the good news here is that there are scholars who have done this work, including textural analysis, that informs best guesses about when these book were written. It seems a good number of the public facing ones, including Bart Ehrman, circle around 70CE as a best case scenario for Mark, the 80s or early 90sCE for Matthew, and the 90sCE for John. Luke is interesting because there are a couple of schools of thought about it: one that places it alongside Matthew in the 80s/90sCE, and another that moves it much later (by these measures) to around 120CE relative to its two-volume pairing with Acts.
It also seems to me that someone with an anti-supernaturalist worldview has a much easier case to make. Isn't it the supernaturalist side that has to show how the Bible is different from all other books? Put another way, if you insist that the Holy Spirit exists &/or that s/he did this work, well, you do woo.
It's fine to take the anti-supernaturalist side but if you use the impossibility of supernatural action to settle on a late date and then use the late date to cast doubt on the veracity of accounts your reasoning is getting very close to being a circle.
I don't think it takes a position re: the impossibility of supernatural action to settle on a later date. One need only deal with the natural to land there. I am curious to know what the supernatural aspects and/or actions are and how they're distinguished from the natural, as well as a better understanding of the lack of supernatural aspects/actions re: textural additions, omissions, conflicts, preservation, etc. Why has the supernatural been, at various points, seemingly absent, intermittent, or ultimately ineffective?
It also seems to me that someone with an anti-supernaturalist worldview has a much easier case to make. Isn't it the supernaturalist side that has to show how the Bible is different from all other books?
As one who’d describe himself as having a very high (though not inerrantist) view of Scripture, I’d think this is stating the obvious. It’s certainly not something I’d disagree with.
Well, yes and no. As I mentioned, the Bible is both human and divine, and the sheer messiness of this means that it's going to be unappealing to people who like their divinity "straight" (Euclidean minds, if you know what I mean) and equally unappealing to those who want to see natural, understandable processes in place and nothing BUT those processes. The hybrid is annoying. Still, it's what we've got... And not surprising if it originates from a God whose major personal project was making himself human, and who retains both natures to this day.
You do realize that the New Testament is a very human book, as well as a divine one, and was intended to be so from the start? Christianity never subscribed to all that “delivered on a set of golden plates nonsense,” unlike the Book of Mormon or the Quran (there not a set of plates but rather a delivery from the angel Gabriel). No, the standard explanation for the nature of the New Testament (and Old) is “that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Peter 1:20-21). Scripture has its origin in the work of the Holy Spirit, the Third member of the Trinity, speaking through very human people—and so you find both imprints, human and divine, all over it. And so we should expect. And this, of course, leads to endless scandal from those who would prefer a … purer… product?
In any case, God—this God—seems to like things messy, or at least not to mind it. And so the coming of the New Testament into the world bears some resemblance to childbirth—a messy, bloody process, with pain and joy mixed. And probably a lot of swearing…
To the extent that it's divine, to what extent do you believe it (the text we read) reflects God's divine will?
Does the influence of the Holy Spirit mean that it is sufficient (though not perfect) to relate God's divine will to us? Or does the human involvement corrupt it to the point where aspects of God's will are obscured to the point where some of us can't see them? Is the ambiguity and confusion that we experience reading and understanding it just a consequence of how it came to be, or intentional?
This is a very good question, and one that we're not likely to answer on this thread, focused primarily as we are on the text and how it came to be. It is basically the old argument between inerrancy and ... not; and the discussion on both sides rests on a whole lot of theological assumptions that are to some extent outside the text.
I'm not trying to dodge the question! Rather I'm explaining that while I, with my viewpoint (and my reasons for it) would say, "Absolutely it's sufficient, and more than that," I'm aware that other Christians would argue for a lower view.
To elaborate a bit more on what I think: The human involvement was absolutely welcomed and planned by God, and is not some sort of blemish on the project; if God had wanted a Quran-style text, he could have had one, easily. He deliberately chose human authors and allowed (encouraged!) them to stamp their personality all over the text, and at the same time oversaw it in such a way that what resulted was trustworthy. I'm speaking, of course, of the original autograph manuscripts.
After that, what? The ordinary human transmission of texts, with all the disasters and occasional errors that introduces--which is why we have textual scientists, to scrub that crap off, as best we can. Has the Holy Spirit entirely let go of the transmission process? I don't think anybody can speak authoritatively to that, but based on the pattern I see in history, my suspicion is no. He has a much looser hand on it, and certainly errors and outright disasters do happen (like certain deliberate mis-translations done by cults to shore up their teachings). But if he's gone away altogether and left us to our own devices, what of the invention of the printing press? Where one of the earliest projects was to print the Bible. What of the Renaissance focus on koine Greek, and the resulting NT text by Erasmus, and the explosion in Reformation theology that came from it? What of the current worldwide Bible translation and distribution programs, which as a byproduct do several very useful things for the people they serve--reducing oral languages to an alphabet, teaching local people to read and write, and thereby allowing them to enter the wider world of communication and education if they wish to?
These all look like good things to me. So I conclude he's still involved, if not to the extent he was during the research and writing process.
Somebody upthread brought up the autographs, and basically complained that God didn't see to it they were preserved, and why is that? Is that some sort of proof that all of this is bullshit, because any sensible God would have preserved them?
Well, no.
Remember what human nature is: If we had the autograph manuscripts, they would inevitably become a) idols--things so highly valued that at least some of us would forget altogether about the Lord they describe. It's happened before, many times, with alleged relics like the Holy Prepuce and Mary's breastmilk and any number of bits of the True Cross, most or all probably spurious.
b) they would be seen by even more people purely in terms of dollars and cents--which is frankly a kind of blasphemy. They would certainly be bought and sold, and likely hoarded by billionaire collectors unless we were lucky enough to have them turn up already under the control of a national museum strong enough and solvent enough to fend off that crap.
c) they would, in earlier ages at least, become grounds for war. Greed for holy and precious things has been the motive for plenty of wars already; why add to it?
No. I think we're better off as we are, without objects that would inevitably become a source of division and greed. And I suspect God saw it so.
It also seems to me that someone with an anti-supernaturalist worldview has a much easier case to make. Isn't it the supernaturalist side that has to show how the Bible is different from all other books? Put another way, if you insist that the Holy Spirit exists &/or that s/he did this work, well, you do woo.
I'm really not clear on what you're saying here. Someone with an anti-supernaturalist worldview may well have an easier case to make; but the point of research and learning isn't to produce an easy case, it's to find the truth. If the truth is in fact at least partly supernatural, then we have to face up to that fact. Ignoring it to make our work easier is intellectually dishonest.
So in the end, it doesn't matter if a given viewpoint makes one's work easier. The question is, have we found the truth?
I'm also not clear on what you mean when you say that supernaturalists need to show how the Bible is different from all other books. I mean, every book is different from all other books. The book I wrote in 2014 is different from all other books. Could you let me know what you meant by this?
I'm also not clear on what you mean when you say that supernaturalists need to show how the Bible is different from all other books. I mean, every book is different from all other books. The book I wrote in 2014 is different from all other books. Could you let me know what you meant by this?
Perhaps I read him incorrectly, but I took him to mean that all books are human (to use the human-divine language you’ve used) so it is easy to accept that the Bible is a human book, and most people would take that as enough of a given that anti-supernaturalists do not need to persuade most people of the idea. (I’d say that persuading some people that it’s just a human book might be a taller order.)
And I think he’s saying that supernaturalists have a generally higher hurdle showing how the Bible is also a divine book, and is/contains/bears witness to (or whatever other way a Christian might want to express it) the Word of God in a way that is different from any other book.
NT Passage A appears to allude to a particular event. Event B is a historical event. Scholar E says this means that Passage A must have been written after Event B.
If Religious Person C says Passage A doesn't need to be written after Event B because Divine-Being Y could have instructed the writer of Passage A in advance of Event B.
Is that pretty much it?
If so, we is to stop Religious Person D making a claim that NT Passage A was dictated to the author at some other earlier point? Doesn't the involvement of Divine-Being Y in the process mean that the claims to truth of Religious Person C are exactly the same weight as Religious Person D (and anyone else using the involvement of Divine-Being Y to explain apparently non-chronological historical evidence)? So doesn't that then mean that there is no possible way to date the writing of Passage A?
Also that would appear to indicate a deity that is interested in the detail of the NT story, but at the same time isn't bothered to the same extent by textural and language differences.
I think any attempt at explanation is simply going to throw out more questions - which isn't to say we shouldn't try.
For instance, if God didn't want the original autograph manuscripts to become 'idols' why didn't he do the same to prevent fake relics?
And on and on we go.
It depends how much messiness we can cope with. And the more messiness we are able to take on board the messier things get. 😀
I think Lamb Chopped is on the money with the human/divine synergy thing - but I would do of course as a card-carrying Orthodox Christian wedded to Chalcedonian formularies (as indeed many of my non-Orthodox brothers and sisters are).
It can sound glib. Six impossible things before breakfast as it were.
But here we stand. We can messily do no other... 😉
It's fine to take the anti-supernaturalist side but if you use the impossibility of supernatural action to settle on a late date and then use the late date to cast doubt on the veracity of accounts your reasoning is getting very close to being a circle.
A completely, fully rational, natural one in every way. Nothing in Paul, a generation before, indicates any awareness of Jesus' Olivet prophecy, despite his anticipating His imminent return.
There is no warrant for invoking the supernatural to explain anything at all. Otherwise there could be no atheists. As nothing supernatural has ever been recorded. By nature. Ever. So why would one invoke it to explain the lies of the Bible? Lying prophecy, after the event, is one of its fortes. The Jewish intelligentsia had previous on this, no?
@Martin54, as you have already been reminded recently, Ship's Commandment number 8 states
8. Don’t crusade – Don’t promote personal crusades. This space is not here for people to pursue specific agendas and win converts.
The existence of God and the supernatural are not the topic of this thread. Please do not derail it by dragging it onto this topic.
If you wish to discuss the non-existence of God, please do so on an appropriate thread. It is up to other posters to decide whether they wish to engage with such a discussion.
Comments
I’d also be leery of equating grammatical gender with actual gender, or assuming the former consistently reflects the latter. Since you mentioned German, you may be aware, for example, that a standard example of how grammatical gender may not reflect actual gender is Mädchen—girl—which is neuter, not feminine, for reasons that have nothing to do with actual gender.
Back to the topic in hand ...
@Lamb Chopped you'll know far more about this than I do having studied all this stuff, but would you agree that having a 'single author' and the Gospels (and perhaps other NT writings) also emerging 'in community' are not necessarily incompatible?
I'm thinking both/and as is my wont.
To have a Gospel 'emerge' from a Johannine community say, doesn't necessarily mean it self-generated as it were. It may simply mean that John 'gave voice' or represented the beliefs about Christ that were current among the particular group of early believers he was involved with.
That's rather different to the Gospel 'writing itself' as it were.
You can see where I'm going with this of course. The NT was written in community and received in community. It was canonised in community.
It didn't drop out of the sky.
Not that you've suggested it did.
This doesn't remove the 'woo woo' aspect, the sense of the Holy Spirit working in and through the process. FWIW I think we've got a very vibrant, active and multi-faceted process going on which includes much - or perhaps all - of what you've outlined and way, way, more besides.
'Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it ...
If you want evidence of that liturgicality, I would send you particularly to the account of holy week, which seems to me to be far a sort of narrated creed than a biography or an account of historical events. It is too full of relationships not recorded elsewhere, and events which mirror very closely the accounts set out in Second Isiah's suffering servant narratives and the psalms, for it to be an accurate records of events. It also strains every sinew to make those events fit into a week, and around Passover. It is an accurate account of that community's faith, and their understanding of the impact of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I wanted to point out the feminine gender word for Holy Spirit in reaction to Lamb Chopped continual use of the second person male pronoun for the third person of the Trinity.
And, no, I do not refer to the Holy Spirit as "it," though the Greek word, pnuema, is neutered.
To the best of my knowledge, this is simply incorrect. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no Greek word logas. (If I am wrong, I would be glad to see the authority for this statement about about John’s gospel.)
The standard Greek word logos long predates the Gospels and is grammatically masculine. There are adjectives derived from it, both masculine and feminine (because that is how grammatical gender works). As Nick Tamen has pointed out, however, with the classic exemplar, we shouldn’t read too much into grammatical gender.
If that's her customary usage why should she change it on your account?
If she chooses to stick with that or change to some other pronoun or formulary that's her business not anyone else's.
Citation needed(TM) - I can find no reference to a Greek Fem. noun *logas. I can find Logia, which looks superficially feminine but is in fact a neuter plural.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, in languages with grammatical gender there isn't necessarily a direct correlation between that and natural gender. It's words that have gender, not the the things they refer to - the Classical Latin word for head, Caput, is neuter, but the Vulgar Latin word was Testa (origin of eg French Tête), which is feminine.
Pneuma is neuter, not neutered. There’s a big difference.
However we approach these things, it's intriguing to see the different devices and structuring of material between John's Gospel and the Synoptics.
But as I think I've noted on these boards before, @Arethosemyfeet, whilst we don't have the 'institution of communion' in John we do have John 6 which is assuredly Eucharistic. Unless you are going to tell us otherwise.
What a thing to come home to, after church!
Anyway--
the Hebrew for Spirit/spirit/wind/breath, "ruach", is feminine.
the Greek is pneuma, which is neuter, not neutered, thank-you-very-much, splutter.
Anyway, you got me curious, so I went looking in John 14-16 for the bits where Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit, and in some places his pronouns follow the grammar (so if the antecedent is neuter "spirit," the pronouns that follow are neuter; if the antecedent is masculine "parakletos, paraclete or helper," we get the masculine forms.) Which tells us basically nothing at all, you'd kind of expect that.
But there is one bit, John 16:13-14, where the masculine pronoun ἐκεῖνος precedes the noun describing the Spirit (τὸ πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, which is neuter), and then the masculine pronouns continues to appear in verse 14, even after that neuter noun gets introduced. Jesus doesn't revert to the neuter, which is what you'd expect grammatically. Instead he uses ἐκεῖνος again. (Note: ἑαυτοῦ is no good to us in this discussion, as the same form is both masculine and neuter, so it tells us nothing either way.)
As you all know from previous fights debates, I take a very high view of the text, down to the word level, and I'm also an inerrantist as regards the autograph manuscripts. (Translation: I think the pronoun thingy I just mentioned is no accident, either of the writer or Jesus; I think it's in there because God intended it to be there.) Y'all can eat me alive for this again, if you like; but it means that, as far as my own personal practice goes, I'm going to continue with the masculine for the Spirit, because the way I see it, Jesus (as recorded by an inspired writer/translator) did so on at least one occasion when it meant going against the normal grammar. There's also the fact that it's been the normal practice of the Christian church as a whole since yonks, and to me, messing around with something like that is WAY above my pay-grade.
So do I draw patriarchal / misogynist / generally nasty and ugly conclusions from this? Nope. There ARE plenty of passages that indicate Christians ought not to behave like assholes, and I take those as normative too. So the pronoun thing is something I find interesting, but anybody who makes a baseball bat out of it and proceeds to abuse their neighbors is likely to wind up in deep crap with Jesus, and I don't want that to be me.
PS I also checked Acts 2, but found no pronouns that would help us out either way. Anybody who wants to do a concordance study on the Holy Spirit and his pronouns is welcome, but I'm too lazy to do that today, so I just hit the high points in John and Acts.
Shh don't tell the angy ani-sacramentalist mob.....
Which is why this: ain’t gonna come from me. I’m very happy to let this be something everyone approaches in the way that they find faithful and helpful. I’m quite confident God can deal with any messiness that results.
But more to the thrust of the thread, I think it should be noted none of the Gospels have similar endings to the resurrection story. Matthew has Jesus appearing to the disciples, telling them they should go out into the world, baptizing the nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, assuring them he will be with them until the end of the ages.
Mark depicts the women fleeing the tomb out of fear, not telling anyone what they had heard and seen.
Luke can't even get his story right. At the end of his Gospel, he claims Jesus ascended into the heavens almost immediately after the resurrection. But then at the beginning of his book on Acts, he says the resurrection happened forty days after the resurrection. And even then, did Jesus ascend into heaven, or did the clouds just cover him and he disappears.
And then there is John. After the resurrection Jesus ends up popping up everwhere, notably when the disciples are gathered together. First there is Mary of Magdala, then the disciples locked behind closed doors, the first time without Thomas, the second time with Thomas. Then the disciples leave to Gallilee and Peter announces he is going fishing.
A sceptic points out there is no common ending to the witnesses. I would think lawyers just would not want to use these conclusions to prove Jesus did indeed rise from the dead.
The point is none of the gospel endings can be applies to modern rules of evidence.
Frank Morison, famously, was one lawyer who, beginning as a sceptic, did not find these differences problematic. Val Grieve was another (UK, I believe) lawyer who found them convincing.
As a former trial lawyer myself, while I can see the issues you raise, I still find the overall case convincing.
I look at the resurrection accounts, and what I see is 40 days of wonderful, overwhelming and fast-moving chaos. Of course Mark focuses on the fear, while John gives us an idyllic picnic beside the sea! Of course Matthew (and Luke, in Acts) focuses on the instructions Jesus gave them for what comes next! There's plenty of time for all those things in 40 days. And in fact, I would have doubts about a resurrection in which nobody was terrified, nobody got freaked out at all. Equally I would be surprised if by the fifth or sixth time they had seen Jesus, the disciples hadn't managed to pull themselves together a bit, certainly enough to go fishing and enjoy breakfast. You can only stay in total freak-out mode for so long. The instructions are only to be expected; after all, this is the same Lord who took such care to prepare his disciples for the crucifixion, warning them several times and even making plans for Galilee at that stage, not that they paid attention (Matthew 26:32, Mark 14:28). Naturally he's giving them instructions for the next stage too--in this case, Pentecost.
[As for what you say about Luke, it's clear that he's writing a summary at the end of the Gospel, to tie everything together neatly. That word "And" in 24:50 is doing a lot of work--more than you think it should, apparently. It's basically skipping over everything between Day 1 and Day 40, and why? Because Luke is hitting the high points--a. That Jesus rose, b. That various disciples saw him, c. that he gave instructions, and d. that he ascended. As the author of a Gospel that is already 24 chapters long, he has every right to do that--all the more as he intends to immediately start Part 2, the book of Acts. And when he DOES begin Acts, he's no longer at the tail end of a long work--he's at the very beginning of a new work, and so he's more inclined to relax and stretch himself, if you see what I mean. That's where we get more details, like the bits of dialogue (like the disciples STILL expecting a political kingdom), the reference to the 40 days, and the detailed description of what the Ascension was like. Psychologically, it makes sense to me. But then, I'm a writer too, and I know the pressure to just END THIS STORY ALREADY, as opposed to the relative freedom you feel when you're just starting out on something new.]
Does the influence of the Holy Spirit mean that it is sufficient (though not perfect) to relate God's divine will to us? Or does the human involvement corrupt it to the point where aspects of God's will are obscured to the point where some of us can't see them? Is the ambiguity and confusion that we experience reading and understanding it just a consequence of how it came to be, or intentional?
Which seems interesting in the sense that other religious books don't seem to offer this level of subjectivity.
You don't Muslims argue endlessly about how to interpret the Qur'an?
I'm not sure, but I doubt any Muslim believes that the Koran includes parts that are human in origin given that they believe it is written by the fingers of Allah and then descended from the clouds. I don't remember the exact details.
No, for that they argue about the Hadith.
I was saying something in response to a discussion about the bible being both divine and human in origin. You've introduced a point about the Koran, which as far as I understand is incorrect, at least in the sense that Muslims accept the Koran as divinely written.
And now you seem to be rowing back and saying 'ah but that's the Hadith'.
It isn't. Whatever the Hadith is or isn't, Muslims believe the Koran to be divinely written. So it cannot then be humanly written at the same time. I don't think there is any debate on that point.
But that human brain is not working in a vacuum. We can attribute several Arthurian romances to Chrétien de Troyes, but that doesn't mean he wasn't working from pre-existing material or that the authorial choices he made didn't emerge from the time and place in which he lived.
I'm wondering how this works. There are numerous translations of the Second Testament and they differ from each other in sometimes significant ways. (From my perspective the biggest is whether dikaiosune and other dik-stem words is translated as "righteousness", as it is in most English language translations, or as "justice", as it is in just about every other language.) Did the Holy Spirit get tired of making corrections, or are some of these translations simply unholy?
I'm not sure what this means, given that we don't have the autograph manuscripts for any of the Second Testament documents. If the Holy Spirit intended you to have access to the inerrant autographs, couldn't the "woo woo" preserve them?
I think the good news here is that there are scholars who have done this work, including textural analysis, that informs best guesses about when these book were written. It seems a good number of the public facing ones, including Bart Ehrman, circle around 70CE as a best case scenario for Mark, the 80s or early 90sCE for Matthew, and the 90sCE for John. Luke is interesting because there are a couple of schools of thought about it: one that places it alongside Matthew in the 80s/90sCE, and another that moves it much later (by these measures) to around 120CE relative to its two-volume pairing with Acts.
It also seems to me that someone with an anti-supernaturalist worldview has a much easier case to make. Isn't it the supernaturalist side that has to show how the Bible is different from all other books? Put another way, if you insist that the Holy Spirit exists &/or that s/he did this work, well, you do woo.
This is a very good question, and one that we're not likely to answer on this thread, focused primarily as we are on the text and how it came to be. It is basically the old argument between inerrancy and ... not; and the discussion on both sides rests on a whole lot of theological assumptions that are to some extent outside the text.
I'm not trying to dodge the question! Rather I'm explaining that while I, with my viewpoint (and my reasons for it) would say, "Absolutely it's sufficient, and more than that," I'm aware that other Christians would argue for a lower view.
To elaborate a bit more on what I think: The human involvement was absolutely welcomed and planned by God, and is not some sort of blemish on the project; if God had wanted a Quran-style text, he could have had one, easily. He deliberately chose human authors and allowed (encouraged!) them to stamp their personality all over the text, and at the same time oversaw it in such a way that what resulted was trustworthy. I'm speaking, of course, of the original autograph manuscripts.
After that, what? The ordinary human transmission of texts, with all the disasters and occasional errors that introduces--which is why we have textual scientists, to scrub that crap off, as best we can. Has the Holy Spirit entirely let go of the transmission process? I don't think anybody can speak authoritatively to that, but based on the pattern I see in history, my suspicion is no. He has a much looser hand on it, and certainly errors and outright disasters do happen (like certain deliberate mis-translations done by cults to shore up their teachings). But if he's gone away altogether and left us to our own devices, what of the invention of the printing press? Where one of the earliest projects was to print the Bible. What of the Renaissance focus on koine Greek, and the resulting NT text by Erasmus, and the explosion in Reformation theology that came from it? What of the current worldwide Bible translation and distribution programs, which as a byproduct do several very useful things for the people they serve--reducing oral languages to an alphabet, teaching local people to read and write, and thereby allowing them to enter the wider world of communication and education if they wish to?
These all look like good things to me. So I conclude he's still involved, if not to the extent he was during the research and writing process.
Somebody upthread brought up the autographs, and basically complained that God didn't see to it they were preserved, and why is that? Is that some sort of proof that all of this is bullshit, because any sensible God would have preserved them?
Well, no.
Remember what human nature is: If we had the autograph manuscripts, they would inevitably become a) idols--things so highly valued that at least some of us would forget altogether about the Lord they describe. It's happened before, many times, with alleged relics like the Holy Prepuce and Mary's breastmilk and any number of bits of the True Cross, most or all probably spurious.
b) they would be seen by even more people purely in terms of dollars and cents--which is frankly a kind of blasphemy. They would certainly be bought and sold, and likely hoarded by billionaire collectors unless we were lucky enough to have them turn up already under the control of a national museum strong enough and solvent enough to fend off that crap.
c) they would, in earlier ages at least, become grounds for war. Greed for holy and precious things has been the motive for plenty of wars already; why add to it?
No. I think we're better off as we are, without objects that would inevitably become a source of division and greed. And I suspect God saw it so.
I'm really not clear on what you're saying here. Someone with an anti-supernaturalist worldview may well have an easier case to make; but the point of research and learning isn't to produce an easy case, it's to find the truth. If the truth is in fact at least partly supernatural, then we have to face up to that fact. Ignoring it to make our work easier is intellectually dishonest.
So in the end, it doesn't matter if a given viewpoint makes one's work easier. The question is, have we found the truth?
I'm also not clear on what you mean when you say that supernaturalists need to show how the Bible is different from all other books. I mean, every book is different from all other books. The book I wrote in 2014 is different from all other books. Could you let me know what you meant by this?
And I think he’s saying that supernaturalists have a generally higher hurdle showing how the Bible is also a divine book, and is/contains/bears witness to (or whatever other way a Christian might want to express it) the Word of God in a way that is different from any other book.
NT Passage A appears to allude to a particular event. Event B is a historical event. Scholar E says this means that Passage A must have been written after Event B.
If Religious Person C says Passage A doesn't need to be written after Event B because Divine-Being Y could have instructed the writer of Passage A in advance of Event B.
Is that pretty much it?
If so, we is to stop Religious Person D making a claim that NT Passage A was dictated to the author at some other earlier point? Doesn't the involvement of Divine-Being Y in the process mean that the claims to truth of Religious Person C are exactly the same weight as Religious Person D (and anyone else using the involvement of Divine-Being Y to explain apparently non-chronological historical evidence)? So doesn't that then mean that there is no possible way to date the writing of Passage A?
I need to go and have a lie-down
For instance, if God didn't want the original autograph manuscripts to become 'idols' why didn't he do the same to prevent fake relics?
And on and on we go.
It depends how much messiness we can cope with. And the more messiness we are able to take on board the messier things get. 😀
I think Lamb Chopped is on the money with the human/divine synergy thing - but I would do of course as a card-carrying Orthodox Christian wedded to Chalcedonian formularies (as indeed many of my non-Orthodox brothers and sisters are).
It can sound glib. Six impossible things before breakfast as it were.
But here we stand. We can messily do no other... 😉
A completely, fully rational, natural one in every way. Nothing in Paul, a generation before, indicates any awareness of Jesus' Olivet prophecy, despite his anticipating His imminent return.
There is no warrant for invoking the supernatural to explain anything at all. Otherwise there could be no atheists. As nothing supernatural has ever been recorded. By nature. Ever. So why would one invoke it to explain the lies of the Bible? Lying prophecy, after the event, is one of its fortes. The Jewish intelligentsia had previous on this, no?
“Wrath has come upon them to the uttermost”?
1Thes 2:16
@Martin54, as you have already been reminded recently, Ship's Commandment number 8 states
The existence of God and the supernatural are not the topic of this thread. Please do not derail it by dragging it onto this topic.
If you wish to discuss the non-existence of God, please do so on an appropriate thread. It is up to other posters to decide whether they wish to engage with such a discussion.
Hostly beret off
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host