Did Paul Accept Jesus's Teachings?

[Dario_M]

The name Paulus sounds way more familiar then Paul. Paulus must have lived after the time Jesus Christ lived 2023 years ago.

Salomon for example was also the same kind of figure like Paulus isn't it? Did they lived in the same time?

I can also google the informarion offcourse insted of asking it all the time. 😌 

[Pyreaux]

3 hours ago, Dario_M said:

The name Paulus sounds way more familiar then Paul. Paulus must have lived after the time Jesus Christ lived 2023 years ago.

Salomon for example was also the same kind of figure like Paulus isn't it? Did they lived in the same time?

I can also google the informarion offcourse insted of asking it all the time. 😌 

Ah, King Saul, King David and King Solomon were Old Testament Kings. Different Saul, who occasionally went crazy trying to kill David, and when the prophet Samuel died, Saul consulted the witch of Endor to summon the ghost of the Prophet, only to get informed David was chosen to be King and Saul was scheduled to die the next day.

The New Testament had another Saul a Jew who persecuted Christians and witnessed the Apostle Stephen get stoned to death and then got cornered by Resurrected Jesus on the road and shanghaied into service and became an Apostle to the Gentiles, as Paul. Conflict with Jewish Christians trying to get Gentiles to become Jewish before becoming Christian. He enjoyed going to the temple and had visions there. Wrote many letters that were added to the Bible after Acts.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Pyreaux

[Dario_M]

21 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

Ah, King Saul, King David and King Solomon were Old Testament Kings. Different Saul, who occasionally went crazy trying to kill David, and when the prophet Samuel died, Saul consulted the witch of Endor to summon the ghost of the Prophet, only to get informed David was chosen to be King and Saul was scheduled to die the next day.

The New Testament had another Saul a Jew who persecuted Christians and witnessed the Apostle Stephen get stoned to death and then got cornered by Resurrected Jesus on the road and shanghaied into service and became an Apostle to the Gentiles, as Paul. Conflict with Jewish Christians trying to get Gentiles to become Jewish before becoming Christian. He enjoyed going to the temple and had visions there. Wrote many letters that were added to the Bible after Acts.

How interesting how interesting. Thank you so much. I learn a lot from you. 👍 And that's a good thing i find. 

I love those names as well. Paulus, Solomon, king David. Those names sounds so innocent to me. So......holy. Saints. 

Love the storie also a lot. 

Edited May 27, 2023 by Dario_M

[Kevin Christensen]

On 5/24/2023 at 11:51 AM, Eschaton said:

Good topic. Very clearly Jesus' model of salvation was quite different - if you wanted to be a part of the new imperial rule of God, the key was doing good toward the poor. For Paul, it came down to allegiance to Jesus and trust in his atonement. Christian atonement theology only developed in reaction to Jesus' death, not in anticipation of it. 

Regarding Christian atonement theology, and it's roots, application by Jesus himself, and interpretation by later Christian theologians, I like this essay by Margaret Barker, which actually explores the issue, rather than just making undocumented blanket assertions.

Quote

There has recently been a number of books on the Christian understanding of atonement.
What has been fascinating for me is the extent to which these books do, or more often do not,
use the Old Testament material on atonement as the basis for what they have to say. The
New Testament speaks in a variety of ways about atonement, and this has become the centre
of Christian dogmatics; but this ‘atonement’ is only loosely related to its Old Testament
roots. Did the first Christians, then, radically alter what was understood by atonement, or
was this radical alteration made by subsequent expositors of their ideas? The latter is more
likely; in other words, the original model for New Testament theology has been lost.
George Steiner, in his book The Death of Tragedy, said this:

"When the artist must be the architect of his own mythology, time is against him. He
cannot live long enough to impose his special vision and the symbols he has devised
for it on the habits of language and the feelings of his society. Without an orthodox or
public frame to support it, it does not take root in the common soil."

The death of Jesus was interpreted immediately in terms of atonement, even though the first
Christians cannot have been, to use Steiner’s phrase, ‘architects of their own mythology’.
That they had been just this, however, is the unacknowledged presupposition of much of the
debate. We are given no explanation as to how the two goats of the Day of Atonement found
their fulfilment in events which were interpreted as the LORD himself coming to his people as
their Redeemer and the renewer of the creation. 

See http://www.margaretbarker.com/Papers/Atonement.pdf

In the same paper, Barker makes her case:

Quote

I want to suggest in this paper that there was no influx of paganism into the concept of
atonement as that was expressed and assumed in the New Testament, and no major
reinterpretation. What was assumed by the New testament writers was a traditional
understanding of the temple rituals and myths of atonement. When the rituals had ceased and
the myths were no longer recognised for what they really were, the key to understanding the
imagery of atonement was lost. It is recognised that certain concepts in the New testament
such as covenant, righteousness, justification and grace must have been related to the central
theme of atonement, but the overall pattern, it seems, has been lost. 

At the end of her paper, she concludes that:

Quote

What I have proposed would
explain why the LORD himself was the atonement sacrifice44. The whole point of the
argument in the Epistle to the Hebrews is that it was Jesus the high priest who took his own
blood into the heavenly sanctuary and thereby became the mediator of a new covenant
(Heb.9.11-15). What I propose would explain the cosmic unity described in Ephesians 1.10:
‘to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth…’ and in Colossians 1.17,20:
‘In him all things hold together,… through him to reconcile to himself all things whether on
earth or in heaven…’ It would explain Matthew’s use of the Servant text ‘he took our
infirmities and bore our diseases’ in the context of healing miracles (Mat.8.17). It would
explain why a sermon in Acts refers to Jesus as the Righteous One and the Servant but also as
the Author of Life (Acts 3.13-15). It would explain all the new life and new creation imagery
in the New Testament. Above all it would explain the so-called kenotic hymn in
Philippians2.6-11; the self-emptying of the Servant would have been the symbolic life giving
when the blood, the life, was poured out by the high priest on the Day of Atonement to heal
and restore the creation.

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[Eschaton]

34 minutes ago, Kevin Christensen said:

Regarding Christian atonement theology, and it's roots, application by Jesus himself, and interpretation by later Christian theologians, I like this essay by Margaret Barker, which actually explores the issue, rather than just making undocumented blanket assertions.

See http://www.margaretbarker.com/Papers/Atonement.pdf

In the same paper, Barker makes her case:

At the end of her paper, she concludes that:

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

Barker seems to be writing something theological here rather than critical. We do get clues in the New Testament that the apostles never expected Jesus to die. Why would they? There was no prior expectation for an authentic messiah to be executed by his opponents. For a messiah claimant to be executed would have been proof that he was not the messiah after all, to most Jews.  The doctrine of atonement was in reaction to the fact that Jesus did in fact die, he was defeated by the enemy. How could he then be the messiah? This is why early Christians had better luck converting pagans. Jewish people knew what to expect from a messiah, and it wasn't being executed by foreign occupiers. For Jesus' disciples, the explanation for Jesus' death was atonement on a grand scale - a concept cobbled together from prooftexts from the Hebrew Bible. The historical Jesus didn't teach that he would atone for anyone's sins. 

And of course not every Christian community adopted atonement theology. The earliest layers of Luke lack any atonement theology, and the Didache lacks an understanding of the Eucharist that is rooted in Atonement. 

 

A bit more on Luke's understanding of Jesus' death:

https://ehrmanblog.org/if-jesus-death-was-not-an-atonement-why-did-he-did/

 

Edited June 1, 2023 by Eschaton

[Kevin Christensen]

On 6/1/2023 at 12:04 PM, Eschaton said:

Barker seems to be writing something theological here rather than critical. We do get clues in the New Testament that the apostles never expected Jesus to die. Why would they? There was no prior expectation for an authentic messiah to be executed by his opponents. For a messiah claimant to be executed would have been proof that he was not the messiah after all, to most Jews.  The doctrine of atonement was in reaction to the fact that Jesus did in fact die, he was defeated by the enemy. How could he then be the messiah? This is why early Christians had better luck converting pagans. Jewish people knew what to expect from a messiah, and it wasn't being executed by foreign occupiers. For Jesus' disciples, the explanation for Jesus' death was atonement on a grand scale - a concept cobbled together from prooftexts from the Hebrew Bible. The historical Jesus didn't teach that he would atone for anyone's sins. 

And of course not every Christian community adopted atonement theology. The earliest layers of Luke lack any atonement theology, and the Didache lacks an understanding of the Eucharist that is rooted in Atonement. 

 

A bit more on Luke's understanding of Jesus' death:

https://ehrmanblog.org/if-jesus-death-was-not-an-atonement-why-did-he-did/

 

I notice the use of passive voice in the first sentence, "seems to be writing", in which a personal, subjective assessment masks itself as an objective existential declaration.  The problem arises when a reader mistakes the mask for what it masks, the seeming for being. Then "theological rather than critical."  The solution is to write "seems to me" which admits subjectivity, and the accompanying awareness of personal human limitations, up front.

Barker's The Risen Lord makes a detailed case that:

Quote

What Jesus believed about himself was identical to that which the young church preached about him, even though he had been imperfectly understood at times. It makes Jesus himself the author and finisher of the faith, rather than the early communities, a supposition which has been fashionable for some time. The great message of atonement was not just a damage limitation exercise on the part of a traumatised group of disciples who could find no other way of coming to terms with the death of their leader. (Margaret Barker, The Risen Lord: The Jesus of History as the Christ of Faith (Valley Forge, PA: T&T Clark, 1996), 109.

Erhman, an important textual critic of New Testament manuscripts began as Fundamentalist whose rigid expectations of the texts were shattered by what he found in the evidence of the manuscripts.   It seems to me that someone whose expectations of the texts are less rigid, who actually expects, variations, variants, errors, and editorial slants and schools, can read the same texts and observe the same variations and evidence of humanity (see 1 Nephi 19:6-7, for instance) without assuming that such things disprove any claims to divine inspiration, and therefore can be profoundly discerning (a synonym for "critical") against a different interpretive framework, and be, therefore, far less subject to shattering disillusion, and more open to mind expanding enlightenment.  Barker cites Erhman in several of her books and essays, including twice in The Risen Lord.  

It is important to understand that "most Jews" is a very different proposition than "all Jews without exception" and to understand that different divisions had different understandings.  One of the things Barker does in her commentaries on Temple Mysticism: An Introduction and her King of the Jews: Temple Theology in John's Gospel is explain why Jesus had to say to Nicodemus, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand this? (John 3.10, [Barker’s] translation).” The point of John’s gospel telling several such stories of such conceptual misunderstanding is to demonstrate that the “Jews had lost touch with their original temple teachings,” the Jews in John’s Gospel being those that Josephus had defined as the ones who had returned from Babylon,16 and as such, heirs and advocates of the Deuteronomist way of thinking."   The point of Barker exploring temple theology is to explain how some Jews (not all Jews, and emphatically not those who crucified him) at the time of Christ could make the leap from the sacrifice of animals in the temple to the sacrifice of one said to be the Son of God.  There were different groups, sometimes using different versions of key texts, as well as different books, and within different interpretive traditions.  That, to my way of thinking, means that Barker's take, ought not be dismissed because it is not Erhman's.   Asking which is better is different than asking, "Which agrees with my favorite authorities and present conclusions?"

The Jews of the time of Jesus and the New Testament were not a single, homogenous group any more than today's New Testament interpreters are.  The shock of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948, and the secondary shock in the 1990s when the monopoly on found but till then unreleased scrolls was broken, demonstrate that. Even a very young Joseph Smith observed that "the different teachers of religion understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible," let alone by an appeal to a selected group of Biblical interpreters, who, for all their imposing and often valuable learning, weren't there.  They are interpreters, not eye-witness. John Tvedtnes wrote (In The Most Correct Book) about the implications of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, such as 4Q246 (suppressed till the mid 1990s), which parallels the language of Luke 1, and 4Q521 (also known as the Messianic Apocalypse, also suppressed til the 90s) which parallels Isaiah 61, the very passages Jesus quoted to begin his preaching in Nazareth, and also relevant in comparison to the Qumran Melchizedek text, which depicts the expectations of the time.  (Barker treats it as a key in The Risen Lord.) All of these texts came as a shock that no modern commentator on the New Testament anticipated.  And Tvedtnes also points to Justin's early dialogue with Trypho, in which he alludes to a prophecy credited to Jeremiah saying "The Lord God remembered His dead people of Israel who lay in the graves; and he descended to preach to them His own salvation,"  that Justin reports had been removed from the scriptures.   

And then there is the important chapter in Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, titled "The Invisibility of Revolutions" in which he explains how, as a natural and inevitable part of scientific revolutions, texts books and traditions are re-written in light of the new framework, and materials that do not fit the newly received picture, are suppressed and/or rewritten.   Erhman himself has highlighted evidences for that process revealed in variants in the early Christian manuscripts of New Testament, in light of theological controversies of the times.  Barker's The Older Testament looks back to earlier revolutions of thought, and the subsequent trauma for the written records and handicapping of subsequent interpreters.  Even the Maxwell Institute demonstrates how the process works, especially in the 2016 change to the Website, in which the Old Website was completely discarded, and thousands of links to that site were broken and how one notable feature of the commentaries that they have produced since the administrative change is that they do not make use of the older FARMS materials. 

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

Edited June 7, 2023 by Kevin Christensen
typos

[MustardSeed]

I find this offensive.  I think the two of you should join forces and have a private page where you can shock jock each other til there’s nothing left to say and leave the rest of us alone to argue and pontificate without the sexual tripe. 

[Eschaton]

On 6/1/2023 at 12:58 PM, Kevin Christensen said:

I notice the use of passive voice in the first sentence, "seems to be writing", in which a personal, subjective assessment masks itself as an objective existential declaration.  The problem arises when a reader mistakes the mask for what it masks, the seeming for being. Then "theological rather than critical."  The solution is to write "seems to me" which admits subjectivity, and the accompanying awareness of personal human limitations, up front.

Barker's The Risen Lord makes a detailed case that:

Erhman, an important textual critic of New Testament manuscripts began as Fundamentalist whose rigid expectations of the texts were shattered by what he found in the evidence of the manuscripts.   It seems to me that someone whose expectations of the texts are less rigid, who actually expects, variations, variants, errors, and editorial slants and schools, can read the same texts and observe the same variations and evidence of humanity (see 1 Nephi 19:6-7, for instance) without assuming that such things disprove any claims to divine inspiration, and therefore can be profoundly discerning (a synonym for "critical") against a different interpretive framework, and be, therefore, far less subject to shattering disillusion, and more open to mind expanding enlightenment.  Barker cites Erhman in several of her books and essays, including twice in The Risen Lord.  

It is important to understand that "most Jews" is a very different proposition than "all Jews without exception" and to understand that different divisions had different understandings.  One of the things Barker does in her commentaries on Temple Mysticism: An Introduction and her King of the Jews: Temple Theology in John's Gospel is explain why Jesus had to say to Nicodemus, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand this? (John 3.10, [Barker’s] translation).” The point of John’s gospel telling several such stories of such conceptual misunderstanding is to demonstrate that the “Jews had lost touch with their original temple teachings,” the Jews in John’s Gospel being those that Josephus had defined as the ones who had returned from Babylon,16 and as such, heirs and advocates of the Deuteronomist way of thinking."   The point of Barker exploring temple theology is to explain how some Jews (not all Jews, and emphatically not those who crucified him) at the time of Christ could make the leap from the sacrifice of animals in the temple to the sacrifice of one said to be the Son of God.  There were different groups, sometimes using different versions of key texts, as well as different books, and within different interpretive traditions.  That, to my way of thinking, means that Barker's take, ought not be dismissed because it is not Erhman's.   Asking which is better is different than asking, "Which agrees with my favorite authorities and present conclusions?"

The Jews of the time of Jesus and the New Testament where not a single, homogenous group any more than todays New Testament interpreters are.  The shock of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948, and the secondary shock in the 1990s when the monopoly on found but till then unreleased scrolls was broken, demonstrate that. Even a very young Joseph Smith observed that "the different teachers of religion understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible," let alone by an appeal to a selected group of Biblical interpreters, who, for all their imposing and often valuable learning, weren't there.  They are interpreters, not eye-witness. John Tvedtnes wrote (In The Most Correct Book) about the implications of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, such as 4Q246 (suppressed till the mid 1990s), which parallels the language of Luke 1, and 4Q521 (also known as the Messianic Apocalypse, also suppressed til the 90s) which parallels Isaiah 61, the very passages Jesus quoted to begin his preaching in Nazareth, and also relevant in comparison to the Qumran Melchizedek text, which depicts the expectations of the time.  (Barker treats it as a key in The Risen Lord.) All of these texts came as a shock that no modern commentator on the New Testament anticipated.  And Tvedtnes also points to Justin's early dialogue with Trypho, in which he alludes to a prophecy credited to Jeremiah saying "The Lord God remembered His dead people of Israel who lay in the graves; and he descended to preach to them His own salvation,"  that Justin reports had been removed from the scriptures.   

And then there is the important chapter in Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, titled "The Invisibility of Revolutions" in which he explains how, as a natural and inevitable part of scientific revolutions, texts books and traditions are re-written in light of the new framework, and materials that do not fit the newly received picture, are suppressed and/or rewritten.   Erhman himself has highlighted evidences for that process revealed in variants in the early Christian manuscripts of New Testament, in light of theological controversies of the times.  Barker's The Older Testament looks back to earlier revolutions of thought, and the subsequent trauma for the written records and handicapping of subsequent interpreters.  Even the Maxwell Institute demonstrates how the process works, especially in the 2016 change to the Website, in which the Old Website was completely discarded, and thousands of links to that site were broken and how one notable feature of the commentaries that they have produced since the administrative change is that they do not make use of the older FARMS materials. 

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

The problem is of course Barker doesn't represent a new revolution in academic Biblical studies - her position is so minoritarian that it's basically just her out on her own. She gets quoted a lot in LDS circles because certain parts of her scholarship are theologically convenient, because she projects Christianity onto pre-Christian Judaism. However, there is no evidence that there was any every pre-Christian expectation that the messiah would suffer and die, let alone atone for anyone's sins. Scholars in general don't think that Jesus considered himself to be divine or that he 

 

Burton Mack on the Christian eucharist:

Quote

The first thing to notice about the scene depicted in this text is that it does not make sense as history. The scene assumes that the death of “the Lord Jesus” was a martyrdom and, as we now know, that thought was an interpretation specific to the Christ cult. The scene is not historical but imaginary. It was a creation of the congregations of the Christ in keeping with their mythology." (Burton Mack: Who Wrote the New Testament? p. 189)

This is how historians approach the New Testament. They treat it as they would treat any other ancient text. They don't harmonize and they don't do apologetics.

 

Quote

"What Jesus believed about himself was identical to that which the young church preached about him, even though he had been imperfectly understood at times. It makes Jesus himself the author and finisher of the faith," - Barker, The Risen Lord: Jesus of History as the Christ of Faith

This is extremely theological and uncritical. And of course the problem with this is there was no "young church" but many young churches, and they were all saying different things about Jesus. 

http://www.margaretbarker.com/Publications/RisenLord.htm

"In this book, Margaret Barker explores and explains apparent inconsistencies in the New Testament to present a new way of understanding Christian origins. She confronts and overturns much of the scepticism of recent scholarship."

This definitely reads like apologetics. 

While it's true that ancient Judaism was extremely diverse, that doesn't mean ancient Jews were practicing Christianity. Note that the very Jewish eucharist in the Didache lacks atonement altogether. 

Edited June 5, 2023 by Eschaton

[Saint Bonaventure]

1 hour ago, Eschaton said:

 

While it's true that ancient Judaism was extremely diverse, that doesn't mean ancient Jews were practicing Christianity. Note that the very Jewish eucharist in the Didache lacks atonement altogether. 

I'm not following why you want to make a point about the Didache with regard to the Eucharist and atonement. Can you help me understand what you're after on this?

[Kevin Christensen]

4 hours ago, Eschaton said:

The problem is of course Barker doesn't represent a new revolution in academic Biblical studies - her position is so minoritarian that it's basically just her out on her own. She gets quoted a lot in LDS circles because certain parts of her scholarship are theologically convenient, because she projects Christianity onto pre-Christian Judaism. However, there is no evidence that there was any every pre-Christian expectation that the messiah would suffer and die, let alone atone for anyone's sins. Scholars in general don't think that Jesus considered himself to be divine or that he 

 

Burton Mack on the Christian eucharist:

This is how historians approach the New Testament. They treat it as they would treat any other ancient text. They don't harmonize and they don't do apologetics.

 

This is extremely theological and uncritical. And of course the problem with this is there was no "young church" but many young churches, and they were all saying different things about Jesus. 

http://www.margaretbarker.com/Publications/RisenLord.htm

"In this book, Margaret Barker explores and explains apparent inconsistencies in the New Testament to present a new way of understanding Christian origins. She confronts and overturns much of the scepticism of recent scholarship."

This definitely reads like apologetics. 

While it's true that ancient Judaism was extremely diverse, that doesn't mean ancient Jews were practicing Christianity. Note that the very Jewish eucharist in the Didache lacks atonement altogether. 

When Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, awarded her the Lambeth Doctorate of Divinity, he did so “in recognition of her work on the Jerusalem Temple and the origins of Christian Liturgy, which has made a significantly new contribution to our understanding of the New Testament and opened up important fields for research.”  When Doctor John McDade of Heythrop college in London reviewed Barker's The Risen Lord: The Jesus of History as the Christ of Faith, as part of a broad survey of Life of Jesus Research, he wrote that “A very original contribution to these questions of Jesus’ religious experience, its connection with experiential patterns in first century Jewish religion and the possible value of non-Gospel New Testament writings for Jesus research has come recently from Margaret Barker: her proposals about these three areas go against the grain of much New Testament scholarship and are therefore worth attention.”  Robert M. Price began his review of The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God by writing "This is what we mean by "paradigm shift." In reading Margaret Barker's wide-ranging investigation one feels the tectonic plates shifting and coming together in a new configuration, or perhaps rather a very old one, as we see the outlines of primal Gondwanaland restored again. Barker strips off the blinders of the canonical redactors of the Old Testament, a job we thought we'd long ago completed. Just as fundamentalists continue in obedience to the faith of the Priestly Writer and the Chronicler and their retrojection of Second Temple Judaism into the Patriarchal and Mosaic periods, the rest of us have too easily been gulled into accepting the Mishnaic urgings that Post-Exilic Judaism was monotheistic."

Barker was elected as President of the Society for Old Testament Studies, an English society which requires knowledge of Hebrew for its membership, that does not seem possible if she was "basically out on her own."  Nor does that account for the wide number of reviews of her books, the impressive book blurbs she promoting her work including by the Archbishop of Canterbury for The Mother of the Lord, and for her book on Creation by High All Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew, nor the swath of Ph.D.s who provided blurbs for her other books, several of which came about due to their invitations for her to come and provides series lectures at their Universities.  Nor does it explain why she would be invited to write the chapter on Isaiah for the Eerdman's Commentary on the Bible, or why she would be invited to "devise a research project" by the Centre of Advance Religious and Theological Studies in Cambridge, nor does explain why the Archbishop of Canterbury would invite her to be part of a multidisciplinary committee to evaluate the Jordan Lead books, nor why she has been published in a wide range of academic journals, lectured in a wide range of University settings, invited to do so by a wide range of credentialed professors, and quoted by such luminaries as N.T. Wright and Andrei Orlov (who includes several of her essays in the syllabus for his classes at Marquette.  I personally witnessed how a lecture hall filled with a few hundred Orthodox Scholars and National leaders greeted their Methodist visitor, and for over twenty years have also seen up close and personally how a wide range of top LDS scholars have reacted to her work.  With other English biblical scholars, she organized the London-based Temple Studies group, which conducted successful symposia for ten years, till interrupted by Covid.  Picturing her as "basically just her out on her own" does not account for any of this.  Noticing that she represents a minority view is legitimate, but that does not in and of itself provide a particularly useful or discerning, (that is, "critical") evaluation of the quality of her scholarship or recognize her growing influence.

On the supposed distinction between scholarship and apologetics, I am very impressed by the insights of Alan Goff.  

Quote

"The primary function of an ideology is to conceal from the person who adheres to it the fact that he or she is operating under the influence of that ideology. The creed works, in other words, by convincing the subject that he or she knows how the real world works and that the others who disagree are apologists or are otherwise operating under a false set of beliefs."  Alan Goff, “Dan Vogel’s Family Romance and the Book of Mormon as Smith Family Allegory,” FARMS Review of Books 17/2 (2005): 335

In tossing around the term "uncritical" one should consider that a primary meaning of "critical" is the same as that of "discerning" rather than "knee-jerk skeptical and reflexively dismissive."   

I've got a very good idea of why Barker gets quoted by LDS scholars, having been exploring that since the first quotations I noticed in the mid-90s, and "theologically convenient" accounts for a relatively narrow slice of that.  (I've recently published a pair of long essays on the topic at Interpreter.)  Historically relevant, in highlighting the Deuteronomist Reforms and King Josiah as an unexpected and complex test for the Book of Mormon, strikes me as particularly important.   Barker herself has addressed the implications of her work for the Book of Mormon in a lecture given at the Joseph Smith Conference at the Library of Congress in 2005.  I was there.  And the essay was published in BYU Studies. 

It happens that Burton Mack, the New Testament scholar you cited as an alternative and superior and representative authority made a brief appearance in my recent Interpreter quotation of Professor John McDade's enlightening essay on "Life of Jesus Research."  See if you can spot it here, and consider the implications for the rhetorical weight and relevance of the "minoritarian" label as applied as a sufficient and discerning assessment of Barker:

Quote

I point you to Telford’s summary of how Jesus emerges as a social type if he is considered in the light of “foreground data” (the narrative tradition, especially the miracles, sayings and the traditions surrounding his death) and “background data” (the elements of general context posited as appropriate to understanding him in his first century setting). Here, weighting is all and what should strike us about this helpful taxonomy is the selective and constructed character of the images of Jesus offered by historians, depending on their choice of emphasis, what counts as primary data, which heuristic models are used, and so on. Telford speaks of a consensus today “that a combination of teacher, prophet, healer best captures historically his social identity or role.” (Telford, p. 55)

[Page 45]Foreground data

If weight is given to the miracle tradition, then Jesus emerges as an ancient magician (Morton Smith) or as a Jewish charismatic healer and exorcist (Vermes).
If the weight is given to the sayings tradition, then a range of images of Jesus is adduced.
If the wisdom sayings (proverbs, parables, aphorisms etc.) are given prominence, then Jesus emerges as a sage (Vermes, Flusser) or even an itinerant subversive sage (Borg, Robinson, Funk).
If an emphasis on the authenticity of the prophetic and apocalyptic sayings is retained, then Jesus emerges as an eschatological prophet (Meyer, Sanders, Charlesworth).
If his Kingdom sayings are interpreted apocalyptically (following Schweitzer), and are linked with the Son of Man sayings, then Jesus is an other-worldly figure, expecting cosmic catastrophe and as being relatively indifferent to social concerns.
If the Kingdom sayings are not interpreted apocalyptically, and the Son of Man sayings are viewed as secondary, then Jesus emerges as a this-worldly figure, a social prophet, with a social programme (Borg, Horsley, Hollenbach).
If the emphasis is placed on the opposition to him and his death at the hands of the Romans, then Jesus emerges as a para-Zealot revolutionary (Brandon) or the pacifist victim of oppression.
Background data

The choice of context in which to place Jesus affects the estimate given of him:

When emphasis is placed on the Palestinian Jewish context and, within that, on the Rabbinic tradition (although that did not flourish till after ad 70), then Jesus can be seen as the inspired Rabbi (Flusser, Chilton) or the Pharisee (Falk).
If the choice is made to place him in the context of apocalyptic Judaism, then he can be seen as the “humane [Page 46]apocalyptist” (Charlesworth) or the “reasonable visionary” (Sanders).
If his Galilean provenance is emphasised, then he becomes a charismatic holy man or hasid in the same tradition as Honi the Circle-Drawer or Hanina ben Dosa (Vermes).
If Hellenistic influences in Galilee are emphasised, then he can be seen as a Cynic teacher (Mack, Crossan).
If it is judged that he conforms to no particular social type, he cannot be placed in one of these categories (Hengel).

The Jesus who is envisaged in these accounts is the pre-canonical Jesus, arrived at through certain judgements about the nature of the Gospel traditions (both canonical and extra-canonical — the Gospel of Thomas is now a controversial card in the game), and set in the dynamics of the religious, social and economic life of Palestine. There is then a radical dependence between the reconstructed Jesus and the reconstructed context/model: how the context and social model are understood determines how Jesus is understood. Determines is not too strong a word, for one of the problems with this approach is that the grid of social and economic context is such a strong factor that it can inhibit responsible handling of the actual textual evidence we have for Jesus

 John McDade, “Jesus in Recent Research,” The Month (December 1998): 498, https://archive.org/details/sim_month_1998-12_31_11/page/498/mode/2up?view=theater.

Quoted here: https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/twenty-years-after-paradigms-regained-part-2-responding-to-margaret-barkers-critics-and-why-her-work-should-matter-to-latter-day-saints/

The LDS are a minority religion, and therefore must justify themselves on other grounds than "Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him?"  Fortunately, such critical grounds are readily available for those who seek them out.

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

Edited June 5, 2023 by Kevin Christensen

[Skylla]

22 hours ago, MustardSeed said:

I find this offensive.  I think the two of you should join forces and have a private page where you can shock jock each other til there’s nothing left to say and leave the rest of us alone to argue and pontificate without the sexual tripe. 

We appreciate members using the report button to call these things to our attention.

Skylla

[Eschaton]

21 hours ago, Saint Bonaventure said:

I'm not following why you want to make a point about the Didache with regard to the Eucharist and atonement. Can you help me understand what you're after on this?

The Didache preserves a version of the eucharist devoid of atonement symbolism. Instead for the community behind the document, the eucharist symbolized the gathering of Israel and the Davidic heritage of Jesus. Jesus is referred to as "God's servant" which although unrelated to my point is interesting too, from a Christological standpoint.  

 

Quote

Chapter 9. The Eucharist. Now concerning the Eucharist, give thanks this way. First, concerning the cup:

We thank thee, our Father, for the holy vine of David Thy servant, which You madest known to us through Jesus Thy Servant; to Thee be the glory for ever..

And concerning the broken bread:

We thank Thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge which You madest known to us through Jesus Thy Servant; to Thee be the glory for ever. Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills, and was gathered together and became one, so let Thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Thy kingdom; for Thine is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ for ever..

But let no one eat or drink of your Eucharist, unless they have been baptized into the name of the Lord; for concerning this also the Lord has said, "Give not that which is holy to the dogs."

Chapter 10. Prayer after Communion. But after you are filled, give thanks this way:

We thank Thee, holy Father, for Thy holy name which You didst cause to tabernacle in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and immortality, which You modest known to us through Jesus Thy Servant; to Thee be the glory for ever. Thou, Master almighty, didst create all things for Thy name's sake; You gavest food and drink to men for enjoyment, that they might give thanks to Thee; but to us You didst freely give spiritual food and drink and life eternal through Thy Servant. Before all things we thank Thee that You are mighty; to Thee be the glory for ever. Remember, Lord, Thy Church, to deliver it from all evil and to make it perfect in Thy love, and gather it from the four winds, sanctified for Thy kingdom which Thou have prepared for it; for Thine is the power and the glory for ever. Let grace come, and let this world pass away. Hosanna to the God (Son) of David! If any one is holy, let him come; if any one is not so, let him repent. Maranatha. Amen.

But permit the prophets to make Thanksgiving as much as they desire.

 

[Eschaton]

On 6/1/2023 at 12:58 PM, Kevin Christensen said:

I notice the use of passive voice in the first sentence, "seems to be writing", in which a personal, subjective assessment masks itself as an objective existential declaration.  The problem arises when a reader mistakes the mask for what it masks, the seeming for being. Then "theological rather than critical."  The solution is to write "seems to me" which admits subjectivity, and the accompanying awareness of personal human limitations, up front.

I forgot to address this. Ehrman's study of Biblical scholarship turned him from a rigid fundamentalist to a more nuanced Christian. It didn't turn him into an atheist - that development was unrelated to his scholarship. 

[Eschaton]

18 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

When Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, awarded her the Lambeth Doctorate of Divinity, he did so “in recognition of her work on the Jerusalem Temple and the origins of Christian Liturgy, which has made a significantly new contribution to our understanding of the New Testament and opened up important fields for research.”  When Doctor John McDade of Heythrop college in London reviewed Barker's The Risen Lord: The Jesus of History as the Christ of Faith, as part of a broad survey of Life of Jesus Research, he wrote that “A very original contribution to these questions of Jesus’ religious experience, its connection with experiential patterns in first century Jewish religion and the possible value of non-Gospel New Testament writings for Jesus research has come recently from Margaret Barker: her proposals about these three areas go against the grain of much New Testament scholarship and are therefore worth attention.”  Robert M. Price began his review of The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God by writing "This is what we mean by "paradigm shift." In reading Margaret Barker's wide-ranging investigation one feels the tectonic plates shifting and coming together in a new configuration, or perhaps rather a very old one, as we see the outlines of primal Gondwanaland restored again. Barker strips off the blinders of the canonical redactors of the Old Testament, a job we thought we'd long ago completed. Just as fundamentalists continue in obedience to the faith of the Priestly Writer and the Chronicler and their retrojection of Second Temple Judaism into the Patriarchal and Mosaic periods, the rest of us have too easily been gulled into accepting the Mishnaic urgings

 

I appreciate that you are a fan of Barker, but she doesn't represent any tectonic shift, and neither does Robert Price the Jesus mythicist. I wouldn't call either of them cranks or kooks, but they haven't started the revolution you seem to be predicting. They are out on their own.

If you're looking for the next Kuhnian shift, it may well be along the lines of the Farrer hypothesis. 

18 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

that Post-Exilic Judaism was monotheistic."

 

That's not really unique to Barker - you can get that point made better from more mainstream scholars, without the quixotic temple theology bit. 

 

18 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

Barker was elected as President of the Society for Old Testament Studies, an English society which requires knowledge of Hebrew for its membership, that does not seem possible if she was "basically out on her own."  Nor does that account for the wide number of reviews of her books, the impressive book blurbs she promoting her work including by the Archbishop of Canterbury for The Mother of the Lord, and for her book on Creation by High All Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew, nor the swath of Ph.D.s who provided blurbs for her other books, several of which came about due to their invitations for her to come and provides series lectures at their Universities.  Nor does it explain why she would be invited to write the chapter on Isaiah for the Eerdman's Commentary on the Bible, or why she would be invited to "devise a research project" by the Centre of Advance Religious and Theological Studies in Cambridge, nor does explain why the Archbishop of Canterbury would invite her to be part of a multidisciplinary committee to evaluate the Jordan Lead books, nor why she has been published in a wide range of academic journals, lectured in a wide range of University settings, invited to do so by a wide range of credentialed professors, and quoted by such luminaries as N.T. Wright and Andrei Orlov (who includes several of her essays in the syllabus for his classes at Marquette.  I personally witnessed how a lecture hall filled with a few hundred Orthodox Scholars and National leaders greeted their Methodist visitor, and for over twenty years have also seen up close and personally how a wide range of top LDS scholars have reacted to her work.  With other English biblical scholars, she organized the London-based Temple Studies group, which conducted successful symposia for ten years, till interrupted by Covid.  Picturing her as "basically just her out on her own" does not account for any of this.  Noticing that she represents a minority view is legitimate, but that does not in and of itself provide a particularly useful or discerning, (that is, "critical") evaluation of the quality of her scholarship or recognize her growing influence.

 

If she's not "out on her own" what major scholars have adopted her temple theology?  As I say she's not a crank, but she's very much out in left field, not representative of any major school of thought. 

What makes you think her influence is "growing?" 

 

18 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

On the supposed distinction between scholarship and apologetics, I am very impressed by the insights of Alan Goff.  

In tossing around the term "uncritical" one should consider that a primary meaning of "critical" is the same as that of "discerning" rather than "knee-jerk skeptical and reflexively dismissive."   

Yes, that's how I'm using the term critical. Critical and skeptical are not synonyms. Critical scholars treat Biblical texts the same as any other text, not as privileged texts. They apply historical critical criteria to those texts. 

 

[Kevin Christensen]

I think Barker's influence is growing because I have been paying attention.  Before she began publishing, she had little influence. Since she began publishing in mid-70s, with some Journal articles, we have notable evidences of influence in consequence, like her election to the Presidency of the Society of Old Testament Study, her Lambeth Doctor of Divinity awarded by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the introduction to her book on Creation being written by His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholowmew, the number of different Universities where she has been invited to give lectures wherein those lectures became books, citations by N. T. Wright in the book based on his 2018 Gifford Lectures, History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology, her appearance in a the Temples through Time video produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the fact that she keeps producing books that remain in print and sell, writes essays, delivers lectures, and gives interviews. In a 2017 interview, she commented that "I’ve more requests to talk about Temple theology than I can possibly accept; so there certainly is great interest in the Church. It helps in the understanding of liturgical patterns, and it’s also the basis for any biblical theology of creation."    I've published 43 essays in a range of journals and books, but personally, I only rarely get invited to speak (aside from the very occasional Sacrament talk, one Fireside and one talk at the Conference on Hebrews at BYU in the past twenty plus years).  So I know the difference between being a niche contributor and one who is at the center of things.

All of that, and more, I take as significant evidence of growing influence and significance.  "Growing influence" does not imply universal acceptance.  Neither Jesus nor Joseph Smith have that either, so that is not a requirement for claiming growing influence and significance.  There are very good reasons for that, not the least of which is Richard Bushman's observation here:

Quote

We must at least acknowledge that no scholarship, no truth, exists in a social vacuum. Though it is rarely mentioned in the work itself, all scholarship is tied to a community of some kind and bears the marks of that community’s influence. Scholarship is the product of people who are located in institutions — universities, research institutes, or circles of like-minded thinkers. They publish their work and want to have it read by others. Their reputations, promotions, pay raises, and appointments depend on how that work is received. When they write, they use the language, the mannerisms, the forms of their scholarly community. In taking an intellectual position, they silently, but inevitably associate themselves with people of a similar outlook.

See  “The Social Dimensions of Rationality,” in Expressions of Faith: Testimonies of Latter-day Saint Scholars, ed. Susan Easton Black (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book, and FARMS, 1996), 73,  https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1467&context=cgu_fac_pub 

There is a discernable difference between those who dismiss her approach from a "Not us!" basis, and those who explore the implications of her work with a "Why us?" openness and humility.  One of the things I like about the best LDS apologists (such as Nibley, Peterson, Goff, the Givens, Welch, Sorenson, Poulson, Gardner, Morris, Roper, Tvedtnes etc.) is that in wrestling with opposing points of view, and addressing ongoing open questions, is that we are pressed by the very nature of the wrestle, the "By proving contrarieties, truth is made manifest" engagement, to seriously consider "Why us?" exploration and comparison and not just settle for a self referential and therefore a significantly ideological-based "Not us!" dismissal.  On the other hand, there are those among the LDS scholarly communities (plural intentional) who practically swoon at the possibility of being accepted by "them" (the "mainstream", the popular and cool kids) and find any serious and public explorations of "Why us?" (that is, why be actual believing LDS, with all of the scandals and baggage and covenants and angel stories and general unpopularity) as embarrassing, and find a "Not us!" claim with respect to apologetics to be a badge of honor.

Speaking of critical, discerning Bible scholars, who "apply historical critical criteria to those texts," here is how Barker describes her approach.

Quote

Since these are my reflections on biblical studies, I should perhaps say something about my own approach. I favour the use of context materials rather than the currently fashionable approaches such as social scientific or rhetorical studies. I believe that a careful use of the historical critical method is most useful, as it enables us to stand where they stood, look where they looked and even to read what they wrote. What we find is not always expected or even welcome. There have been several times in my own research and writing when I have been forced to abandon the very position I was trying to establish, and with it a great deal of my personal baggage, but this has always led to something even more exciting.

http://www.margaretbarker.com/Papers/ReflectionsOnBiblicalStudies.pdf

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

Edited June 7, 2023 by Kevin Christensen

[Saint Bonaventure]

22 hours ago, Eschaton said:

The Didache preserves a version of the eucharist devoid of atonement symbolism. Instead for the community behind the document, the eucharist symbolized the gathering of Israel and the Davidic heritage of Jesus. Jesus is referred to as "God's servant" which although unrelated to my point is interesting too, from a Christological standpoint.  

 

 

An intriguing perspective, thanks for sharing it.

I'm sure I don't understand what you mean by "atonement symbolism" or why it matters for the larger discussion. Is there some connection between the Eucharist, Barker's work and Latter-day Saint understandings of the early church? 

[Kevin Christensen]

2 hours ago, Saint Bonaventure said:

An intriguing perspective, thanks for sharing it.

I'm sure I don't understand what you mean by "atonement symbolism" or why it matters for the larger discussion. Is there some connection between the Eucharist, Barker's work and Latter-day Saint understandings of the early church? 

For a detailed examination, see Barker's chapter "Excursus: Parousia and Liturgy" in The Revelation of Jesus Christ, pages 373-388. She writes that "When the Day of Atonement is recognized as the original context of the Eucharist, other elements in the tradition fall into place." (p 379). 

Also in Temple Theology: An Introduction, she comments how the consonants for the key word 'remember' can also be translated as 'invoke', which is a priestly, temple activity." She notes that the difference between the Deuteronomists who "remembered the LORD whereas the priests invoked the presence. If Jesus spoke either Hebrew or Aramaic at the Last Supper, his words 'Do this in remembrance of me' will have had the same ambiguity. He could also have meant 'Do this as my invocation." (page 38.)  

And that makes the sacrament LDS sacrament prayers far more interesting (Moroni 4 and 5) as they combine both remembrance and invocation: "that they may always have his spirit to be with them."

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA