I haven't paid sufficient attention to this blog recently, as is evident from the time it's been since my last post. I've still been spending time reading books, however I've kept my thoughts to my minimal personal notes, along with the notes in the margins of the books I've been reading.
Here are some good links I've recently discovered on various topics:
The Christ Myth
In internet circles, many atheists consider it fashionable to make statements like "What's the point of arguing about Jesus's Resurrection? After all, Jesus might not have even existed". This is called "The Christ Myth", or the idea that no man named Jesus ever even walked the earth. This claim is fairly radical. Most intelligent skeptics argue that Jesus was a travelling wise man, or was an apocalyptic prophet who was put to death for his anti Temple rantings. However the Christ Myth claim says that not only did Jesus fail to have any supernatural powers; actually he didn't even exist.
I've heard the anti-Jesus argument refuted many times, for example in the following places:
- John Dickson's various materials: The New Atheism DVD, The Christ Files DVD and book, and The Life of Jesus book.
- John Dickson's videos on Public Christianity's web site.
- Gary Habermas and Michael Licona's A Case For The Resurrection of Jesus, where an extensive footnote lays out why Josephus is very good evidence of the existence of Jesus.
However, I was interested to hear a fuller and more detailed representation of the alternative argument, as the above sources only provided small quotes here and there. This is one reason why I purchased Five Views On The Historical Jesus, where Robert Price is alloted 20 or 25 pages to make his case. Price is one of two historians in the world that I'm aware of who argue for this view. As is obvious from the review I posted on Amazon, I was not impressed. The case that Jesus never existed relies on ignoring a lot of evidence, twisting the rest of the evidence with bizarre leaps of (il)logic and relying on mere possibility when it's crystal clear that the probability suggests another interpretation.
This is why I'm glad to have recently found James Hannam's four part series on the issue. This is a succint and clear refutation of The Christ Myth. You could read the whole thing in half an hour or less and you'd have received a solid summary of the reasons why the arguments for The Christ Myth are exceedingly weak. In another entry, I will either explain or link to an article explaining why it's historically certain that Jesus at very least existed.
Audio Bible
Go here for a fully dramatised NIV audio bible. The only downside is that you'll have to download each chapter seperately- there doesn't seem to be an option for downloading entire biblical books at a time.
Communication, information, and the beauty of the internet
One important aspect of communication is this: The medium of communication must match it's target audience.
Often I'll read a book or an article on a particular subject and I'll want to talk about this subject with others, or will want to suggest the resource to someone (on a forum for example). However, many people simply aren't interested enough to buy books; they might not be the type of person who'll sit down and read for an hour or two. Alternatively, even when people are the reading or studying type, they often don't consider the issue enough of a priority at that point in time to consider alloting any significant amount of time on it. This is one reason why the internet can be so good: The variation and amount of information on the internet is astounding. Journal articles? Look around, you will find plenty. Some professors upload their journal articles on their faculty pages. And there's some good resource websites out there too: Last seminary.com, for example. Full length books? You'll find a few for free (for example go here and scroll down the left hand side till you find "Online Books"). Or look through bookdepository.co.uk,amazon.com and booko.com.au for the cheapest prices. Shorter, less scholarly articles? Plenty, of varying quality. Videos? Again, plenty of varying quality. Want to find further resources on a particular subject? Google is your best friend. Wiki is a good friend too, as is the "people who purchased this book also purchased...." section on Amazon.com.
I'm continually aiming to A. Build up a list of the best sites to visit online, B. Hone my internet information searching skills and C. Work through ways to best collate or record the information I find for further thought, connect the new information with other knowledge I've gained, and store information for later reference. One of the main roles I see this blog as serving is providing a summary of solid information gleaned from the depths of the vast Internet Ocean.
Women In Ministry
This is an interesting issue and it's one that I don't like being dogmatic about. It's definitely an "open hand" rather than a closed fist issue for me, to borrow an analogy from Mark Driscoll. But I strongly lean towards the idea that women should have just as much of a place in ministry as anyone else. Perhaps, for pragmatic and socialogical reasons it may be wise to have a male head pastor in most cases however I don't see that as a hard and fast rule as far as the theology of it goes.
Many people have a reasonable level of interest in this topic, but I'd wager few would consider it important enough to read any extended treatment on the issue. I myself have only read one extended treatment, and that was due to the topic being couched inside a book on something else- the issue was used as a case study for Scot McKnight's approach to reading the Bible in The Blue Parakeet, a book I highly recommend.
Without further ado, check out Ben Witherington's interview with PublicChristianity.com. . The most relevant section is 3:10- 4:26. Here are my comments following brief summaries of Witherington in bold:
- Examples of Bibical Women and the roles they fulfilled: Phoebe, Junia, Priscilla etc. If women in the early church were church leaders ("apostle") and taught men, what makes us think we possess a better system for the church in the 21st century?
- An explanation of passages in 1 Corinthians and 1st Timothy which makes good sense of the fact that women acted in the various roles in point 1. This explanation highly contextualises those passages, and Witherington summarises his point very briefly. This explanation makes more sense of the Bible as a whole and the big picture than the view that women should, to put it crudely, sit in church quietly and not take any major role in church leadership or teaching type ministries.
Many would no doubt complain that Witherington's take doesn't involve a plain vanilla reading of the passages. However, as Witherington says: "A text without a context is simply a pretext for whatever you want it to say". The pastoral epistles and the doctrinal books of the NT were written to specific people in specific places and were used for particular purposes at particular times. This does NOT mean that we can simply write them off as irrelevant. However, it does mean that we ALWAYS need to be aware of the historical and contextual issues surrounding the texts and that these issues will impact on our interpretations. (Although I don't want to go along that line of thinking any further here, other than state my view of the application to the issue at hand).
With Women in Ministry, 1. We have strong reasons to doubt that a vanilla reading makes sense of other parts of the Bible. (Paul describes and works alongside women leaders and teachers in the early church and then explicitly forbids women leaders and teachers forever and beyond. Really?) AND 2. There's a case to be made that the texts in question were utilised for a particular time and are not relevant today. Scot McKnight discusses some historical and textual arguments for point 2 in his book and Witherington summarises one brief argument in the linked vid.
In combination, these two points make the interpretation given by Witherington and McKnight more plausible than the interpretation that we should take Paul at his literal word, as if it were directed to 21st century western culture and command women keep silent in churches.
