But we have no evidence beyond supposition, have we?
Well, we have the evidence of John's late attestation as well to consider... but that was not the point. I was answering your charge that it was "changing the subject" to go from my doubts about John's reliability as a source to questions of possible alternative motives for its composition. The fact that "there is no evidence beyond supposition" about the motives is exactly why John is not a suitable starting point for considering what Jesus did or did not really say; start with what we have better reasons for thinking original, and then test whether John fits in well with it.
You can't say it's [social concern] absent from John.
Yes I can. Social concern is absent from John. There. I just said it.
John was addressing a nascent schism in the community at Ephesus and we do know he was addressing certain aspects of the Christian teaching that stood at risk of being distorted by an Hellenic dualism.
The dispute in Ephesus and the other churches in Asia Minor was over whether to obey the Council of Jerusalem's decree that meat dedicated to pagan deities should be avoided (and there hardly existed such things as secular butchers at that time; animals were always killed with some sort of religious ritual, and most "butchers" were actually priests; whether a kosher butcher existed in some area would depend on whether there was a Jewish community already), or to follow Paul's line that this was really a triviality and not worth getting in a lather over. Paul lost decisively on this issue and took it hard ("all of Asia has turned against me"), and John was one of his opponents (he compliments Ephesus for rejecting "those who call themselves apostles, but are no such thing"); Pliny notes by the turn of the century that a crackdown on Christianity has helped the fortunes of the meat-sellers "who previously had trouble finding buyers"; but by that time Johannines and Paulines were no longer at enmity and Johannine leaders like Polycarp are commending Paul's epistles (there may have been a reconciliation of factions when Peter went to Rome to check up on Paul, or the simple fact that both were martyred may have led the factions to set aside all differences).
None of this is a big issue by the time "John" is composed. The fight is against a specific form of the kind of "dualism" you are talking about, namely the theology of Marcion and like-minded thinkers. That was a 2nd-century development, not anything that the disciple John had to deal with when he was alive.
I disagree. The Johannine Corpus presses social justice, in perhaps a very Christian way — love one another.
In John, the way it comes across is that Christians should love
other Christians. There is no mention of taking care of the poor, or of treating outsiders well.
That kind of consensus of the lowest common denominator, the critical minimum, would require that anything questionable be removed.
YOU BET! Why do you want to hang on to the questionable so tightly?
You'd be left with nothing.
If that was true, then indeed I would say the whole NT should be thrown in the rubbish bin. I don't find that to be the case.
Looking around at Meier, he seems to observe a distinction between the Jesus of history — that is the Jesus available for historical investigation — and the Jesus of Faith. He's not saying the former eradicates the latter, or undermines it ... he's saying, there is a critical minimum that can reasonably be agreed to
Yes, and if you want to have any rational discussion who do not share your faith and have no trust in your "tradition", that is where you need to start.
I would have thought to compose the New Testament, to invent the character of Jesus, from various mythological sources, is pushing the bounds of credibility ... it would be a magnum opus of scholarly synthesis, wouldn't it?
Yes, and composing the strikingly original thoughts that Breech, for example, wants to focus on as the core, requires some Great Genius whom we might as well just call "Jesus"; the Ockham's Razor explanation for why the texts say that "Jesus" was the name of the guy who came up with this is, um, because that was his name.
Bultmann pressed the myth argument, and was soundly refuted:
A is a myth
B reads like A
Therefore B is a myth.
— when examined, that third statement is not a given, it's an assumption.
I'm not a real fan of Bultmann. Things which
can be "explained away" as mythological developments should not be dismissed out of hand; but, they should be set aside from the initial stages of thinking about the questions.
In which case, the whole premise of Scripture would have to be refuted, wouldn't it, as it records something other than everyday experience?
Well, so did the Apollo broadcasts from the Moon (which some people still refuse to accept) or, for that matter, many feats seen in the Olympic Games. But we can fit them together with what we do know about how the world works. Many of the old stories in "Scripture" fit together with what ancients thought was the way the world works, but don't fit now that we know a little better: I remember talking to about the Ascension, and how ancients and medievals had no problem thinking about Jesus just stepping up onto the air and climbing to a "heaven" that was up there, a ways past the Moon; you wouldn't agree that they were really thinking in such crude terms, but-- I'm sorry, they really were.
It was not part of their "everyday" experience, to be sure, but fit in with their larger conceptions of how the universe as a whole worked, just as Neil Armstrong's trip does for us. Miracles were not "supernatural" (a very modern word) but part of the more unusual and wondrous aspects of the "natural" as they understood it: the conceptualization that there are physical laws that keep chugging along by themselves until, occasionally, God steps in to "suspend" the laws for the duration of the "miracle" is not faithful to how the Biblical authors were seeing things.
I don't agree that one's own experience is the benchmark, that's too subjective.
What I was saying is that, although I agree it's not good to be "subjective", it is impossible to get totally away from it. What IS your "benchmark"? The Tradition of the Church? WHY? Because you have had certain experiences that lead you to trust it.
Now I fully accept that there are those who insist every word of scripture was dictated by God to a scribe, and that is nonsense, but by the same token, I also regard the notion that it's all 'made up' is equally a nonsense
So far so good. I was worried for a while that you were falling into all-or-nothing thinking.
and furthermore that by taking away the 'supernatural' from the 'natural' will leave us with an authentic image of the historical Jesus is equally a nonsense.
It will leave us with a starting point. The day-to-day experience of a disciple following Jesus around cannot have been a constant disjunction from the ordinary ways of the world: Jesus is recorded as having eaten food, and I expect he excreted as well...
I also take in the works of philosophers like Ricoeur and Lonergan on the nature of sacred texts ...
I will look up those names. Neither of them is previously known to me.
I think eye-witness, or a proximity to events, is a more reliable claim to authority than the assumptions of someone 2,000 years removed.
The question of how close to the events any particular piece of text actually is, itself raises a lot of issues. How do we tell? Just by taking someone's word for it?
We settled to that view ages ago ... it's there in the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church in 1965.
The view that will eventually be settled upon will, I think, be every bit as different from your "Dogmatic Constitutions" as from naive verbatim literalism or comprehensive rejectionism.
But Meier even defends the Gospel of John!
In my critique of Meier, which I hope to get up on a web-site at some point (part of a body of writings that is getting very long), I note that he takes for granted, without even thinking about the question, that every one of the gospels has a
single date of composition: that if any portion of the book is old, the entire book must be that old. It wasn't until the late 2nd century that the Christians start to treat the gospels as SCRIPTURES: that is, as books that must be copied faithfully letter for letter, without additions or edits. The evidence points to a far looser attitude in the earlier 2nd century. Meier raises very good points about the antiquity of
the Passion Narrative in John; I agree that this is well-preserved old material. That does not imply antiquity for the "gospel of John" as we now have it, however.
But in your rebuttal of John, you seem to assume this of the church, that the church set out to create a self-serving doctrine ... but I see no evidence for it.
Uh... aside from over a millenium of the Church functioning as a brutally totalitarian state?
Because truth is timeless? Because the same truths are thought anew, but that does not alter them as truths, just explains them more.
Do we dispose of Native American wisdom because they didn't use the wheel?
We do disregard Native folk-tale "explanations" of the cosmos. We might teach the following in anthropology class, but would not treat it as a good source on astronomy:
"
A mean old Chief once hoarded the three light sources in the world creating perpetual night. The light he kept closed up in three dark bags, which were only opened for his pleasure. However, a Raven got bored of flying around in the dark and decided to bring back the light. To do this he turned himself into a leaf and fluttered down on a gust of wind into the Chief's tepee.
The Chief's daughter was sipping a drink in the tepee, when a leaf entered and landed in her cup as she was drinking. After swallowing the leaf, the daughter fell pregnant and gave birth to a baby with raven-black hair and dark glowing eyes, naturally they called the new arrival “Ravens Child”. The child however was very temperamental and whenever he was bored or wanted something, he shrieked, and shrieked and cried.
The Chief while a doting Grandfather, hated all the noise the child made and ordered, “Give the child what ever he wants”. So they gave the child the dark bag containing “the Light of twinkling Stars” to play with. The child was very happy as he played with the Stars, bouncing them off the sides of the tepee. So enthusiastically did he bounce them, that one day they bounced right up through the smoke hole in the ceiling and scattered around the dark of night providing a little Light, much to the displeasure of the Chief.
Having lost the Stars, Ravens Child soon became bored again and as was his way, he shrieked, and shrieked and cried, all the while driving the Chief crazy with the noise. The Chief relented and ordered, “Give the child what ever he wants”. So they give the child the dark bag containing “the Light of the Moon” to play with. The child was very happy as he played with the Moon, bouncing it of the sides of the tepee. So enthusiastically did he bounce it, that one day it bounced right up through the smoke hole in the ceiling and joined the Stars in the dark of night providing a little more Light, much to the displeasure of the Chief.
Deprived of yet another toy, Ravens Child threw a major tantrum, and shrieked, and shrieked and cried. So disruptive was the noise he made, it was causing the Chief to tear out his hair, as a result the Chief ordered, “Give the child what ever he wants”. The tepee staff were weary of the child by now, and fearful of the Chiefs wrath should anything happen to the third dark bag, so they tried to find something else to keep the child quiet and restore peace, but none of the usual baby toys would satisfy Ravens Child who kept pointing to the last dark bag. Finally they give it to him, but with dire warnings not to lose it, for it contained the Chiefs most prized possession “The Light of the Sun”.
Instead of playing with it as he had done with the other dark bags, the child suddenly turned back into a Raven and flew up through the smoke hole in the ceiling carrying the bag in his beak and stealing the Chiefs “Light of the Sun”. Untying the bag Raven spread light throughout the world bring to an end the perpetual night and creating day."
Catholics find themselves in a curious position. If we accept Scripture as is, without question, we're accued of blind faith, etc., if we contemplate and draw out of the text hitherto veiled secrets, then we're accused of inventing doctrines.
Uh... the scriptures are what they are, and pretending that they have "hitherto veiled secrets" in them is intellectually. They contain the wisdom and the foolishness of bygone days; face up to what is foolish, throw it away, and replace it with wisdom that was simply unknown to the authors of those old books.
That's the human nature, not the divine nature.
You were accusing wil of "anthropomorphizing" for saying that Jesus even HAD a human nature. Of course he did. Whether he had some "other" nature as well is a separate question, which can't be sensibly discussed until you at least come to grips with Jesus as a human.
In the first instance, i believe God stands beyond all forms, human or otherwise, God is, in that sense, unimaginable, except in philosophical or metaphysical terms ... but God, it would seem, chooses to...
Hold on, right there! When you talk about God as a being that "chooses" things, you are assuming that God is a mammal.
but does not 'the words became flesh' say 'hypostasis'?
I think so.
I think those words indicate a terrible category confusion. I have elsewhere used the analogy, "The number seven became a chair": does that sentence even have enough meaning to be false? The Platonist conception of "Ideals" as a kind of "object" is presupposed by this whole notion of "The Word" as some kind of creature among the other creatures in the world; it just doesn't work.
