Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus PDF
254 Pages·1996·12.993 MB·English
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Although primarily conceived as a reply to the research of the liberal-minded Jesus Seminar, the articles in "Jesus Under Fire" are written as more general defenses of the historical claims of traditional Christianity, so one does not need to be very familiar with the work of the Jesus Seminar to find them interesting. The general perspective of the book fits well within the viewpoint of contemporary evangelical Christian apologetics. Over the last couple of decades or so, professional apologists for traditional Christianity have been clustering around three central arguments in support of their beliefs: a re-formulation of the Cosmological Argument (the need for a First Cause to explain the origin of the universe) that accepts Big Bang cosmology; a re-vamped version of the Argument From Design that points to the supposed "fine tuning" of the universe to support human life and also favors "intelligent design" in biology; and a renewed Argument from Miracles that uses historical methodology to support the reality of Jesus' resurrection and other deeds. The authors of "Jesus Under Fire" present all three of these arguments, but they focus most of all on the historical arguments in favor of a literalist reading of the New Testament.What they support, though, might be called "soft literalism." For instance, the article by Darrell Bock on the words of Jesus essentially argues that the authors of the Gospels accurately recorded the meaning of Jesus' words, but did not make a verbatim report of them (not least because the Gospels were written in Greek, while Jesus spoke Aramaic). At the same time, though, he simply avoids some glaring issues, such as how the Gospels writers were able to describe the dialog between Jesus and Pilate despite not being there to witness the event. William Lane Craig argues for the historical reality of Jesus' bodily resurrection, but he has to strip away and dismiss all contradictions between the Gospel accounts and stick to his version of the basic facts, which requires him to generally avoid directly quoting the New Testament scriptures and comparing them directly side by side. Despite presenting themselves as using mainstream historical methodology, the authors fail to explain how they are able to make the leap from arguing that the Gospels are "reliable" historical documents to essentially implying that everything in them is true- a claim that is beyond the capability of historical methodology and which no contemporary historian would make about, say, an account written by a Roman historian.Despite these flaws, which may be inherent in any attempt to use historical methodology to support religious claims, the articles in "Jesus Under Fire" are generally well-written and provide "best case" scenarios for the literal truth of the New Testament. The book would be useful and interesting to read in combination with a more skeptical book like Bart Ehrman's "Jesus, Interrupted."
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