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On Tue, 3 Apr 2007, Jonathan King wrote:
On 4/3/07, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
On Mon, 2 Apr 2007, Jonathan King wrote:
>
> Pagels is a very smart and interesting person, and I would suggest that
> what she has to say is interesting even if you aren't likely to see
> things her way (which I suspect might be a common category around here,
> since I know it will include Mike Miller and I suspect it might
> include...people who aren't Mike Miller. :-))
Why wouldn't I see things her way?
I would have expected you to roll your eyes when, in spite of the fact
that she pretty much has down the complete history of how the New
Testament was likely assembled and is fully aware of the textual
inconsistencies and takes a rather different view of the whole endeavor,
that she still professes to be a Christian.
Well, it's not making me want to be a Christian, but as Stephen said,
there are many different kinds of Christians. She is one of the more
thoughtful types. She is not a literalist.
The interesting thing for me is that all the gospels contradict one
another and she sees them as created by people to fulfill certain
needs. For example:
The earliest gospel, Mark, says Judas handed him over, but it doesn't
give any motive at all. The people who wrote after Mark -- Matthew's
and Luke's gospels -- apparently felt that what was wrong with the
Gospel of Mark was that there was no motive. So Matthew adds a
motive. Matthew says Judas went to the chief priests who were Jesus'
enemies, and said, "What will you give me if I hand him over to you?"
And they agree on a certain sum of money. So in Matthew's view, the
motive was greed. In Luke's gospel, it's entirely different. It says
the power of evil took over Judas. Satan entered into him.
So the authors were trying to tell stories and make them seem consistent.
Not exactly (or maybe I misunderstand you here). I think she's saying
that the authors were telling stories that they knew to be inconsistent,
and made them inconsistent on purpose, because their beliefs differed
from those of other early Christians. But, at another level, there was a
core of good news that they did wish to communicate that would be
recognized as the foundation of their beliefs.
By "make them seem consistent" I meant consistent with their ideas about
God's omnipotence and such. According to Pagels, the disciples had
unanswered questions about how things happened and they were trying to
write stories that were consistent with their religious beliefs. This
wasn't all that easy and they came up with different stories.
Apparently, God was not guiding the creation of the texts.
This contradicts the common view among conservative evangelical
Christians that the Bible is "the inspired word of God" and literally
true in every detail.
It obviously contradicts the "literally true in every detail", but I am
much less sure that it contradicts the "inspired word of God" part. That
said, I studied paleography at Oxford one summer when I was in college,
and doing that, you become acutely aware of the fallibility of human
copyists and translators and come to grips with other issues like "what
is the text" which sounds silly until you realize what a squirrely mess
ancient and medieval libraries really were. The whole thing is
completely fascinating, but even *I* could see that the average amount
of money you could expect to earn in that field was much less than what
the average part-time crossing guard gets, and you could argue that
their job is way more important in terms of lives saved.
I guess the literalists are not aware of these problems, or maybe they
just don't care.
Mike
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