Quote of the Day - Ehrman on Q

I know, I may not be fashionable doing such but I seem to share such scepticism towards Q:

Let me repeat: Q is a source that we don't have. To reconstruct what we think was in it is hypothetical enough. But at least in doing so we have some hard evidence...But to go further and insist that we know what was not in the source, for example, a Passion narrative, what its multiple editions were like, and which of these multiple editions was the earliest, and so on, really goes far beyond what we can know - however appealing such "knowledge" might be." (Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium. 113.)

Quote of the Day - McKnight on Jesus and his Death

"We have established that Jesus thought he would die prematurely, in the providence of God, and would probably die at the hands of those who rejected his mission as a potential source of rebellion. It only makes sense that one who thought he would die, who on other grounds considered himself a prophet, also tried to make sense of that death. We can assume that Jesus did not think of his death as a sad tragedy or as a total accident of history. After all, Jesus could have escaped Jerusalem during the night; he could have avoided all public confrontation; and he could have worked harder to maintain his innocence." (Scot McKnight, Jesus and His Death :Historiography, the Historical Jesus, and Atonement Theory p.177)

I know, an odd quote to have for a few reasons. Firstly, I have posted it at the end of an older post. Secondly, it is a conclusion without a context!  But we  can pretend that is the point, right? To make you read the book and understand the cumulative argument!

Quote of the Day - I. Howard Marshall on Bousset's Christology

From The Origins of New Testament Christology by I. Howard Marshall (1990 reprint):

His (Bousset's) appeeal to religious parallels from outside Judaism easily turns parallels into influences, and much of the details reconstructions of myths that have been held to influnce the early Church has been shown to rest on a misreading of the sources. Finally, his attempt to distance Paul from Jesus by means of a hypothetical gentile church acting as intermediary must be pronounced a failure. (pp.18-19)

James D.G. Dunn on Robert Price

James D.G. Dunn (Jesus Remembered) on Robert M. Price's (Christ Mythicist) in the soon to be released The Historical Jesus: Five Views published by IVP:

On Price's use and abuse of the criterion of dissimilarity:

Price takes up the early form-critical observation that for the Jesus tradition to have been preserved it must have been of some pragmatic value, and he uses it to make the criterion of dissimilarity "all devouring." If every bit and piece of the Jesus tradition had a home in the early church, then "all must be denied to Jesus by the criterion of dissimilarity." Such an extension of the criterion of dissimilarity simply undermines what value it has. It is so a priori obvious that an influential teacher's teaching would influence his disciples and shape their own teaching and lives in substantial degree that the dissimilarity criterion does not help us to distinguish the one from the other.

James D.G. Dunn in The Historical Jesus: Five Views (IVP 2009), p.95

James Dunn on Price's use, or lack thereof, of primary sources:

Where I begin to become irritated by Price's thesis, as with those of his predecessors, is his ignoring what everyone else in the business regards as primary data and his readiness to offer less plausible hypotheses to explain other data that inconveniences his thesis. Why no mention of 1 Corinthians 15:3 - generally reckoned to be an account of the faith that Paul received when he was converted, that is, within two or three years of the putative events - "that Chris died...." Why no reference to Paul's preaching of Christ crucified (1 Cor 1:23), his preaching as openly portraying Christ as crucified (Gal 3:1)? How can Price actually assert that "we should never guess from the Epistles that Jesus died in a particular historical or political context," when it is well enough known that crucifixion was a Roman political method of execution characteristically for rebels and slaves? I could go on at some length - "seed of David" (Rom 1:3), "born under the law" (Gal 4:4), "Christ did not please himself" (Rom 15:3). Yet Price is able to assert that "the Epistles...do not evidence a recent historical Jesus," a ludicrous claim that simply diminishes the credibility of the argument used in support. (p.96)

Yes, the question in your head is "why are you bothering with an idiosyncratic Christ Mythicist?" Well, such views seem to be believed by laymen with a polemical agenda against Christianity.

Quote(s) of the Day - Bauer and Silence

Indeed, we are mixing it up today with plurals!

Throughout the book [Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity] Bauer argues extensively from silence. This is always a difficult argument, since one must be able to establish that the silence is significant and not just accidental, that there ought to be something there which is missing. An argument from silence, to be persuasive, must present us with an absence that needs explaining and that can only be explained in a particular way. But quite often, Bauer simply uses silence as a space within which to create history out of whole cloth." (J. McCue, Bauer's Rechtglaubigkeit und Ketzerei p.31)

Specific details of Bauer's demonstration were immediately seen as problematic. Bauer was charged, with good reason, with attacking orthodox sources with inquisitional zeal and exploiting to a nearly absurt extent the argument from silence. (Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities p.173)

Positive German reviews of the first edition (1934) commended the ingenious approach of boldness of Bauer' vision; they joined, however, the moral critical ones in underlining Bauer's use of the "argument from silence" and excess of interpretation. (Eduard Iricinschi, Holger M. Zellentin, Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity p.6)

Quote of the Day - Bauckham on Christology

“the highest possible Christology – the inclusion of Jesus in the unique divine identity – was central to the faith of the early church even before any of the New Testament writings were written, since it occurs in all of them.”
Richard Bauckham, "God Crucified" in Jesus and the God of Israel p.19