Topical Index

The Comments in the Debate with James Still

Comment 1:

• The accuracy of the account of the trial of Jesus before Pilate
• Anti-semitism

Comment 2:

• Criterion of 'historical probability' and historical arrogance(!)
• Our presumption in "judging the text" too simply

Comment 3:

• openness vs. suspicion (a brief remark)

Comment 4:

• Jesus and the Pharisees
• A small note on Jewish education

Comment 5:

• An example of the Procrustean hermeneutic of presumptive scholarship!

Comment 6:

• Problems created by presuppositions.

Comment 7:

• Just some inconsistencies in Jim's statement of my position

Comment 8:

• The methodological problem of separating the 'layers' in the NT
• No way to triangulate some 'historical core' of the NT from outside data
• A reminder that we have NO HARD DATA for intermediate documents--all we have are finished products in the archeological records.

Comments 9-12

Comment 9:

• Apostles as gospel authors?
• The difference between "original" writings and the ones we have today?
• The literary witness to use of sources by the evangelists

Comment 10:

• (Just a response to a few slurs from Jim)

Comment 11:

• Manuscript data showing a very early NT production
• The relative "purity" of the early mss.

Comment 12:

• The issue of oral tradition, control, and fixity
• The "tradition control" methods as the church expanded
• Evidence of early writing by the apostles (probably even during Jesus' life)
• The impetus to write it down, due to being outside 'mainstream' Judaism (e.g. Qumran)
• The widespread availability of NT mss. during the birth of the church
• Evidence that even smaller churches had multiple copies of NT mss. often

Comments 13-16

Comment 13:

• The issue of multiple "types" of Christianity in the early church
• Their claims to 'legitimacy'

Comment 14:

• Major heretics as "Church Fathers"?
• Evidence that heresy was neither EARLY nor Strong (contra the Bauer/Koester position)

Comment 15:

• On the cooperation of early church leadership
• Papias and his preference for oral tradition
• Justin Martyr's use of extra-biblical tradition?
• Mithras and Jesus?
• (Just a historical error about Marcion)

Comment 16:

• Mistranslation of Irenaeus
• The events leading up to Irenaeus' statement about the Fourfold gospel
• A timeline of early Christian & anti-Christian literature (with interdependencies and implications)

Comments 17-20

Comment 17:

• On early church unity vs. factionalism/in-fighting
• On the underlying unity of the early kerygma
• On how misleading 'trajectory' can be
• Local church interpretive autonomy versus a controlled and pre-interpreted transmission

Comment 18:

• (A complaint about how 'un-scientific' some biblical scholarship can be)
• Debunking of the slow, oral, hodge-podge accumulation of bits and pieces of the NT into some whole
• Again: the process wasn't solely oral...
• the identity/background/dating of the Gospel of Mark

Comment 19:

• On the 'original Mark' versus canonical Mark
• When was Mark 6.45-8.26 ADDED to Mark?
• The spurious endings of Mark's gospel

Comment 20:

• It was NOT OK to take poetic license and create/invent falsehoods and pass them off as historical truth (in the Ancient world!)
• It was not okay to do it in biography, either.
• Even the problem with speech-reporting was subject to norms of accuracy
• ALL four Gospels are written in the Graeco-Roman genre of Bioi
• The Gospels are therefore under the same Thuycididean standards and conventions of the Hellenistic world
• They are probably even at a higher level of fidelity to historical reporting

• Were there really long periods of 'oral only' transmission of the sayings of Jesus, from the times of Jesus?
• Was the early oral tradition ONLY made up of 'sayings' of Jesus?
• Was this alleged oral tradition transmitted without 'controls' and quite loosely?
• Could Jesus really not have had any 'apocalyptic expectations' because they were allegedly only later?
• Could Jesus really not have had any 'Son of man' sayings, because they were allegedly only later?
• Did the early church really create 'new' sayings of Jesus and 'write these into' the stories of His pre-Easter life?

• How 'assured' is James' solution to the Synoptic Problem?
• Would acceptance of James' understanding of the Two-Source Hypothesis be inimical to 'the faith'?
• What are the scholarly trends in that area today?
• How compelling is the case for Literary Dependence among the synoptic gospels?
• What is an alternative understanding of the process of gospel formation?

• The question of "where did the gospels become authentic?" only comes up  IF you buy into James' reconstruction of gospel formation.
• Were the gospels pseudonymous (i.e. written by someone other than the gospel authors, and just ascribed to them)?