Hanges at least knows what he's talking about when he mentions "parallelomania" which is more than can said for possibly most people who throw the word around. . . .We saw that with respect to method, the vigorous push-back against the search for continuities practiced by the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule at the end of the last century redefined the comparative enterprise by using comparison specifically to identify differences that could be deployed to protect the essential the uniqueness of Christianity. [Kummel, New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems, 206-25]
. . . . . . . .
But what we can now see, especially with the aid of contemporary culture studies, is that despite the methodological "red-herring" known as, "parallelomania," thrown into the arena by apologists, the fundamental theoretical proposition of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule was, despite certain missteps, true to its target - religions cannot be isolated from the historical, social, and environmental forces that shape all cultural forms; religions, including Christianity, belong to and are always shaped by history.
Earlier in his opening chapter he also wrote (p. 12)Of course. the "red-herring" of parallelomama, so often flung accusatorially at the early Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, is often traced to Samuel Sandmel, "Parallelomania, ·· JBL 81, no. I (1962): 1- 13, who d1d not actually deal with the practice of the History of Religion school explicitly, but rather limited his focus to the use of rabbinic and other Jewish parallels in the interpretation of the New Testament, primarily the gospels.
Is "apologetics' too strong?"In methodological terms, as we shall see in due course, postcolonial observations have pulled the rug out from under any theoretical or methodological justification for the, more often than not, apologetically-motivated demand that only unambiguously exact, rigidly-defined cultural parallels . . . could possibly be used as evidence for external influence or cultural influence on Christianity; the effect being to effectively isolate Christianity and protect its "uniqueness" from the contamination of non-Christian religious ideas or practices. . . . .
In other words . . . Christianity, or more accurately, the cultural forms associated with it, can no longer be protected from the convulsive realities of cultural encounter. All attempts to do so are simply methodologically obsolete, if not embarrassingly obviously apologetic, strategies to insist that a selected difference is diagnostic and thereby sufficient to distinguish Christian phenomena from inclusion in a higher order category, particularly Greek or Roman genera.
Not according to Stephen Young, Protective Strategies and the Prestige of the “Academic” : A Religious Studies and Practice Theory Redescription of Evangelical Inerrantist Scholarship, in Biblical Interpretation, 23 (2015) 1-35. In this article he identifies two types of biblical inerrantists.
1. That subset of Evangelical Christians who consider their Bible to be without error in a historical sense in all its actual claims. These scholars claim that
That means we can allow for rounded numbers, hyperbole, the reporting of falsehoods, topical arrangements of narratives, etc.the Bible must be judged by “its own” standards for truth, as opposed to foisting upon it “anachronistic” or “alien” expectations for how it is true, such as seeking modern technical precision at all times.
2. Other inerrantists stress an understanding of literary conventions of the day and accepting the good-intentions of the authors. Only willful deception would make the Bible errant. And if literary conventions allowed for wild exaggerations and over-stressing a particular point or deliberately altering details to deliver a theological lesson, then we can assume the original audiences understood all of this, so we should too, and accept the Bible as basically meaning to tell the truth in a theological and literary sense. That is, we can accept that the authors were not really trying to tell us exactly what happened, so we can't accuse them of being errant. It's important to understand "genre" studies here. We can even call them "genre inerrantists"; if the genre of history writing allowed for making things up then we have to understand this was the understood genre and therefore the Bible is not untrue.
3. I would even add a third type of apologist inerrantist to the above two identified by Young. Those who assume that the Bible is based on and reflects at some level genuine historical events. All that is needed is to learn the right "code" or method to know how to peel away the layers of myth and legend and theology to identify the true history it really represents. To question the assumptions of these inerrantists -- the assumption that, say, the gospels are the products of historical memory -- is considered another form of blasphemy by many of these scholars.
