Bernard Muller wrote: ↑Fri Sep 08, 2017 4:00 pm
to Neil,
About your post
http://vridar.org/2012/04/22/putting-ja ... sian-test/:
For Book of Acts we have what is surely a strange silence about James being related to Jesus,
gLuke and Acts do not mention the name of the brother of Jesus (contrary to gMark & gMatthew), but they acknowledge Jesus had brothers.
The language used here in the last clause ("but they acknowledge Jesus had brothers") alerts us to the reason we are talking past each other and therefore exchange is accomplishing nothing or missing the point of the argument I have been making about historical method.
One person is making assessments based on the literary texts and no more, while the other is using the literary texts to make assumptions and arguments about a situation that exists outside the texts, as if the literary narrative is merely a window through which to look at historical events that were happening before the text was written. One is studying the text like a stained-glass window, examining the parts and seeking to understand their coherence, context etc with other stained-glass windows; the other is looking right through the text as if it is clear glass and imagining a world that exists independently of the text, as if the text's narrative is merely a sign pointing to past events that are the real point of interest.
That latter way of reading a text is naive. It is, in fact, circular. We cannot assume that a narrative is a window through which we look to see persons and events in the past. We need some form of independent corroboration in order to know if there are real events or persons behind the text's narrative.
James McGrath produced a simple diagram to show the different types of readings:
- diagram.jpg (64.86 KiB) Viewed 4814 times
That's from
The Burial of Jesus: History & Faith, p. 57
McGrath offers that model of historical inquiry with approval. Unfortunately, it is the core of the problem of biblical scholar methods of doing historical inquiry. I wish I could recall the author and book where I recently read a direct criticism of this method of doing history (I thought it was by Jacob Neusner but maybe not, and I can't find the source now) -- but it was a discussion of historical methods and explaining that unfortunately many students (and biblical scholars included) tended to dismiss the literary approach as something for "literary types" that had no relevance to historical inquiry. That error is in fact the method McGrath himself repeats.
But such an erroneous method is circular. It assumes that the text will offer information simply because it appears to be, or says it is offering historical information. That is the criterion used to justify the approach. That approach is a naive reading of the text. All the amount of criticism applied to a text that is read this way is criticism that rests upon an unsupportable assumption.
The historian always needs to establish what sort of text is being studied, first and foremost. That requires literary criticism as one fundamental process before we know what sorts of questions we can expect the text to be able to answer.
What McGrath labels the "historical approach" is indeed the historical approach used in biblical studies all too often. "Historians" see different "realities" behind the text according to the critical adjustments they make to the text they are looking through.
