Bruno Bauer: The First Skeptical Life of Jesus

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Irish1975
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Re: Bruno Bauer: The First Skeptical Life of Jesus

Post by Irish1975 »

flowers_grow wrote: Sat Jul 24, 2021 10:02 am Bruno Bauer is so interesting, as you hear so much of him by reputation but he's so inaccessible if you don't read German. The Gothic script in one of his works I found really put me off too.

Usually Bauer is quickly dismissed, but some like Schweitzer treat him with more respect. Another such person was A.D. Loman, a Dutch scholar from the late 19th century. Here's what A.D. Loman wrote about him in Theologisch Tijdschrift 16, in 1882, in his first "Quaestiones Paulinae", which helped kick off the Dutch radical movement (my translation from the Dutch):
...
Thanks for this.

The only thing I know about the Dutch critics is through Hermann Detering's book The Fabricated Paul. It is interesting to read this excerpt from Loman.

The reverse side of Schweitzer's observation about Bauer having distinguished himself by finding the most problems in the NT, and the deepest problems, is that it is very hard to resolve those problems into positive explanations. In life and in academia as well, people don't want to hear about unsolved and unsolvable problems. Many prefer an absurd story to a pile of unanswerable questions. "Savage wilds under an open sky" about sums it up.
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mlinssen
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Re: Bruno Bauer: The First Skeptical Life of Jesus

Post by mlinssen »

Irish1975 wrote: Mon Jul 26, 2021 3:33 pm
flowers_grow wrote: Sat Jul 24, 2021 10:02 am Bruno Bauer is so interesting, as you hear so much of him by reputation but he's so inaccessible if you don't read German. The Gothic script in one of his works I found really put me off too.

Usually Bauer is quickly dismissed, but some like Schweitzer treat him with more respect. Another such person was A.D. Loman, a Dutch scholar from the late 19th century. Here's what A.D. Loman wrote about him in Theologisch Tijdschrift 16, in 1882, in his first "Quaestiones Paulinae", which helped kick off the Dutch radical movement (my translation from the Dutch):
...
Thanks for this.

The only thing I know about the Dutch critics is through Hermann Detering's book The Fabricated Paul. It is interesting to read this excerpt from Loman.

The reverse side of Schweitzer's observation about Bauer having distinguished himself by finding the most problems in the NT, and the deepest problems, is that it is very hard to resolve those problems into positive explanations. In life and in academia as well, people don't want to hear about unsolved and unsolvable problems. Many prefer an absurd story to a pile of unanswerable questions. "Savage wilds under an open sky" about sums it up.
What is "absurd"? The writings that we have must have made good sense to those who wrote and edited them

By looking for "positive explanations" you may be already discarding those that could fit.
There is cause and effect to everything, and everyone at every point in time always makes the best possible choice given the knowledge (and options) available at that time: everything makes sense at some point in time, but when time changes, so does the sense of "sense"

I very much liked the translation by flowers, by the way. Especially given the old Dutch that is even intertwined with some Germanisms
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flowers_grow
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Re: Bruno Bauer: The First Skeptical Life of Jesus

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Thanks! The old scholarly Dutch has quite a few complicated sentences, though it's surprisingly spiked with little short sentences and even poetic imagery - which makes it more human. It was interesting to "unroll" these sentences and organize them into modern English.

I don't think that the writings we have necessarily *have* to make sense to those who edited them - with the Pauline epistles in particular, it could be an interpolator had as a goal to blunt the impact of what was written, obscure the original point, but without actually *changing* the text, either because it's already respected, or because notes got inserted into the main text, or because they don't want to be caught out as a forger. The resulting text can be self-contradictory.
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mlinssen
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Re: Bruno Bauer: The First Skeptical Life of Jesus

Post by mlinssen »

flowers_grow wrote: Tue Jul 27, 2021 5:44 am Thanks! The old scholarly Dutch has quite a few complicated sentences, though it's surprisingly spiked with little short sentences and even poetic imagery - which makes it more human. It was interesting to "unroll" these sentences and organize them into modern English.

I don't think that the writings we have necessarily *have* to make sense to those who edited them - with the Pauline epistles in particular, it could be an interpolator had as a goal to blunt the impact of what was written, obscure the original point, but without actually *changing* the text, either because it's already respected, or because notes got inserted into the main text, or because they don't want to be caught out as a forger. The resulting text can be self-contradictory.
I think that more often than not an edit was directed at a small section, especially towards the end, so yes, less and less people world have an overview of the entire text before deciding that it needs changing.
That fits with the progression of a product as well, it is pretty much a biological one: in the infancy change grows and change happen fast and "in large chunks" and towards adolescence rise get smaller and smaller. I find the same in products, consumer goods, IT applications and systems - and indeed, sometimes a change, or as they call it, "feature" leads to a bug somewhere else

It's not that I meant that the entire product would benefit from a change, I wanted to state the (relatively obvious) fact that we all do what makes sense to us at the time that we do it

It was impossible to control the NT as a product once it got out as a bundle of a dozen or more MSS. Decentralised distribution, no version control or peer review at all, basically anyone could make a copy - maintenance nightmare there, but especially a manager's nightmare. No wonder there are so many variants, and fun to see how the Eastern branch did things much differently from the Western
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