Audio Transcript Auto-generated
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Hey, everyone, we are group eight. Yes.
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Um, we're talking about historical Jesus research. Um, why do it?
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Can you do it?
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Well, uh,
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and we're actually gonna be looking at a bunch of different methodologies.
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Both flawed methodologies
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and some helpful methodologies.
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Explore the criteria, but, uh, amidst them both as to why they might be flawed or,
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um accurate,
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Uh, and tell you why that you should care about it.
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Basically, um, I'm gonna introduce to the floor. Dan.
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Dan, How are you, bro?
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Sniffing brother. That's good. Now, uh, can you tell us a little bit about
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form criticism? It's a flawed way of doing historical. Jesus.
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Yeah.
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So one of these flawed methodologies is form criticism,
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which says that we can truly know the past by getting behind
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the biblical text to try and get to this uninterpreted
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undistorted, authentic Jesus,
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which is constructed apart from later Christian interpretation.
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The most common way of doing that is to
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say that pre Easter sources portray an authentic Jesus,
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and post Easter sources are just the biassed interpretations of the disciples,
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which we shouldn't trust.
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I could listen to your beautiful English accent all day,
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but I'm gonna invite Carl to the floor because I'd like to actually know why
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that's
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that form. Criticism is actually flawed. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
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Yeah. Thanks, Jimmy. Uh, so form criticism, uh, tries to eliminate bias
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and things that are biassed.
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Uh, but the problem with that approach is that bias is unavoidable.
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Uh, there is no such thing as a truly independent tradition
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that is free of interpretation.
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But the good news is that biassed does not mean inauthentic.
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Mm.
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What a word. Inauthentic. Now,
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I've actually got a good friend here by the name of pots.
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I think that's on his birth certificate. Um,
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to talk to us about postmodern critiques. Perhaps. Would you be able to join us? And
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is that AC? Can you Can you tell us a little bit about postmodern critiques, please?
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Few things would bring me more joy.
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Uh, yeah.
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So within the field of, uh, the historical Jesus,
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a lot of postmodern critiques of history have been brought into, uh, this field,
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and that has led many to sort of give up on any
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sense of being able to find any truth about the Lord.
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Jesus. Uh, they have?
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Yeah. Postmodernism suggests that there are flaws.
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And so they have taken this on board.
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But this has been to the detriment of the discipline.
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Uh, they have, uh, uncritically taken on these critiques and applied them.
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And this has led them to conclude that they cannot know anything.
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As we've sort of already seen. They've thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
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Seeing that there is bias in history,
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they have concluded that they cannot know anything.
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However, a closer study of the historical field shows that most historians,
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outside of the field of historical Jesus
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are not interested in postmodern critiques and are
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happy and confident that history is able to give us a knowledge of the past.
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Couldn't have said it better myself.
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And I love that you included good preacher hands with it.
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Um, now, we've actually got some helpful methods,
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which I'm really excited to hear about.
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Jeremy. Welcome.
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Can you tell us a little bit about social memory theory? Ah, social memory.
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The It's the best.
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Uh so the past is always shaped by the present in this fair, so you can't eliminate it.
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We have to go back to what the Christians of the time were believing, Uh, James
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has embraced this method and Jesus remembered,
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and he thinks there's a few categories.
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So we got the social and historical context of the first century,
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the backgrounds of early believers,
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practises and beliefs of the early church and
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early church doctrines in the face of challenges,
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which I think if we remember correctly, we have, uh,
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understood this New Testament and church history.
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So it's great that we're part of more college and the faculty who, uh,
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are able to teach these amazing things.
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Yeah,
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absolutely.
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Love to hear it now, we've actually also got another helpful methodology.
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I would love to invite parks back to the floor because it's really talking about
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not postmodernism.
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Yeah, that's if postmodernism led us to reject some of these
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CRI criteria for understanding the historical Jesus. We can
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look at them and say they are good and useful,
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and they are used more broadly within the historical field, for example,
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the criteria of embarrassment,
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the idea that if something in a source is embarrassing to its writers,
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that's probably a good sign they didn't make it up.
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This is used in classical history and can also be used as we examine the Gospels.
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As we've said many times, there is no view from nowhere.
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Agenda is inevitable and is not a cause for concern.
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Uh, similarly,
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the attestation of multiple sources to the
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same event is always considered good evidence.
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And we can trust that the many sources of the Gospels and the
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letters of the evangelists can give us confidence in what they wrote.
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Just because we cannot know everything with total certainty does
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not mean we cannot know anything with any certainty.
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Awesome.
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And I'm back,
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as
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Leona helpfully points out,
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just because doctors make errors in diagnosing patients,
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This does not mean we should give up on medicine
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in much the same way. Just because there are errors and difficulties in history.
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This does not mean we should give up on it entirely.
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You'll love to see it. Alright, Steph, take us home. Why should we care about this?
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Why does it matter? Yeah, Great question, Jimmy. For three reasons.
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So the first one is knowing that bias and genders can be OK.
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So just because the gospel writers wrote with a particular agenda
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doesn't mean we have to feel embarrassed when we use them
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as genuine historical sources which speak to real historical events.
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And secondly, it can help us to trust the whole Bible. So not just the unbiased bits.
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And thirdly, it can help us to have confidence that we can learn true things.
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Um, and clear historical information about Jesus of Nazareth.
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Sweet. Thanks for listening.
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Please don't ask us any hard questions.