Hopefully you have all done what I suggested last time and made notes on both of the nativity stories. Below are my notes (sorry for the bad formatting, WordPress for some reason does not allow arbitrary css styles on html elements, so I just gave up and let wordpress format it as it saw fit).
Continue reading “Reading the Christmas Stories: What is biblical criticism? Part 3”
Genesis 1-3 and The Documentary Hypothesis (again)
As scholars have noted for some time, and as I shall argue here, there are quite clearly two creation stories that presently exist side by side in Genesis chapters one through three, and which derive from two different sources which have been edited or redacted together.[1] The first source is the account of creation found in Genesis 1.1-2.4a (or, as some scholars might argue, Genesis 1.1-2.3), and is typically known as “P” (which stands for “Priestly,” as it is believed to have been written and edited by a group or “school” or priests) among critical scholars.[2] The second source follows thereafter and continues, for present purposes, up to Genesis 3.24. This source is known as “J” among biblical scholars (after its use of the divine name YHWH/Yahweh which is spelled with an initial J in German, the language in which much of the early research on this topic was conducted).
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Translation Styles and Book of Mormon Apologetics and Exegesis
For the past couple of days I have been reading An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon. Like most books or papers on the Book of Mormon I have read, it lacks a theory of Book of Mormon translation and suffers because of this lack. I would like to propose a rule for all future efforts at Book of Mormon apologetics, archaeology, or exegesis. The rule is that before you do anything you have to lay out your theory/explanation of the translation style used in translating the Book of Mormon. This means that before you attempt to explain something about the text you have to explain what kind of text you are working with.
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Righteous Dissent?
Paul’s bitter dispute with Peter and James poses a problem for thinking about LDS notions of authority because it puts into tension church authority and moral and doctrinal issues. When true doctrine and church leadership are in conflict, how are we to make a choice between them? When our sense of what is moral conflicts with our leaders’ sense of what is moral, what are we supposed to do? Paul found himself in exactly this situation, and had to make a choice between his own sense of what was right and the views of his leaders who had been commissioned directly by Christ to take care of the church.
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The Bridal Chamber
The Gospel of Philip from the Nag Hammadi corpus contains some important passages about a kind of celestial marriage in the “bridal chamber.” It is not uncommon for Latter-day Saints to appeal to this text as evidence for a kind of parallel to Mormon notions of eternal marriage found in ancient Christianity. I hope to show that such a reading of this text is mistaken, and that appeals to the Gospel of Philip to butress Mormon apologetic aims are an example of the problem that much apologetic work faces, that of decontextualizing ancient material to produce systematic misreadings. Rather than an approval of a particular kind of ritual marriage that unites a mortal husband and wife together for eternity, the bridal chamber is best understood as BYU Prof. Gaye Strathern’s dissertation, “The Valentinian Bridal Chamber,” argues, “within the context of an ascetic lifestyle where the body and its passions were renounced in favor of a higher spiritual lifestyle” (i).
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Back to Allegory?
When we moderns read any scripture we tend to read it only one way. We read it as history that is supposed to have some sort of theologically edifying meaning to us. This style of reading fits so well with our modes of thinking that it just seems the blatantly obvious way to read scripture. What could be more obvious than reading a book about the past, which we assert is true, as history?
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Amateur Biblical Studies, Part 2
Here’s the other five resources which I recommend for an amateur in biblical studies just getting started.
Continue reading “Amateur Biblical Studies, Part 2”
Amateur Biblical Studies, Part 1
I am not a biblical scholar, and I have never taken a class in anything related to biblical studies. So, what I am about to say may be worth every penny you are paying. Having said that, I think that it is possible for a motivated amateur to get a basic education in biblical studies on the cheap and in his/her spare time. I wanted to list 10 resource which I have found to be the most helpful and the most effective for getting educated in the world of academic biblical studies. I’ll list the first five resources in this entry, and the second five in the next entry.
Continue reading “Amateur Biblical Studies, Part 1”
Call for Papers
“Reconciliations and Reformulations”:
A Conference for LDS Graduate Students in Religious Studies
Harvard University, February 20-21, 2009
http://faithandknowledge.org
Many Latter-day Saints experience their scholarship and their religion as
clashing cultures, each with its competing values and contradictory
conclusions. Religious studies students especially struggle to reconcile their
faith and the knowledge they acquire in graduate school. The forms this
reconciliation take–including the failure to achieve reconciliation–become
crucial episodes in a student’s life history. The purpose of the Faith and
Knowledge Conference for 2009 is to provide a forum for exploring these
attempts at reconciliation.
Continue reading “Call for Papers”
Vision of Gabriel Update
The “Vision of Gabriel,” (aka Hazon Gabriel) a newly discovered Hebrew text written in ink on stone out of the antiquities market, made a big splash in the media over the last few weeks, and received some amount of coverage in the bloggernacle as well. Paleojudaica has been keeping track of all the coverage. First discussed in 2007 among a small group of scholars, the text has recently hit the media in a big way. The announcement of this text seems to have caught many off-guard, so I have been waiting to see what kind of analysis could be given after the initial dust had cleared. The first translation was published in Cathedra in Hebrew, and created some small buzz among people who really care. An English translation has been posted by Israel Knohl. Continue reading “Vision of Gabriel Update”