Vridar
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Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from naturalist's perspective.
Vridar
2d ago
A book that concludes to assign the Epistle to the Galatians and the other main Pauline epistles to the second century requires, more than any other, a few words of introduction. Not that I believe that any preliminary remarks can remove the impression of bewilderment that such an undertaking must initially make on any theological ..read more
Vridar
1w ago
The influential French theologian who was excommunicated by the Pope for his views, Alfred Loisy, concluded that there were two different “Pauls” authoring the main letters attributed to him. The reason Paul’s letters are generally considered “hard to understand” is because they intertwine two incompatible messages of the Christian faith. Loisy acknowledges that scholars of ..read more
Vridar
2w ago
The fact that a century of such patient and devoted scholarship has yielded so few agreements on difficult passages and fundamental issues makes me think that the nineteenth-century debate is not yet over. (O’Neill, 8f) John Cochrane O’Neill had a reputation for being a controversial critic but his attempt to sift through the many variant ..read more
Vridar
3w ago
Some argue…. Some argue that it is misleading to speak of “dying and rising gods.”65 Greece (Eleusis) and the East did know of dying gods; there were always two, usually an older female goddess and a younger male partner who dies. The older female mourns, and death is partially abolished, but Gerd Theissen argues that ..read more
Vridar
3w ago
The previous post presented a historical Dutch language criticism of Galatians and here I offer a sceptical analysis from France. I have selected from Henri Turmel’s discussion those paragraphs that address Galatians 1-2, — as per my earlier explanation. In my coming post on J.C. O’Neill’s detailed discussion, both Bergh van Eysinga and Turmel are ..read more
Vridar
3w ago
They damned the old method, and self-consciously proposed a new method — not because they sought to create a new theological or scholarly party but because they believed the new method was forced on them by the nature of the Bible itself. Gunkel and his friends were convinced that Wellhausen and his school did not ..read more
Vridar
3w ago
The following is by the “Dutch Radical” Gustaaf Adolf van den Bergh van Eysinga (1874-1957). I have translated it from the Dutch with the assistance of machine translators. The 1946 Dutch work from which this chapter (#4) on Galatians is an extract is available at https://archive.org/details/eysinga-servieres/mode/2up Bergh van Eysinga, G. A. van den. De Oudste ..read more
Vridar
3w ago
To freeload off the Gospel of Luke’s prologue, inasmuch as many have taken in hand to set in order an account of those things which have been written in Galatians, I have decided not to add my own variant to their number, but to set forth one by one the accounts of our predecessors so ..read more
Vridar
3w ago
What could have prompted individuals of our highly successful species to obey an unseen being who told them what they should and should not do? — Peoples & Marlowe, 253 In my Origins of Religion post I focussed on anthropological evidence for the most fundamental of religious concepts that we can reasonably infer were found ..read more
Vridar
1M ago
I returned to the forum to follow up a question I had with a scholar on the earlywritings forum and wanted to reply to his answer but discovered when I tried to log in that I am met with a message: It seems my attempts to engage critically with the moderator of the forum, Peter ..read more