What He said - TLS Highlights - Times Online
This is a pretty interesting and sympathetic review of a new book suggesting that the most popular scholarly theories of the last century about how the synoptic gospels came to be written may be wrong. I won't bother quoting the review here, as few readers may be interested, but the basic argument is that it may, after all, be correct to "assume a faithful and unbroken link between the original witnesses of Jesus' life and death and the record of these things in the Gospels."
I think it is fair to say that, broadly speaking, the Catholic Church has always maintained that position. It's been the Protestant scholars who assumed less authenticity in the Gospels due to a convoluted process by which they were imagined to have been created.
At the risk of losing audience further, this all reminds me of a CS Lewis essay in which he pointed out that literary critics very often made incorrect assumptions about the origins or motives behind a present day work of fiction, such as Lord of the Rings for example. (Lewis knew intimately the process of the creation of that work, and how some of the guesses of the critics about what parts of it meant were clearly wrong.)
Lewis' point was to encourage scepticism of similar scholarly work on the Gospels, and I have always felt that the point was a good one.
A liberal fantasy reconstruction can be so extreme as to truly become self delusional. I would put Barbara Thiering in that category. (It didn't stop her getting lots of coverage on the ABC at the time, even though I reckon anyone with common sense could see that her claim that her method was "testable" was ridiculous.)
But even the more "conservative" scholars seem to me to often to have an unwarranted over-confidence about their conclusions.
The CS Lewis essay is "Fern seed and elephants", and I see it is available in full here.
That is a good Lewis essay. I've read this quote before, and suspected he was being a bit of an intellectual bully:
ReplyDeleteEither this is reportage - though it may no doubt contain errors - pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors, or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read. I would recommend him to read Auerbach.
It makes more sense in the context of that article, although I think the argument is still a little suspect.
This passage, on the other hand, is pure Lewis:
There are characters whom we know to be historical but of whom we do not feel that we have any personal knowledge - knowledge by acquaintance; such are Alexander, Attila, or William of Orange. There are others who make no claim to historical reality but whom, none the less, we know as we know real people: Falstaff, Uncle Toby, Mr. Pickwick. But there are only three characters who, claiming the first sort of reality, also actually have the second. And surely everyone knows who they are: Plato's Socrates, the Jesus of the Gospels, and Boswell's Johnson.
Ah there, Clive!