The reliable Bible: Craig Blomberg’s ‘Aha’ moment
In response to my previous post on what we practise when the Bible is 'incorrect', and Peter Enn's serial of 'aha' moments, Craig Blomberg has offered an account of his own 'aha' moment when, from a liberal Lutheran upbringing, he came to realise that the Bible was more reliable than he has been led to believe.
Craig is Distinguished Professor of the New Testament at Denver Seminary in Colorado where he has been since 1986. He has written numerous books, many of which focus on the question of the historical reliability of the New Testament, most recently Can Nosotros Still Believe the Bible?: An Evangelical Date With Gimmicky Questions.Michael Bird comments:
He gives thoughtful and nuanced answers to questions often raised by critics and skeptics…Blomberg gives very helpful and thoughtful reflection hot topics like Genesis 1 and cosmos, whether Job and Jonah are "historical," two or three Isaiahs, the dating of Daniel, Matthew as Midrash, and Pseudonymity and NT Epistles.
I found hisThe Historical Reliability of John's Gospel peculiarly helpful when teaching undergraduate and graduate classes on John'due south gospel. Here is his story:
The year was 1968. Information technology was a turbulent time, with growing protests against the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and riots outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. For me, those events were largely curiosities to sentinel on the news; after all I was only in eighth form. But eighth grade was the year for confirmation classes in the one-time Lutheran Church building in America in which I was raised. Our pastor was young, relatively fresh from seminary, and trying hard to be relevant and interesting to a group of nine boys and iii girls who seemed to have little involvement in Luther's shorter catechism. So we played and discussed the latest Simon and Garfunkel anthology, or something from the Beatles, discussed the claim of conscientious objection to the war and occasionally tucked in a little of Luther.
What little we discussed of the Bible came largely from the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. But one evening nosotros looked at a page or two from a Synopsis of the Gospels. They contained the 4 accounts of Jesus being anointed by a woman. Iii of them, Matthew, Mark and John, are all ready during the last week of Jesus' life near Jerusalem. The one in Luke (Luke 7:36-50) occurs in a totally different context, with different characters, involving an unnamed woman with sinful reputation rather than Mary of Bethany, and an entirely unlike follow-up conversation making entirely different points. Only our pastor used the lesson to illustrate how dramatically contradictory Gospel parallels could exist.
That was merely the tip of the iceberg. Nosotros had to understand that the Bible was full of factual errors; it was a drove of entirely human books written by religious people. Luther, we were taught, did not believe that the Bible was the give-and-take of God (I later learned that was wrong). The give-and-take of God was what came to parishioners when the pastor preached to the congregation, and it might or might non be facilitated by the Bible. Christianity was to be believed by faith; if we could give evidences for our faith then we would walk by sight and not past religion and the centre of our religion would be destroyed. Just religion was immune from critical investigation. What we believed was one affair; what actually happened in history was something else. The ii did not necessarily have to intersect.
By the time I went to a tiptop-notch undergraduate higher of the LCA, Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, in the mid-1970s, I learned to associate names with the collection of views I had been taught: Lessing, Kierkegaard, Bultmann, especially Bultmann. Nosotros had to purchase a Synopsis for a class on the Gospels and the burden of the grade was to point out how utterly contradictory the iv accounts all were. The only two methods that were legitimate to use were grade and redaction criticism. Form criticism showed how distorted the oral tradition made the original simple pedagogy of Jesus, a self-styled rabbi and prophet merely zero more. Redaction criticism showed how the four evangelists all fabricated up most of what the Gospels contain and superimposed it on pinnacle of the already distorted oral tradition. Somewhere securely cached in the midst of all of this was a small core of historically reliable information that scholars were constantly seeking in something chosen the quest for the historical Jesus. The portraits that emerged were wildly divergent, one from another, but they all agreed on 1 thing: the church for most of its history got it terribly wrong and Jesus was non divine.
I remembered request my pastor dorsum in confirmation class, given that nearly all of the details differed between Luke's anointing of Jesus and the accounts in the other 3 Gospels, why Luke couldn't have been narrating a separate event altogether. Information technology was clear that my question defenseless him off baby-sit and that he hadn't idea near a credible answer, so he blustered something to the result of, "Well, the details are just too similar!" I asked the same question of my college New Attestation professor, a man who had studied under Krister Stendahl at Harvard, and he was every bit surprised. He actually gave information technology some careful thought, however, and said that the references to alabaster jars of spikenard that the accounts shared involved such specific detail that no matter how much of the residuum of the stories varied it was impossible that such an incident could have happened that way twice. Another professor generalized and told our entire grade that it was utterly impossible to be an evangelical and maintain our intellectual credibility.
Information technology would exist just years later on that I would larn that spikenard was a very mutual form of perfume used in the ancient Mediterranean world, and that Pliny himself had commented that alabaster was the all-time container in which to go along it. I realized then that ii accounts of Jesus beingness all-powerful past different women with perfume in this kind of container were petty more casual than two different accounts today of prima donnas being given flowers by doting fans wearing gilt jewelry.
But to this mean solar day I take never seen a unmarried scholar out of the hundreds (literally) that I have read on these passages, except within evangelical circles, e'er fifty-fifty admit this fact much less interact with it!
My experience at Trinity Evangelical Divinity Schoolhouse, studying with D. A. Carson in the late 1970s, and at the University of Aberdeen in the early 1980s with I. H. Marshall, was astounding. These were not but academically enriching but spiritually exciting times. On topic later topic, the skepticism of my previous pastors and professors was shown to exist groundless. Already as an undergrad reading Marshall'south Luke: Historian and Theologian, when I discovered information technology buried in my college library's basement, introduced to me the notion that something could exist both redactional and historical. What a novel and liberating thought! That was probably my biggest "aha" moment!
Many things take changed a lot since the 1970s and 1980s. Evangelical scholarship has flourished to an extent none of us dared to imagine. The academy has had to pay attention to usa if only because of our sheer numbers. Simply the Jesus Seminar and the Acts Seminar didn't. They were able to ignore us, at least in their published works, equally much as any Bultmannian of a previous generation. And near state universities in this country still pass up to hire evangelicals to positions in New Testament study, even when those evangelicals take demonstrated themselves far more willing to stand for all sides adequately in a debate than their liberal counterparts.
This is some of why I have very little patience for those in the earth of evangelicalism in its broadest sense who would campaign for us to cover liberal biblical scholarship as if it were the just intellectually apparent arroyo to have. Been there, washed that! The churches that bought into that myth, with rare exceptions, have died, are dying or are populated only by one-time people who accept remained faithful to the church despite all of the liberal theology since the 1960s. Equally for my confirmation class—well, I know of only 1 or two who still go to church anywhere.
Of grade, I don't want old-line fundamentalism either, as anyone who reads the closing sections of each of my chapters in Can We Notwithstanding Believe the Bible? will know or who observes how Norman Geisler has libeled me repeatedly in the blogworld. I am so glad I was not raised in information technology or I might accept had a pilgrimage more than akin to Bart Ehrman's. I hope I never have to choose betwixt being similar Kenton Sparks who seems out to bash traditional evangelicals or Norm Geisler who is unashamedly out to bash fellow inerrantists just considering nosotros disagree with his item definition of inerrancy. I have seen the destruction that both wreak and the faith of many people that gets destroyed. There are much, much better constructive, middle ways that need to be embraced. I am grateful that God has led me throughout my adult life to numerous such places.
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