A response to Anthony's observation that "... much of this is simply Crossan's personal interpretation of Jesus."
It is true that Crossan wrote the book, so technically every
proposition in it represents his opinion, but it is not really his "personal" interpretation. It’s a bit like saying of your chemistry professor
“It’s Dr. Harris’s opinion that table salt contains the chemical
compound sodium chloride.” The opinion, in these cases is an expert one,
emerging from a lifetime of study and scholarly engagement with
hundreds of other people, subject to continuous discussion and
re-evaluation in light of new research. Moreover, scholars like Crossan
are not dictating, but summarizing their reasoning for the reader, who is
completely free to make a case for an alternative interpretation. This
is why I insisted at the beginning that I am not asking you to agree
with the reading, but to get inside it — understand it as thoroughly as
possible. Where you go with that understanding once we are finished is
entirely up to you.
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6 comments:
I understand your point and appologize for any friction my statements may have caused, but I think the sodium chloride comparison isn't really fair or accurate. There is a far cry between interpreting ancient texts, even historical ones, and analyzing table salt in a lab setting. That's like saying Crossan has a special tool that allows him to literally look back in time and see exactly what happened, and report absolute facts about what happened thousands of years ago. I don't think that's even close to the same thing. As far as my comment, I was responding to a post that hinted at a crisis of faith in the blogger in question. It was simply an attempt to express the fact that you don't have do believe everything in this book. I think you said your self early on that it wasn't your intention to alter peoples religious beliefs.
No need for an apology; these discussions are what we're here for.
Of course the chemistry analogy is inexact (by definition, all analogies are), but it might be stronger than you think. Simple as sodium chloride might seem, none of us have actually seen a molecule -- everything we think we know about chemistry is deeply theory-laden.
I wholeheartedly agree that no one has to agree with anything in this or any other book. I ask only that you all commit yourselves to understanding it as deeply as possible. What you do with that understanding afterward is up to you.
I'm not trying to beat a dead horse but we most certainly have imaged molecules and we know salt is sodium chloride through chemical analyses... it's not a theory, it's a solid scientific fact. Granted there is a difference between a theory and a scientific theory, just not sure which you are referring to when you say chemistry is theory-laden.
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/05/30/scientists-capture-first-images-of-molecules-before-and-after-reaction/
This book was very nice to read, although it was hard to analyze completely due to all of the content. As you said in the beginning of the course, the intent was not to change our religious beliefs and it has not changed mine. I am a Christian, and as this book is an interpretation, I read it as an interpretation. It helped me understand reading literally and as an interpretation. It brings about discussions of the content and not questioning the religion as a whole. The interpretations of different practices, historical references, and rituals are symbolic and through these interpretations, we try to see what exactly it is that each part means. From what I got from the reading was not whether or not the Christian faith is absurd but discovering who the real Jesus is. I really enjoyed this reading and it has been challenging but very fun to read.
By 'theory-laden' I mean that how we understand chemistry (and almost everything else) is a complex process that relies on background theoretical structures. Yes, we have machines that can generate images of some molecules, but the workings of those machines is extremely complex, so we're never looking at a molecule in any unconditioned manner.
All "solid scientific facts" are such only in relation to their theoretical framing, and that framing is always subject to refinement or replacement (though of course some theories are better developed than others).
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