I think both of you are full of it.
They are neither biography nor doctrinal.
I think they are certainly testimonial and pedagogical.
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Pedagogical is just a fancy word for teaching. What is teaching if it is not the intent to pass on specific information, in this case, about Jesus and God.
Matthew is trying to convince the jews that they should hae recognised Jesus for what He is.
Mark is the closes to your view of testimony but there is the underlying “secret” that explains why Jesus was misunderstood. Luke claims imartiality but emphasises the non Jewish aspects of Christ’s life and teaching./ John is certainly doctrinal, and goes out of his way to link actions and teahing to make his theology clear.
The Gospels are a unique form of writing that does not conform to any other style of writing, although it is closest to the Old Testament historically based narratives.
Richard
They are exactly that – all four Gospels fit the category of βίος (BEE-ohss), first-century biography. John stretches the category tremendously while remaining within it.
By telling the truth. All βίος was meant to portray the character of a person, being as accurate as possible, so the reader would understand that person. In the case of Christ, the expectation was that such understanding would lead to faith in Christ.
Incorrect. That’s a pious opinion that was overturned decades ago; they conform to βίος.
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Yes!
And it is one thing to point out a theme of these gospels and quite another to sum up and reduce them to these themes you are pointing to.
Matthew has one of the best accounts of Jesus’ unique teachings.
John has some of the most startling statements regarding scripture and Jesus role in things.
Certainly I have had many reasons to refer to both of these in discussion regarding Christian ideas and teachings.
“imartiality” - for a second there I thought I had a chance to learn a new word but an internet search only comes up with “impartiality.”
Back to laying down the law I see…
Your textural approach has flaws that you cannot see,
Of course. You could not possibly be wrong, so John must be complying with your view.
Richard
Edit
i forgot to thank you for calling me pious. I take it as a compliment.
Stating facts is not “laying down the law”.
My view is that John doesn’t fit the category of βίος. The consensus of the secular experts is that it does, so I go with that.
They are not facts.
They are opinions at best.
Secular! Since when was Christianity interested in secular opinions!!
Even the Old Testament does not conform to this view. The history is redacted and edited to fit with the editorial view. Hundreds of years are ignore just because “They did not worship in Jerusalem” and yet despite this being “gainst God’s wishes” they reigned for much longer than some of the kings who supposedly conformed!
The Bible is doctrinal. it is not journalism, or just history. Everything is related to God and Judaism in the Old Testament and Christianity in the New Testament. That is its purpose. It is what Scripture is.
Richard
How you can claim that the Holy Spirit conforms to secular writing form is beyond me (not that I think the Holy Spirit authored Scripture but that is what you have been claiming) I have always suspected that your studying was secular, and you have now confirmed it. It negates your Christian authority to Zero.
Unfortunately its true that there are attempts to blot out some history or even someones name entirely from the genealogies. I believe this is the case with Cainan, the son of Arphaxad who is mentioned in Luke, but missing from the Genesis account. He is however included in the Septuagint and the book of Jubilees explains that he sinned by copying “forbidden knowledge”. According to AI Overview – “Cainan is depicted as learning to read and finding inscriptions on rocks revealing the astrology taught by the Watchers, who had descended to Earth and corrupted humanity.”
While Jubilees is non-canonical, it does help support the case that Cainan did exist and a reason for his omission rather than an opposing view that it was a copyist error in adding him to Luke. I believe Luke’s account and by including Cainan, it shows that while men may blot people out, God does not… Cainan is included in the genealogy of Jesus.
And as an aside to anyone interested, Cainan as a type, fits nicely in my common decent timeline between Arphaxad and Salah. The name Arphaxad means, “healer, releaser, stronghold” and may represent our common decent with egg laying monotremes about 153.3 mya.
Cainan means, “acquirer or weaver” and may represent our common decent with the now extinct multituberculates, of whom there is some evidence that they would collect things similar to todays ground squirrels. Our common decent with multituberculates would be 140.5 mya based on Arphaxad being 35 when he begot Cainan (35 x 365K = 13M).
And then Salah means “petition, breaks or divides”, perhaps to mean the egg laying process is broken and the premature young are cared for directly by the mother. So Salah represents our common decent with marsupials. If we deduce that Cainan was 30 when he begot Salah, then our common decent with marsupials was approximately 129.6 mya (30 x 365K = 11M).
The geneological timeline in this range has about an 8-9% margin of error with scientific estimates.
Also to deduce that Cainan was 30 when he begot Salah, I simply subtracted 100 from the age of 130 recorded in the Septuagint that had, erroneously, added 100 years to many of the ages from the original Hebrew (where Cainan was omitted). I believe the Word of God, including its history, is preserved even if we need to do a little digging and use some logic to find the truth of it.
I am sorry, but if you are using human logic and understanding you are missing the point.
Richard
Human logic and understanding guided by the Spirit of truth of course… to be lead by the Spirit, you need to believe the Word is true.
Here’s my own answer:
The overall story is fairly straightforward. Parsimony is a good thing. Begin with the concept that God desired to make a creature capable of fellowship and love both for God and others. “Let us make…” is a statement of purpose, of telos . Likewise, the imago Dei is a vocation that all of humanity is called to fulfill. But we could not achieve that end without mature moral judgment – the knowledge of good and evil. The animal kingdom exhibits behaviors humans would label “good” or “evil,” yet neither we nor God hold them morally responsible for those choices. Animals, like infants, are “innocent,” which Kierkegaard rightly observed simply means “ignorant.” Human evolution gradually moved toward greater and greater levels of sociality, communication, and “love,” but we learned those behaviors over millennia, and for most of that time, “good” and “evil” were simply behaviors, not abstract concepts. Humanity from erectus to early sapiens was in a transitional period that resembled childhood. Like children, their brains were still developing, and they were learning language and morality, but none of those capacities had reached the point that either God or modern adult humans would consider them “guilty” of moral evil. There’s a reason why societies don’t put 6-year-olds in jail. The final phase in moral guilt is represented by the woman’s mature reasoning and selfish choice in Genesis 3, followed by shame and consequences. Innocent Animal-Immature Child-Guilty Adult. It really is that simple.
The “flood” in Genesis is the Israelite response to Babylonian mythology, like all of Genesis 1-11. None of it is literal history; all of it is a polemic against the ancient Babylonian-Sumerian mythology that Israelite scribes learned by heart when they went to “scribal school” and were taught how to write cuneiform. Stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are legends passed down over generations before being written down. The “historical” portion of the Old Testament doesn’t begin until roughly Samuel and the birth of the monarchy in Israel.
Evangelicals believe in the “inerrancy of Scripture” as an article of faith. The question is how to define that concept. YEC interprets inerrancy as meaning without error in anything, including historical accuracy. Thus, a literal Adam & Eve, a literal global flood, a literal Tower of Babel. None of those hold up to scrutiny.
Another definition of inerrancy is offered by John Piper – a theologian I don’t recommend but one with impeccable Evangelical credentials. He defines inerrancy as “perfect with respect to its purpose,” and its purpose is salvific, which is a fancy word meaning the Bible is without error in what it says about salvation and the life of faith. In short, God’s message was meant to bring us toward home with him. It wasn’t written to give us details about the past.
I believe on good evidence that Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo erectus were all members of the human family. Did God communicate with them?
My answer goes back to the Garden of Eden and “inspiration” of the Bible. Genesis isn’t literal history, but I believe it imparts spiritual truths to us. “The man” and “the woman” (ha’adam and ha’issah) are literary archetypes, which simply means that together they represent the collective human experience and the individual human experience. Collectively, it begins with them in the garden, where they experience communion with God, and ends with them expelled from the garden and barred from re-entry. The journey is from nearness to God to an experience of God’s absence, which is the universal human condition, and why Christ is necessary to reconcile us to God.
I believe evolution was a God-guided journey that resulted in a creature capable of loving one another and loving God. If the garden has any meaning at all, it portrays a situation where humanity had a “felt” presence of God (early humans like Neanderthal and erectus), similar to a modern child. At some point, when humanity reached “moral maturity” and chose selfish interests, God withdrew from the scene and left us to our own devices. Religion was invented later and is a man-made device to fill the void.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Your mileage may vary.
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O wow.
That is tantamount to denying the existence of god at all. To all intents and purposes He might as well be. And all religion is false and delusional?
Shame that i have an active relationship with this sleeping or absent God of yours.
Richard
Opinions are opinions in the scholarly world, and secular opinions are more likely to be objective about scripture, having no vested interest in it. Every ANE scholar I ever met was interested in all opinions.
Besides which, there is no “Christian” opinion on βίος, there are just scholarly opinions.
Of course not – none of it was written as βίος or any other form of biography.
Why? The Old Testament is full of pagan literary forms; why should conformation to merely secular forms be a surprise?
Nope – try again. Hint: stop the binary thinking.
It wasn’t, unless you count the one Reform Jewish rabbi on a panel presentation one day as “secular”.
I don’t have any authority anyway – the text does. You just can’t grasp that.
The early church defined it as the word of God always striking its goal, like an arrow unerringly hitting the mark.
Shades of grad school! – some professors held a debate once over whether the concept of “archetype” was even known at the time(s) of the writing(s). [My takeaway was “It’s complicated”.]
But not forever.
Which God grabbed onto and made use of.
Heh – but ditto.
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In a sense, yes, because even when Yahweh is the one giving content to the religion humans manage to make it false, and if false then delusional.
Projection is a dangerous thing.
That’s not much help. Did the word of God unerringly hit the mark of literal, allegorical, moral and/or anagogical truth?
I get that. I would argue Genesis 1-11 was compiled and took its final form just before and during the exile. It was a vaccine intended to inoculate the people against Babylonian religion and culture, even though the Babylonian gods had seemingly defeated YHWH.
True.
I regard Romans 1:18-25 as Paul’s description of the fall of humanity. People as a whole “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images,” which is what we see in the archaeological record after about 65,000 years ago. Once humans reached moral maturity and turned to selfishness, evidence of idolatry, spiritism and witchcraft immediately appears. These early beliefs eventually coalesce into organized religions complete with mythologies, shamans, priests, temples and eventually kings long before YHWH makes himself known to Abram, even according to the biblical record.
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Whatever worked – different Fathers used different methods, some used multiple ones, and a few strove to use all. Origen, for example, held that every passage had at least three senses, the literal, moral, and spiritual, and that moral and spiritual could be subdivided. Clement of Alexandria split the spiritual sense three ways: “The meaning of the law is to be understood by us in three ways [in addition to its literal sense]: as displaying a sign, as establishing a command for right conduct, or as making known a prophecy.”
And several noted that where one method didn’t reach some certain non-believer, another method might – one referred to the passage where the word of God is said to be sharper than a two-edged sword, saying that each method of understanding/interpretation counted as a “sharp edge”, and the different edges cut through the resistances of different people.
They weren’t concerned about some attribute the scriptures had while sitting on a shelf but with its charcteristics in action. This led to a discussion that links to the ancient question quod alii, sed non alii?, “Why some, but not others?”, in this case meaning why does the word “cut” some but not others?
Interesting. It also reads like something the Christians in Rome would have observed all around them, a descent into depravity that they actually witnessed.
Of course Enoch attributes that to the “Watchers”, the fallen elohim who instead of guiding the nations to follow Yahweh set themselves up as gods. To the greater ANE, the greatest gift of these rebel iyrin was “the kingship”, the establishment of power and authority that could extend to the entirety of a realm (which is why so many ANE kings lists start out naming the deity who “brought the kingship”). The first kings were understood to have been priests themselves, something we still see in the OT, and the priesthood split off from it . . . . and so on.
So when it came to interacting with humans, they expected some sort of religion, which was universally understood as including covenants and sacrifices, so God made use of that.
That is why your faith is cold. There is life in Scripture but you have reduced it to form and linguistics.
That is because to you it is not personal.
If that was the case my faith would have died years ago. My faith is real, and so is God. Faith goes beyond the tangible, but it still needs feedback to survive.
Shame that Paul blames it on God
Richard
You are so delusional.
He doesn’t. Read the passage. All it says is that God let people have what they wanted.
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