The End of Christianity (54 page)

28
. There are other definitions as well. Emanuel Tov (in
Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
, 2nd ed. [Minneapolis: Fortress; Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2001], 1) says: “Textual criticism deals with the origin and nature of all forms of a text, in our case the biblical text.”

29
. For the goals and agendas in the textual criticism of nonbiblical works in antiquity, see James E. G. Zetzel,
Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity
(New York: Arno Press, 1981); Rudolf Pfeiffer,
History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age
(1968), and L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson,
Scribes&Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek&Latin Literature
, 3rd ed. (1991). On the goals and methods of modern textual criticism: Paul Maas,
Textual Criticism
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1958).

30
. Eldon J. Epp, “New Testament Textual Criticism in America: Requiem for a Discipline,”
Journal of Biblical Literature
98 (1979): 97. This essay is a printed version of a lecture delivered in 1977 at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.

31
. For more demonstrations and discussion of this point than are here to follow, see Avalos,
End of Biblical Studies
, 65–108.

32
. For more demonstrations and discussion of this point than are here to follow see ibid., 109–84.

33
. William G. Dever, “Death of a Discipline,”
Biblical Archaeology Review
21, no. 5 (September/October 1995): 50–55, 70; quote is from 51. For a broader treatment on the demise of biblical archaeology, see Thomas W. Davis,
Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

34
. Ronald S. Hendel, “Is There a Biblical Archaeology?”
Biblical Archaeology Review
32, no. 4 (July/August 2006): 20.

35
. Dever, “Death of a Discipline,” 53. Italics are Dever's. For a more optimistic view of archaeology in areas other than those tied to ancient Israel or the Bible, see Brian Fagan, “The Next Fifty Years: Will It Be the Golden Age of Archaeology?”
Archaeology
59, no. 5 (September/October 2006): 18–23. Whether intentionally or not, Fagan does not give more than a passing comment to lands remotely related to the Bible (e.g., Egypt and Mesopotamia), and nothing about biblical archaeology whatsoever.

36
. William G. Dever, “Material Remains and the Cult in Ancient Israel: An Essay in Archaeological Systematics,” in
The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of His Sixtieth Birthday
, ed. Carol L. Meyers and M. O. Connor (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 571.

37
. We adapt the list and approximate dates from Halpern, “Erasing History,”
Bible Review
11, no. 6 (1995): 30.

38
. Hendel, “Is There a Biblical Archaeology?” 20.

39
. Stephen Neill and Tom Wright,
The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861–1986
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 379. The term “Third Quest” has been criticized effectively by Stanley Porter,
The Criteria for Authenticity in Historical-Jesus Research: Previous Discussions and New Proposals
(Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 28–59, but especially 51–59.

40
. For more demonstrations and discussion of this point than are here to follow, see Avalos,
End of Biblical Studies
, 185–218.

41
. John Dominic Crossan,
The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant
(New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), xxviii; S. G. F. Brandon,
Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity
(New York: Scribner's, 1967); Morton Smith,
Jesus the Magician
(New York: Harper&Row, 1978); Geza Vermes,
Jesus the Jew
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981) and
Jesus and the World of Judaism
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984); Bruce D. Chilton,
A Galilean Rabbi and His Bible: Jesus’ Use of the Interpreted Scripture in His Time
(Washington, DC: Glazier, 1984); Harvey Falk,
Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus
(New York: Paulist, 1985); E. P. Sanders,
Jesus and Judaism
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985).

42
. Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar,
The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus
(New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 34.

43
. Ibid., 25–26.

44
. For a general defense of the Jesus Seminar, see Robert J. Miller,
The Jesus Seminar and Its Critics
(Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 1999). [Editor's Note: But for a sound refutation of its methods, see Porter,
The Criteria for Authenticity
; Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter,
The Questfor the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria
(John Knox Press, 2002); and Dale Allison, “The Historians’ Jesus and the Church,” in
Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage
, ed. Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Richard B. Hays (William B. Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 79–95.]

45
. Funk,
Five Gospels
, 26.

46
. Ibid., 143.

47
. Ibid., 145.

48
. Ibid., 43.

49
. Ibid., 44.

50
. Ibid.

51
. Ibid.

52
. We follow the translation of the Prayer of Nabonidus in Florentino Garcia Martinez,
The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English
, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 289. The quoted portion of the Aramaic text, following F. M. Cross (“Fragments of a Prayer of Nabonidus”
IEJ
34 [1984]: 260–64) reads: “as for my sin, he forgave it (or: my sin he forgave). A diviner-who was a Jew…” In this translation the one doing the forgiving is God, but the problem is that the words preceding the quoted portion are not certain. Thus, the alternative translation is also plausible. Note that Garcia Martinez's translation has brackets on the last two letters of “Jew,” which means that he regards those letters as not present in the manuscript, but Cross's facsimile and transliteration (“Fragments of a Prayer of Nabonidus,” 261, 263) shows that all the letters of the word are visible.

53
. For a more conservative academic critique of modern historical Jesus research and the Jesus Seminar, see Philip Jenkins,
Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way
(New York: Oxford, 2001). Jenkins (p. 157) observes that of the seventy-six scholars listed as active members of the seminar in 1993, about one-third were associated with Harvard Divinity School and the Claremont Graduate School.

54
. Albert Schweitzer,
The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progressfrom Reimarus to Wrede
(Macmillan, 1910). For Robert Price's analysis of how conservative scholars err as greatly as the Jesus Seminar ever did, see Robert M. Price, “Jesus: Myth and Method,” in
The Christian Delusion
, ed. John Loftus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), 273–90;
Jesus Is Dead
(Cranford, NJ: American Atheist, 2007); and
Inerrant the Wind: The Evangelical Crisis of Biblical Authority
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009).

55
. Charles W. Hedrick, “The 34 Gospels: Diversity and Division among the Earliest Christians,”
Bible Review
18, no. 3 (June 2002): 20–31,46–47.

56
. Bart Ehrman,
Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
(New York: Oxford, 2003).

57
. Crossan,
The Historical Jesus
, 427–29.

58
. For the dates, see list in Hedrick, “The 34 Gospels,” 27–28. [Editor's Note: For the Gospel of Judas: Rodolphe Kasser et al.,
The Gospel of Judas: From Codex Tchacos
(Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2006)].

59
. See Ehrman,
Lost Christianities
, 9–11, and
Forged: Writing in the Name of God-Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are
(New York: HarperOne, 2011).

60
. On the diminishing willingness of liberal intellectuals to voice their opinions, see Eric Lott,
The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual
(New York: Basic, 2007).

61
. J. Cheryl Exum and David J. A. Clines, eds.,
The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible
(Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1993), 11.

62
. See Edgar V. McKnight and Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, eds.,
The New Literary Criticism and the New Testament
(Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994). See also Frank Lentricchia,
After the New Criticism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

63
. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds.,
The Literary Guide to the Bible
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Robert Alter,
The Art of Biblical Narrative
(New York: Basic, 1981) and
The Art of Biblical Poetry
(New York: Basic, 1985); Meir Sternberg,
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

64
. Alter,
The Art of Biblical Narrative
, 189.

65
. For the Yale Report, see Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith,
American Higher Education: A Documentary History
, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 1:289.

66
. For a defense of our “Western canon,” see Harold Bloom,
The Western Canon: The Books and Schoolfor the Ages
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994); and Christian Kopff,
The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999).

67
. See interview of Hershel Shanks with Phyllis Trible, “Wrestling with Scripture,”
Biblical Archaeology Review
32, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 49.

68
. For a stark illustration of this, see Avalos, “Yahweh Is a Moral Monster,” in
The Christian Delusion
, 209–36.

69
. See Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen,
Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective
(Oxford: Clarendon, 2002).

70
. For more demonstrations and discussion of this point, see Avalos,
End of Biblical Studies
, 219–48 (and see 289–342 for a demonstration of the institutional inertia and ignominious commercial interests likewise sustaining biblical studies).

71
. For basic historical surveys, see John H. Hayes and Frederick C. Prussner,
Old Testament Theology: Its History and Development
(Atlanta: John Knox, 1985). Also useful is Robert B. Laurin, ed.,
Contemporary Old Testament Theologians
(Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1970).

72
. Krister Stendahl, “Biblical Theology, Contemporary,” in
The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible
, ed. George A. Buttrick, et al. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), 1:420. Compare Stendahl's view with that of E. D. Hirsch,
Validity in Interpretation
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 8: “
Meaning
is that which is represented by a text; it is what the author meant by his use of a particular sign sequence
Significance
, on the other hand, names a relationship between that meaning and a person….”

73
. For the history and philosophical issues surrounding the concept of “author-ship” and authorial intentionality, see Jed Wyrick,
The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution and Canon Formation in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian Traditions
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature, 2004); Jeff Mitscherling, Tanya DiTommaso, and Aref Nayed,
The Author's Intention
(Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004).

74
. John J. Collins,
Encounters with Biblical Theology
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 7.

75
. For more demonstrations and discussion of this point, see Avalos,
End of Biblical Studies
, 249–88.

CHAPTER 5

1
. This chapter is a revised and shortened extract from an argument against the existence of Yahweh in my doctoral dissertation (Jaco Gericke,
Does YHWHExist? A Philosophical-Critical Reconstruction of the Case against Realism in Old Testament Theology
[PhD thesis, Pretoria, South Africa: University of Pretoria, 2003]), and a full survey of this argument and its evidence was published in J. W. Gericke, “Yahwism and Projection: An A/theological Perspective on Polymorphism in the Old Testament,”
Scriptura
96 (2007): 407–42. The same findings and more are corroborated by the work of Thom Stark,
The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
(Wipf&Stock Publishers, 2011).

2
. Friedrich Nietzsche,
Daybreak
, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1977), 57.

3
. Robert Carroll,
Wolf in the Sheepfold
(London: SPCK 1991), 38.

4
. David Clines,
Interested Parties: The Ideology of Readers and Writers of the Hebrew Bible
(Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 190.

5
. Quoted in William Harwood,
Mythology's Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992), 257.

6
. For a more thorough discussion of the historical and semantic background behind this recent hemming and hawing over how God is physically described in the Old Testament, see Gericke, “Yahwism and Projection,” 407–12.

7
. For a humorous exposition, see Alexander Waugh,
God
(London: Headline Books, 2002). For a more detailed survey and discussion of examples of God being understood as working with the parts and limitations of a human body, see Gericke, “Yahwism and Projection,” 416–18 (anthropomorphic projection).