Exodus And The Story

In response to my blog post on a Facebook-Atheist’s rather flimsy objections to Christianity, a friend forwards me this question (from a reader whom I don’t suppose read my reply):

 Intellectual question. I imagine most of us know that there’s no evidence for the idea that Egypt actually kept a slave state for 600 years. Or that the Israelites were “let go”, etc.

So…where did the story come from? Was it a whole-cloth invention by the writer of Genesis? 

And, if so……at what point does the fictional story of the Exodus evolve into a factual story of the Israelites hacking their way through the MIddle East and committing acts of genocide and rape against the cities of Jericho, Ai, etc. 

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The Siege of Vienna Tempts The Otter Away From Useful Work

I’m a dead-beat grader, with books like James Reston, Jr.’s Defenders of the Faith: Christianity and Islam Battle For The Soul of Europe, 1520-1536 hanging around…

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The Historicity Of Jesus

Updated on Thursday, April 12, 2012 at 9:04AM by Otter

Testimonium Flava Flavium: Credo ut Hiphoppam. Not to be confused with Josephus.A reader asks about whether the texts can be trusted. Did Jesus even exist? What’s the critical mind say about the gospels as history? About Josephus and his “Testimonium Flavianum” that apparently offers objective evidence of Jesus’ existence? Does Jesus resemble other literary messiahs?

We get our historical-literary fingernails dirty in this Sunday’s edition of Riparian Church.

Summary and money quote:

I think it’s overreaching on the evidence: what the evidence does not imply is that there was no Jesus. What it strongly implies is that certain factions in Judaism were strongly disposed to write accounts of that man in literary patterns that were meaningful to their audiences. And once again we see why it’s so freaking important that Christians have chosen at their peril to assume that a simplistic gospels-as-historical-fact reading serves their best interests. It leaves them vulnerable at every turn, not just to misunderstanding their own texts, but to weird charges, like “Jesus never existed.”

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Lee Strobel Fouls Out

I took an hour or two today to watch Lee Strobel’s “The Case For Faith.”

The Amazon reviews are typically full-throated exultations of the video’s power. 

I found it weirdly lacking in substance.

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Borderlands Between The Community of the Living And The Dead

For a little while, mom looks better, coaxed back into the world of the living, the world of history, our semi-informed gossip about the dead.

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Bible Scholars and Historians and Really Bad Satire

Bad satire is really an ugly thing: I've written some myself, and I know.

But it shouldn't be allowed to go pretending to any depth just because I suck at it. 

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The Quandary of Some Christian Apologetics: History, Fact, and the Resurrection

Reflections on the idea of "fact" as it relates to the Resurrection, with an eye on some major failures in late 20th century American Christian apologetics. I look at what it means to claim the Resurrection is "historical."

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"No King But Jesus": American Christianity & The Truth

Updated on Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 11:19AM by Otter

Now that it’s out on Facebook, it almost doesn’t matter. But the difference between myth and history is that myth structures the mind so you can navigate the factual world while history actually seeks to catalogue that factual world. Confusing the two creates irrevocable havoc for either faith or mind. You cannot say that the Christian myth is “factual” but then not care about facts. You cannot say that something is history and then not care about the rules for establishing historical fact.

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More on Bart Ehrman

But what you should be getting over, first and foremost, is your addiction to the modern ideals of what a "historical account" should live up to. That's your addiction, not the Bible's.

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