tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18902745.post1360334432035413961..comments2024-03-24T15:19:06.377-04:00Comments on The Continuum: Protestants and the BibleFr. Robert Harthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05892141425033196616noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18902745.post-34940974414900233842007-01-26T10:09:00.000-05:002007-01-26T10:09:00.000-05:00Fr Hart,
Did you ever get a response from these p...Fr Hart,<br /><br />Did you ever get a response from these people?Albion Landhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14423168351697120421noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18902745.post-16193845305255669602007-01-23T04:04:00.000-05:002007-01-23T04:04:00.000-05:00Oooooh, Father, you do flatter me! Unfortunately, ...Oooooh, Father, you do flatter me! Unfortunately, in matters theological and philological I'm a rank amateur and no more than a dabbler.<br /><br />If I may digress right off topic, where I know what I'm talking about, I recall an article about the reception of Mahler's music in Vienna. The author was trying to make a feminist point, and she seized on the review of the 5th Symphony (in 1905, I think) by one Elsa Bienenfeld, to show how Dr Bienenfeld had a unique woman's insight. (My own assessment of Dr Bienenfeld's work, in comparison with that of the best of her male contemporaries, was that she was a bit of a nutter, but I digress.)<br /><br />The author focused on Dr Bienenfeld's reference to musical climaxes and in particular her use of 'Klimax' where, according to the author, the usual German word would be 'Höhepunkt' (high point, or peak), and concluded that Dr Bienenfeld, a disciple of Freud, was daring to describe Maher's music in orgasmic terms.<br /><br />Now, I respectfully disagreed. I consider it far more likely that Dr Bienenfeld was using 'Klimax' not in some Freud-influenced biological sense, but in the sense in which anyone in Vienna in 1905 with a decent education would have understood it: the sense of classical poetics, where it refers not to the expressive summit (as climax now does in English, as a result of corruption of its strict sense), but to the stepwise path by which the summit is reached. Such an interpretation, however, was quite unremarkable.<br /><br />This is illustrative of the principle: 'Why let the facts, or the most obvious explanation, get in the way of a good theory?'<br /><br />Now, I don't want to be too critical of the author. Ignorance is a universal affliction: nobody knows everything, or, as I prefer to say, everybody doesn't know something. A more experienced and circumspect scholar, however, will take stock and check that all his/her bases are covered before advancing a sensational interpretation of something that's crying out for a prosaic one, lest the something that he/she doesn't know come back and bite him/her on the backside.<br /><br />From my observation of the condition of theology, and especially from my reading (most of it long ago) of the late works of Mascall (which I heartily commend to anyone out there who hasn't read them), it would appear that the rush to hang a whole new version of the faith on a variant reading (Junias or Junia, etc), or to fit the documents to the theory and not the theory to the documents, has been all too common. Mascall complained that the breadth of the basic honours degree in theology meant that the training received in both theology and in the ancillary disciplines lacked the depth and specialisation found in other degrees. That can, and should, be overcome, and the problem I have described is not unique to theology, in any case.<br /><br />The problem lies partly in the pressure to produce original work, as I think I've said before in connection with the Pagels problem, and in educational systems that don't allow students a long period of absorbing before they have to start producing. Much of it possibly also lies with the desire of faculty to seem up-to-date, which will result in the latest controversial work going on the students' reading list in place of an older work that would actually teach the students something. I am firmly of the belief that students should actually know things before they are encouraged to think about them. (That's very old fashioned, I know.)<br /><br />From Fr Kirby's remarks, however, I wonder if the issue of editions and manuscripts of the Bible is the right one in which to launch into tirades like mine. Nevertheless, I think there is a general principle to be gleaned, and that is that any authentic biblical study will have to take holy Tradition into account, and will ignore holy Tradition at its peril, since even the scholar who is not afraid to be called a heretic should be very fearful of being called sloppy.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18902745.post-86597114490435079682007-01-22T16:06:00.000-05:002007-01-22T16:06:00.000-05:00These are all good points.
What Salome wrote is t...These are all good points.<br /><br />What Salome wrote is the kind of scholarly point that has been needed for a long time, and I wonder if she might round that out and let us post the results. As for the Biblical case for episcopacy, I think I ought to write a separate post on that in the next few days. I am amzed that so many people think it is completely "extra-Biblical." Don't they read the Pastoral Epistles? However, I recommend as a relevant work , the short book (booklet really) <i>Holy Order</i> by Dom Gregory Dix.Fr. Robert Harthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05892141425033196616noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18902745.post-46415241740022416332007-01-22T09:00:00.000-05:002007-01-22T09:00:00.000-05:00Indeed, the Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7) is missin...Indeed, the Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7) is missing from pretty much all early GREEK MSS, but isn't it found in some early <br />LATIN Versions and in quotes from some of the fathers? I seem to have read this somewhere before.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18902745.post-76001626480219291922007-01-21T22:41:00.001-05:002007-01-21T22:41:00.001-05:00I agree that the desire only to affirm the inspira...I agree that the desire only to affirm the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible in its original manuscripts is unnecessarily fearful and a reflection of the anxiety that "sola Scritpura" brings in the modern context. However, I would note three things:<br /><br />1. Contrary to what has been implied in the post, Textual Criticism and "Higher Criticism" are not identical. To a large extent they are independent of each other.<br /><br />2. Following on from this, whereas Higher Criticism often relies on multiplication of suppositions and philosophical filtering, Textual Criticism has a more scientific and logical grounding. It is NOT true to say it simply always prefers the older manuscript. Comparison of variants is extensively used to work out how the variations may have developed, often due to common sorts of scribal errors and glosses. This analysis does not usually rise to the level of certainty in its conclusions, which is why modern Bibles give alternate marginal readings so often. Textual Critics themselves also point out that none of this affects any major doctrines.<br /><br />3. Finally, the example of 1 John 5.7 is not apposite. Long before modern "criticism" or the discovery of Codex Sinaiticus Erasmus and others had noted that it was not original to the text and, indeed, it occurs in not one of the Greek versions of the first eight or nine centuries AD if my memory serves me correctly.Fr Matthew Kirbyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14386951752314314095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18902745.post-73373050189466814872007-01-21T22:41:00.000-05:002007-01-21T22:41:00.000-05:00I agree that the desire only to affirm the inspira...I agree that the desire only to affirm the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible in its original manuscripts is unnecessarily fearful and a reflection of the anxiety that "sola Scritpura" brings in the modern context. However, I would note three things:<br /><br />1. Contrary to what has been implied in the post, Textual Criticism and "Higher Criticism" are not identical. To a large extent they are independent of each other.<br /><br />2. Following on from this, whereas Higher Criticism often relies on multiplication of suppositions and philosophical filtering, Textual Criticism has a more scientific and logical grounding. It is NOT true to say it simply always prefers the older manuscript. Comparison of variants is extensively used to work out how the variations may have developed, often due to common sorts of scribal errors and glosses. This analysis does not usually rise to the level of certainty in its conclusions, which is why modern Bibles give alternate marginal readings so often. Textual Critics themselves also point out that none of this affects any major doctrines.<br /><br />3. Finally, the example of 1 John 5.7 is not apposite. Long before modern "criticism" or the discovery of Codex Sinaiticus Erasmus and others had noted that it was not original to the text and, indeed, it occurs in not one of the Greek versions of the first eight or nine centuries AD if my memory serves me correctly.Fr Matthew Kirbyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14386951752314314095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18902745.post-69123793365062694972007-01-20T16:32:00.000-05:002007-01-20T16:32:00.000-05:00From my inexpert reading of things, it would appea...From my inexpert reading of things, it would appear that most, or at least some, of the omissions from the Sinaiticus are the result of identifiable copyists' errors (in particular ti homoeoteleuton, where one could presume that two successive lines of the text of the manuscript ended with the same word, with the result that one such line was omitted by the copyist). Now, it would seem to me that if Higher Criticism were preceded by solid philological work, these would instantly have been identified and the omissions ascribed to the obvious error. The error appears to account for 1 John 5:7 (although the Greek doesn't have exactly the same words repeated). I can't explain the loss of the end of St Mark, but I have for years been troubled by the combination of the missing resurrection story in the Marcan account and the apparently universally accepted priority of Mark (which I was taught at school as a 13-year-old as a simple matter of fact). (I mentioned to my priest one day that it seemed strange that Christians couldn't agree on fundamental points of doctrine such as the divinity of Christ or the resurrection, but that everyone without question appeared to accept the priority of Mark. I was rewarded the next week with a sermon on the priority of Matthew, and was therefore glad to learn that at least the fathers disagreed.)<br /><br />In any case, the problem appears to have arisen from inadequate attention being paid to the ancillary disciplines--in this case old-fashioned philological text editing, the sort of thing God made Germans for (where were they?). Theology and its related disciplines appear to have been infected by a false intellectual pride founded on bad scholarship. Why do things the old-fashioned, rigorous, way, and come to the same answer that the Church has always and everywhere come to, when you can cut a few corners and come up with a new one? Sorry to ramble on, but I recently restored to my library (by purchasing replacements) some later works of Mascall, and I am currently revisiting Theology and the Gospel of Christ.<br /><br />I do note, however, that the Sinaiticus agrees with the KJV in Luke 10, where the Lord sends out the seventy, rather than the Vaticanus, where he sends out seventy-two. <br /><br />Oh, and I just loved the bit about episcopal governance having biblical foundations.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18902745.post-13629745812985002522007-01-20T13:58:00.000-05:002007-01-20T13:58:00.000-05:00Albion,
They are not Anglicans, and the website i...Albion,<br /><br />They are not Anglicans, and the website is supposed to be for all Christian Churches. Their Belief Statement is, otherwise, fine. I saw my response to the "original manuscripts" issue as worth posting here. It shows the problem of authority among a certain strain of Evangelicals. The Bible is the word of God, but what if some scholar proves that a very early "reliable" manuscript denies a very important verse ot two? This has been done to I John 5:7, and it is what the hubbub about Mark 16:9-20 is all about. <br /><br />In other words, in place of Scripture, Right Reason and Tradition, they have the latest poop from modern scholars as the final authority on doctrine. Since they do not want their situation to be what it is, it is worth waking them up to this fact.Fr. Robert Harthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05892141425033196616noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18902745.post-38895788922776194922007-01-20T10:04:00.000-05:002007-01-20T10:04:00.000-05:00Fr. Hart,
Thank you. One of the things that final...Fr. Hart,<br />Thank you. One of the things that finally led me back to the Catholic Tradition was exactly this nonsense of the 'autographs' of the Scriptures. How can one rely upon the authority if a non-existent document as identified by a handful of scholars who do not have to believe any part of the content to be recognized scholars? The Bible is known to be the Word of God precisely because it has been in continuous use by the Church of God. These 'ancient manuscripts' have not been. I have a lot of Bibles on my shelf, of various translations. Some of them are in near pristine condition and will long outlast this mortal flesh. I neither trust not use them. Some of them are already worn out from use. Most of these copies will not outlive me. Why did Sinaiticus and the others survive? Perhaps because they were considered too good to destroy, but not really good enough to use, and wer tucked safely away.<br /><br />I've been presenting these thoughts for years, and have been roundly derided by Evangelicals, Anglicans, and RCs for being 'against scholarship'. It is a pleasure to find someone else who sees these ideas as reasonable.<br /><br />edpoetreaderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11613032927883843078noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18902745.post-25730074836418201582007-01-20T04:40:00.000-05:002007-01-20T04:40:00.000-05:00Fr Hart,
Unless I overlooked it, you left out of ...Fr Hart,<br /><br />Unless I overlooked it, you left out of your post any statement as to whether these people are describing themselves as Anglicans.Albion Landhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14423168351697120421noreply@blogger.com