On the Minimalist

Jim West offers a well written guide to what minimalism means. Of course in his case this is a faithful minimalist – one that believes in the Scriptures. Most minimalists approach the text with Jim’s argument and therefore conclude “There is no reason then to believe on the Scripture.” This is a a bait and switch as all the early Church (and Jim) both declare to rest on eternal truth not specific historicity (at least on the claims and method of history as such).

In general the writers of what is now Scripture did not take as priority the historicity of their recounting.

In this regard, most redactional emendation can be seen as an adoption of miminalist literary technique, be it inner-biblical exegesis, midrashic interpretation, or targumic reconciliation – all of these are examples of minimalist attempts to rewrite or properly explain history.

I think Jim’s love of theology should cause him to rethink his hate for the good Bishop NT Wright, as JR Daniel Kirk writes:

[Speaking of Jesus and the Victory of God] The book is, as I read it, a very helpful, historically rooted theology of the Synoptic Gospels.

That is to say, Wright writes as a theologian with an eye to the purported story as the gospels (and other literature of the time period) tell it. If we cannot, as Jim says, actually know what happened we can take at value the theology of all the sources present, yes? And Wright’s work, to my mind, does just that. It takes each of the trajectories of the the sources we have and analyzes them all to synthesize a theology grounded in a rather Orthodox Christian tradition. (Even if that tradition is different than both Protestants and Catholics in general).

I see what Wright has done (that is to treat the material sympathetically with an eye to understand what the final composed piece is communicating) is not much different than other fields, as Kirk again tells:

And if so, then that brings up the question of how different Luke is from ancient historians. If it is a matter of quantity of God- (or other propaganda-) overlay rather than quality of historiography, it seems that what we “know” from the Gospels might be not so different from anything else we might “know” about the ancient world. It’s an honest question (not merely rhetorical): how much more against the grain to we have to read the Gospels to get at “what really happened” than we’d have to read against the grain of Herodotus, Plutarch, or Julius Caesar?

Jim I think this is just another one of your “We must prove Christianity wrong.” Because there is obviously nothing wrong with believing that Julius Caesar was betrayed by Marc Antony, but there is certainly something wrong with believing that Jesus Christ existed, let alone was crucified and perhaps even raised from the dead by God.

All history is propaganda. There is no “objectivity” other than their dilemma. So much for history.