opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

Amazon.co.uk: Charles Freeman: 9780300170832: Books

One of the few negative reviews on Amazon, by someone offended by Freeman’s secularism, says:

If you are looking for a secular or fundamentalist liberal account of the Early Church, which presupposes that there is very little which needs to be understood about the person of Jesus, and his followers’ convictions about him, then you could do no better than buy this book.

Yup. And that makes it a great read for me.

I’ve read a fair bit on both Historical Jesus and the Early Church, but this account still foregrounded for me a lot, and I appreciated it for that. That includes:

• The incoherence of Paul’s theology
• The lack of curiosity Paul had about the actual Jesus the Nazarene (something Nikos Kazantzakis lampooned towards the end of The Last Temptation of Christ)
• The massive contradictions between the three or four strands of the New Testament (Hebrews vs Romans in particular)
• The lack of a well-defined orthodox Christian theology for centuries
• The long-running prominence of Subordinationism in Christian theology prior to Nicene Christianity. (The conventional narrative is of course that the Trinity was there all along to be uncovered; the account of the homoousion as a stumbled-on catchword, which was never really thought through, was a welcome corrective.)
• The extent to which the first four Ecumenical councils were the products of imperial intervention
• The Da Vinci Code narrative of Christianity being this unsullied chalice before the Empire got hold of it was one I long found puzzling, with my orthodox (Orthodox) Christian instruction in the Ecumenical Councils. This was the first time I got it.
• The fact that Leo I could claim much of the credit for the Chalcedonian creed—at a time when the West was otherwise a laggard in theology
• The closing down of inquiry in the face of orthodoxy
• How much Jerome and Augustine have to answer for, in their ascetic and pessimistic view of humanity

The most sensational bit of the book is the very early speculation on what happened to the body of Jesus. It’s still an unsettling notion for me—unsettling because it is plausible. But that is a bit of speculation, and it should not distract readers from the rest of the book.

I found myself thinking this would be a particularly interesting read for Muslims. They would get their kicks, I suspect, from the fact that a lot of their polemics against Christianity were live issues in third- and fourth-century Christendom.

One review I’ve found sneered that Freeman is a generalist not a theological historian, and that this work does not break new ground. That does not compel me: there’s a hell of a lot of room in the world for cogently argued summaries of modern scholarship.

Consistency.

There are lots of quotes on why consistency is overrated, which I won’t verify because I’m on my phone. Keynes’ “When things change, I change my mind; what do you do?” Emerson’s (?) “Hobgoblin of small minds”. Whitman’s “I contain multitudes.”

But the world has ever admired, and the world has long been led, by adamant, unyielding, assured men of conviction.

Usually led right off a cliff.

I am blessed to have lived in a country with a state religion—which ends up tantamount to no religion at all—and in an aggressively secular country. So while I may have had the zeal of Voltaire in my teens about atheism, I no longer get, nor particularly care to get, strident atheism such as abounds in the US.

That’s strident atheism, to make a distinction my confrere Michael Masiello makes.

Why not Magister, Michael, as I usually call you? Because this time around, I’m dissenting, and that calls for fraternity rather than tutelage. 🙂

I dissent, because while I understand the distinction made by Michael between atheism and antitheism, it is not a distinction of any great age, and not one I would impose on the question. I haven’t read of the antitheist Soviets, for example, just state atheism.

And of course that’s why I find the notion that militant atheism is inconceivable to be a cavil. Of course there have been militant atheists. If we take the maximalist definition of “militant” used by other respondents, I don’t know what else to call the killing of 28 bishops and 1200 priests from 1922 to 1928 in the name of Leninism (Religion in the Soviet Union – Wikipedia). If we take the less lethal, but to my mind no less valid notion of militancy as the systematic suppression of religious practice and destruction of religious sites, the Soviets excelled in militant atheism as well.

And to my mind, an activist destroying a religious symbol to protest religiosity, still counts as militancy and not just stridency. What Femen did in chainsawing the public square crucifix in Kiev to protest Pussy Riot (Femen – Wikipedia), for example, might have been militant atheism, anti-government protest, or any number of other things. (Mostly, I think what Femen does is simply inane, but I’m not their target audience.)

So if militant atheism involves organised acts of actual violence against believers (if you want to differentiate militancy and stridency in that way), is that a current issue? If it is, it’s mostly limited to North Korea, China, maybe Cuba. And to tell a militant atheist, you’re looking for the willingness of the atheist to commit violence to advance their agenda.

Does that excuse belligerence and contempt, from either side? Not in my book. YMMV.

Go in peace.

I’ll register some confusion at Robert Semple’s answer that it’s a day labourer; I’ve read Crossan too, and I don’t remember that.

I’m not disputing it; Crossan is pretty dense.

What’s stuck in my head is what the Jesus Seminar decided (and Crossan was a prime move behind it, but not the only one): they were inclined towards interpreting it as “builder”, because of the number of building references in Jesus’ parables and sayings (capstone, not a stone upon a stone, etc).

Note that the Greek word used in the Gospels, tektōn, shows up in English: archi-tect (literally chief tektōn), tectonics.

I’ve tried to reword the question to what OP Sam Rizzardi intended (“what do King James Only proponents think…”); but QCR knows what he intended out of the question better than OP does, clearly. *sigh*

There are different flavours of King James Only, as explained at King James Only movement – Wikipedia. Not all versions hold that KJV is divinely inspired, and most are opposed to modern textual scholarship (moving away from the Textus Receptus for the Greek); they would find allies in the Greek Orthodox church. In most versions, KJO says nothing about languages outside of English.

Going through the flavours.

• “I Like the KJV Best”. Likes it for style, doesn’t actually make any big theological claims. Indifferent to other languages.
• “The Textual Argument”. Prefers the older redactions of the Greek and Hebrew texts that the KJV used. Would be fine with e.g. the Vulgate for the same reason.
• “Received Text Only”. Thinks the older redactions of the Greek and Hebrew texts are providentially selected. Again, would be fine with e.g. the Vulgate for the same reason.
• “The Inspired KJV Group”. Holds that the KJV translation itself was divinely inspired. Does not necessarily say that translations into other languages might not be divinely inspired; though I assume they don’t expend a lot of energy exploring that possibility.
• “The KJV As New Revelation”. Holds that the KJV translation supersedes the original Greek and Hebrew themselves, because it is literally a new revelation from God. Would therefore reject all other translations, unless they are translations from the KJV direct. Called Ruckmanism after Peter Ruckman.

Where does it leave non-English translations? #1 doesn’t care. #2–#3 wants them to be textually conservative. #4 is agnostic about them (though it would at minimum expect them to be textually conservative as well). #5 rejects them.