RE: What are the Characteristics of a NT Christian?
April 7, 2017 at 10:25 am
(This post was last modified: April 7, 2017 at 11:43 am by Neo-Scholastic.)
(April 7, 2017 at 9:42 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: Yes, a position of rational skepticism is more credible, in any investigation or research. It means you have a standard of evidence that must be satisfied before you'll accept something as true.
Suppose instead the ancient text in question is not part of the NT; but rather, the Epic of Gilgamesh. The primary goal of scholarship is to consider what the epic meant to the Sumerians and the role of epic poetry in the cultural context of ancient Mesopotamia. The veracity of what the epic only comes afterwards and involves attempting to uncover the circumstances that may have have prompted the creation of that flood story by looking at parallel accounts, prior source material, contemporary historical events, etc. Perhaps it came from a world-wide flood (which I doubt) or perhaps ancestral memory of vast post-Ice Age flooding of the South Pacific (my favorite) or just a symbolic extrapolation from local tragedies (not likely).
A skeptical approach is valid for the later, but would contaminate the first. Unless you have a pretty good idea of the social and historical context of Gilgamesh speculation about what it actually describes is pointless. As it applies to NT scholarship, the first questions revolve around what the text meant to those who wrote the Gospels and Epistles. It is clear that the writers of the canonical scripture, as opposed to the Gnostic myth-makers, were trying to describe real events. Whether or not what they describe truly happened is a question that can only come after establishing the motivations of the authors and the 1st century context. Erhmann puts the cart before the horse. His skepticism taints his analysis.
