Reddit reviews The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings

> Until recently it has been commonly thought (again, even among scholars) that oral cultures could be counted on to preserve their traditions reliably, that people in such societies were diligent in remembering what they heard and could reproduce it accurately when asked about it. This, however, is another myth that has been exploded by recent studies of literacy. We have now come to see that people in oral cultures typically do not share the modern concern for preserving traditions intact, and do not repeat them exactly the same way every time. On the contrary, the concern for verbal accuracy has been instilled in us by the phenomenon of mass literacy itself; since anyone now can check to see if a fact has been remembered correctly (by looking it up), we have developed a sense that traditions ought to remain invariable and unchanged. In most oral societies, however, traditions are understood to be malleable; that is, they are supposed to be changed and made relevant to the new situations in which they are cited.

• The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings
  
  EDIT: grammar

1. Yes.
   
   
2. Yes, because the majority of additional gospels to those that are canonical were found accidentally. Nag Hammadi, for example. Archaeologists aren't focusing in the ME because of Christianity. There are far more culturally rich communities/civilizations there. Christianity was a non-entity in the macro scale of events in the ME until Late Antiquity.
   
   
3. I don't think Julius Caesar is a fair example because he was a Roman senator from a very well establish family in a very literate part of the world during the height of Roman legal articulation. Consider for perhaps a better comparison the different stories involving other religious leaders like Buddha, or Krisha, or even Alexander the Great outside of Plutarch.
   
   The difference with Jesus is the motivation of the authors. Historical accuracy is a modern concern. These people were writing to forward the concerns of their particular communities. The world wasn't "global". Each gospel reflected the needs of the community that produced it, whether it's Gentile vs Jew, the proliferation of miracles, high vs low Christology, etc.
   
   I think you would find this one interesting: http://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Historical-Introduction-Christian/dp/019020382X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458179626&sr=8-1&keywords=the+early+christians+ehrman
   

Eh. I’m sure this is pointless, but I did my undergrad in church history. The ‘overwhelming scholarship’ you reference just doesn’t exist. If anything, scholarship is overwhelming in the OTHER direction.

Just, take the canonization of the Bible for example. In THE MOST general of terms, a cannon was somewhat agreed upon about 250 years after the birth of Christ, and would go through a progressive series of additions, subtractions, and revisions until the 16th century!

One of the criteria for canonization was authorial integrity, that the book was written by who it claimed to be written by. What’s known as pseudepigraphy, or writing in another authors name pretending to be that person, was INCREDIBLY common in the ancient world. Modern scholars agree that Paul wrote 8 of the 13 books attributed to him. The other 5 are very questionable.

This is a good history of the subject: https://brill.com/view/title/13087

Bart D. Ehrman’s work is a good place to start reading, as far as general scholarly consensus is concerned: The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings https://www.amazon.com/dp/019020382X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_pd5dBb4EWCZRH

Be warned: you WILL find a lot of blogs and word press websites that refute these texts and authors with a scholarly front. You will not find serious, peer reviewed refutations of these authors or ideas.

So that raises an interesting question, doesn’t it? Isn’t all scripture God breathed? Did God lie when he said Paul wrote the books he didn’t?

Also, yes, scholars very much agree that the Bible, as a whole and in parts, is a continuity NIGHTMARE.

Yeah, I used the Harper Collins Study Bible when I was in school (I did a double major in English and Religious Studies in a Canadian University) but I believe the Oxford Annotated Bible is also popular when studying the bible academically.

Edit: I also used Ehrman’s The New Testament as a companion when studying the Bible in school.

This, or any worthwhile academic book on the New Testament. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019020382X/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i5

This isn't fringe scholarship, this is day 1 101 class stuff. We have no eyewitness accounts.

I read the bible with the aid of a commentary (The New Jerome Biblical Commentary), and a Bible Dictionary (HarperCollins Bible Dictionary). It slowed the pace a bit, but I got a lot out of it. I also had some good intros to the New Testament (An Introduction to the New Testament by Raymond Brown and The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings by Bart Ehrman).

Some other interesting study aids:

• Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Friedman - for an overview on the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch.
  
  
• Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman - goes over the difficulty of rebuilding the original words of the authors of the bible.
  
  Good Luck.

>you imbecile

I can already tell this is going to be fun.

>Jesus has literally ZERO contemporary historical data.

That's not what you asked for. You asked for peer-reviewed arguments for the historical existence of Jesus, of which I said there are thousands, and to which I said you'd have a much more difficult time finding the opposite--- peer reviewed articles and books arguing that Jesus was entirely a myth.

>I’ll wait for those libraries of sources you have.

Where do you want to start?

Probably the best place for you to start is with Bart Ehrman, a leading scholar of on the development of Christianity, and he's also a popular skeptic speaker and writer. In addition to publishing he's written popular books about how many of the books of the Bible were forgeries, and how the belief that Jesus was divine developed in early Christianity, he also wrote an entire book laying out the widely accepted case that Jesus was likely a real historical person, written directly to skeptical lay people like yourself.

If you want a great introduction to the scholarly debate about the historical Jesus, you could start here or here. I also think Dale Allison's work is great critical look at some of the issues at work in the debate. There are lots of historical reconstructions of Jesus' life. Some of the more popular ones like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan tend to sell books to liberal Christian audiences, so I've always thought E.P. Sanders treatment was perferable. I'll spare you the links to scholars who identify as orthodox Christians, like Luke Timothy Johnson or N.T. Wright. It sounded like you specifically wanted more scholarly sources and not popular books, so you could just look at the scholarly journal dedicated to the study of the historical Jesus. Or the Jesus Seminar. Or either of the following Introductions to the New Testament textbooks which are used in secular universities throughout the english speaking world:

Introduction to the New Testament by Mark Allen Powell

Introduction to the New Testament by Bart Ehrman

These are the ones I'm personally most familiar with. There are tons more like Geza Vermes and Amy Jill Levine I haven't read and I'm not as familiar with.

But I'm not telling you anything you wouldn't learn in any basic 101 intro to New Testament Class. The academic consensus is that regardless of what you think about him as a religious figure, it is extremely likely that there was a first century Jew named Jesus who started a faith movement that led to him being crucified. Why do scholars think this? Because by the time Paul started writing his letters 20 years later there was a growing, spreading religious movement that worship a crucified Jew named Jesus as their messiah, and given critical analysis of the texts produced by this movement, some of which are now in the New Testament, there really doesn't exist a coherent argument for the development of this movement that doesn't include the existence of a first century Jew named Jesus who was crucified.

Congrats on your mission call, and double congrats on going to Central America.

As far as understanding and following the New Testament, you really can't do better than getting a good study bible. In addition to the text of the scripture, you also get scholarly essays that introduce each book, as well as notes running parallel to the text that help clarify and contextualize the tricky parts, written by academics from a variety of faiths. Either of the following two are great:

The New Oxford Annotated Bible

The HarperCollins Study Bible

You might also check out the next book, which is a standard text in divinity schools.

The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings

I don't know how much any of these are going to help you in 87 days, but I respect your ambition in trying to tackle the scriptures in such a short span.