A Response to Porter and Pitts’ ‘Wright’s Critical Realism in Context’

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-193
Author(s):  
Jonathan Bernier
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Critical Realism ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Bernard Lonergan ◽  
New Testament Studies

In The Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 13 (2015) Stanley Porter and Andrew Pitts contributed an article in which they sought to situate N.T. Wright’s critical realism in its philosophical context. Although they correctly identify the philosophical context for this critical realism as the work of Bernard Lonergan, particularly as mediated for New Testament studies by Ben F. Meyer, this response will argue that they fail to adequately address the Lonerganian context. Reasons will be identified for this failure. An effort to better, albeit succinctly, present the rudiments of Lonergan’s critical realism will round out the article.

Being Interpreted by the Parables

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 232-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald L. Denton
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Bernard Lonergan ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
The World ◽  
New Testament Studies ◽  
Mode Of Being

N.T. Wright’s historical Jesus work, along with his approach to New Testament studies generally, is informed by a hermeneutic grounded in a critically realistic epistemology. This latter can appropriately be considered a hermeneutical epistemology, and its impact on both Jesus studies and parables interpretation is evident in Wright’s work. It is of course grounded in the cognitional theory of Bernard Lonergan, but may be furthered by the holistic historiography derived from observations of R.G. Collingwood, as well as the phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition represented by Heidegger and Gadamer, and ultimately the application to biblical hermeneutics by Ricoeur. Lonergan’s ‘world mediated by meaning’ and Heidegger’s ‘mode-of-being-in-the-world’ both make knowledge radically hermeneutical; Ricoeur’s world-projection in the narrative sees the narrative parable’s function as world-encompassing, similar to Wright’s worldview-subversion. All of these have in common that they are irreducibly participatory or hermeneutical.

‘More Ingenious than Learned’? Examining the Quest for the Non-Historical Jesus

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-460
Author(s):  
Justin J. Meggitt
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
New Testament Studies

This paper seeks to scrutinise the debate about the historicity of Jesus and identify aspects that merit critical reflection by New Testament scholars. Although the question is regularly dismissed, it is a salient one that was formative in the development of the discipline, and has become increasingly visible since the turn of the century. However, the terminology employed by the protagonists is problematic, and the conventional historiography of the debate misleading. The characteristic tropes evident in the contributions are also indicative of substantive issues within the discipline of New Testament studies itself.

Can Study of the Historical Jesus Escape its Typographical Captivity?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-65
Author(s):  
Richard A. Horsley
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Comprehensive Approach ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Communications Media ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
New Testament Studies

Abstract As part of the deepening diversification of biblical studies, several lines of research are now undermining the print-cultural assumptions on which New Testament studies developed. The first section offers summaries of important inquiries into ancient communications media: the dominant oral communication and the uses of writing; revisionist text-criticism of manuscripts of texts later included in the Hebrew Bible; the oral-written cultivation of their cultural repertoire by Judean scribes; the parallel oral cultivation of Israelite popular tradition; revisionist criticism of Gospel texts; and the learning and oral performance of Gospel texts. These separate but related lines of research are undermining the standard print-cultural assumptions, concepts, and approaches of Jesus studies. The second section explores the implications of these researches that open toward an alternative view of what the sources are, a more comprehensive approach to the historical Jesus appropriate to ancient communications media, and a reconceptualization of Jesus studies.

The Quest of the Historical Muhammad

1991 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Testament Studies ◽  
The Right

Writing in 1962 Stephen Neill listed twelve of what he regarded as “positive achievements of New Testament studies” over the past century.1 As an affirmation of progress in a notoriously difficult field of investigation, they make satisfying and even cheerful reading for the historian. Who was Jesus of Nazareth? What was his message? Why was he put to death? Why did his few followers become, in effect, the nucleus of the powerful and widespread community called Christianity? These were the enormously difficult questions that had begun to be posed in a critical-historical way in the mid-19th century, and some of the answers Bishop Neill discerned, though by no means final, represented ground gained and truths won. Neill's widely read book was revised in 1988, and though his optimism was here and there tempered by what had been said and thought in the twenty-five years since the first edition,2 there was still good reason to think that historians were by and large on the right track in pursuing what Albert Schweitzer described in 1906 as “the quest of the historical Jesus.”3

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