Post by fortigurn on Oct 8, 2012 16:56:14 GMT
Diaglotting is reviewing 'Is This the Carpenter?', and Thomas Verenna's chapter has been subjected to examination by someone who knows what they're talking about.
Verenna responds briefly in the comments section, but eventually bows out leaving many points unchallenged.
An overarching drawback I found with this essay (apart from the footnotes!) is that when I finished reading it, I had no idea what the “method formed from intertextuality” even was. The author does talk a little bit about “imitation” and “emulation” towards the beginning, though didn’t really seem to offer a definition of what these concepts are. The closest I could find was when he said: “Emulation, in this study, means establishing intertextuality” (137).
By the time I got to the end of the chapter, I still hadn’t figured out how imitation and emulation had been used as a heuristic device to demonstrate that Paul didn’t believe Jesus to be historical. It seemed to me that the author was simply arguing that since Paul spoke about Jesus in a manner which employed the Hebrew Bible, coupled together with Paul speaking of Jesus in allegorical and spiritual fashion, that this must led one to the conclusion that Paul only envisaged Jesus as a fictional character.
It was a spirited attempt by Verenna to prove that Paul didn’t believe in a historical Jesus, but ultimately it was utterly unsuccessful.
By the time I got to the end of the chapter, I still hadn’t figured out how imitation and emulation had been used as a heuristic device to demonstrate that Paul didn’t believe Jesus to be historical. It seemed to me that the author was simply arguing that since Paul spoke about Jesus in a manner which employed the Hebrew Bible, coupled together with Paul speaking of Jesus in allegorical and spiritual fashion, that this must led one to the conclusion that Paul only envisaged Jesus as a fictional character.
It was a spirited attempt by Verenna to prove that Paul didn’t believe in a historical Jesus, but ultimately it was utterly unsuccessful.
Verenna responds briefly in the comments section, but eventually bows out leaving many points unchallenged.
