In any event, my great revelation isn't that Nietzsche was correct about something. It is that I finally figured out why I am so utterly frustrated in the field of New Testament scholarship.
I was walking and texting at the same time in that forest I just mentioned. I drove home and sat in my front lawn when it just hit me - no matter which 'expert' New Testament scholar you listen to, he probably hasn't studied enough philosophy.
Now I am not just saying this because philosophy was my major in university (in Canada we don't call it 'college' - college is for people who train to fix or build things). There simply has to be a reason to explain why I am always probing at the limits of our knowledge of the Church Fathers and these people seem so content to swim around in the small pool of things said and believed by these early Catholic writers.
When you study any major philosopher the topic of epistemology inevitably comes up. It isn't just the study of 'what we know' but 'how we know what we know' and 'why we know what we know.' The ultimate topic that every philosopher begins to approach with sheer delight and fascination is 'what are the limits to what we know.'
Do you think that any of these New Testament scholars - I don't care who they are - have paused EVEN FOR A MOMENT to dwell on the topic of the limitations of what we know about early Christianity? At best they feel a need to address the subject in a line when writing one of their banal papers but the truth is that each of them - again I don't care who you are speaking about - wants, craves, and ultimately NEEDS the security of thinking that the pool of things that we know about a given topic in the study of early Christianity is in essence all that really matters 'all you need to know' about that subject.
So it is that you get these idiotic statements like 'Tatian wrote the Diatessaron by blending the four gospels.' Where the hell do they get the certainty to make this statement. Imagine if you applied this logic to things said by Sean Hannity - Obama is gay, Muslim, socialist with no birth certificate. Maybe he too had a virgin birth. That's next I'm sure.
This unconscious thought process at the heart of NT scholarship demonstrates such stupidity and is so widespread that it requires nothing short of an aluminum bat to help pound the point into their thick skulls. So here is my rant for today:
I don't know who or what Jesus is but logic dictates that the answer to that question necessarily goes outside or beyond what was written in the gospel that Irenaeus handed, edited - (whatever verb you want to place here) - to the Church.
What the hell is the matter with these people? At best the four canonical gospels concentrate on the events of three or four years. The Alexandrian tradition said it was only one year. Maybe Jesus was a man as the Catholics suggest. Maybe he was God like the tradition of Mark originally held. But the bottom line is that we know jack shit about who or what Jesus is, was or will be.
No one is an expert on what Jesus is, was or will be because the Catholic gospels were established in the late second century. It forms only a finger nail of the original evidence about what Christians, Jews and pagans thought about this Jesus. The point is that we develop theories about Jesus but we can never have any degree of certainty that our conclusions are authoritative because of that large ominous pool of things that we will never know was originally believed and thought about Jesus by any Christian who lived before Irenaeus.
I am not convinced that what Irenaeus says about Polycarp is true because there was this other guy living in Rome at the time he wrote who completely contradicted his testimony. If this problem exists for someone Irenaeus liked imagine the difficulties which exist with the testimony that gives about people he doesn't like - i.e. Marcion.
I am not arguing that we should just give up and turn back to the 'good old days' of faith. What I asking for - indeed what I am demanding with a metaphorical aluminum bat in my hand - is some humility about our 'accepted presuppositions.'
At best they reflect what Irenaeus believed about Jesus, the Church, the other Christian traditions that were active in his day and went back much further than his own tradition.
But at the end of the day, why should anyone care ...
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