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Originally Posted by SeattleUte
When I read your post I went over there and did a very quick search and this was the first thing I found. Isn't Daniel Peterson FARMS' Jefe? (By the way, so far as I can tell "Hellenization of Christianity" is an LDS-created term.)
http://www.fairlds.org/FAIR_Conferen...g_Picture.html |
If Dan holds that position, then I disagree with him. I don't read the languages like he does and will defer to his knowledge of the ancient languages, but I can read what a bunch of non-denominational scholars have written in English and completely disagree with his characterization based on those readings. I still don't believe all of those guys there believe that and maybe Dan if he thought about it or if one spoke with him, might give a more nuanced opinion. I don't know as I won't defend that opinion.
I hadn't read that article as I usually don't do FARMS. I'm not certain what to make of his conclusions, as it is not as sloppy as Robinson's conclusions were.
I don't know what to think of this quote:
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So, while it may be understandable that some of us wish for a sophisticated theology with which to impress outsiders, that wish may nonetheless be misguided and, perhaps, even morally questionable. It was the early Christian "Apologists" Minucius Felix, Justin Martyr, and others with their desire to make Christianity intellectually respectable, who may have done more than any other group to deform early Christian doctrine. With the best will in the world, they adopted and adapted the philosophical concepts of their day to express Christian beliefs and, in that very process, subtly but unmistakably altered those beliefs. Moreover, Boman is right to lament "the customary European judgment that only the systematists are real thinkers. Whoever is of this opinion will find no thinkers in the Old Testament, for the Israelites were truly no systematizers, even less logicians."77 At least, they didn't do logic the way Aristotle did logic. "I have repeatedly pointed out," wrote the great W. F. Albright,
that the Hebrew Bible is the greatest existing monument of empirical logic and that this logic is more exact than formal logic in some important respects. After all, it is based on the cumulative experience of men, and not on postulates or presuppositions which may or may not be correct, as is inevitably true of most postulational reasoning outside of mathematics and the exact sciences.78
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