This is an extraordinarily good piece. I especially liked this:
The literary critic Frank Kermode, in “The Genesis of Secrecy” (1979), a pioneering attempt to read Mark seriously as poetic literature, made a similar point, though his is less historical than interpretative. Kermode considers Mark to be, as the French would say, a text that reads itself: the secret it contains is that its central figure is keeping a secret that we can never really get. It is an intentionally open-ended story, prematurely closed, a mystery without a single solution.
It’s really not - its a load of inaccuracies and crap. People such as Erhman and Crossan simply are not historically accurate, and in a matter as important as this (although Benedict doesn't really think so, see his Jesus of Nazareth) we owe it to ourselves and our relationship with God to get it right -- not be enamored of facile writers. Crap is crap, and crap attempts at explaining the holy are really crappy crap.
ReplyDeleteThe two towering historical Jesus authors are Fr. Raymond Brown (now deceased) and Fr. John Maier. Maier's The Historical Jesus (4 Vols. so far) is very very thorough. Look for example at his deconstruction of Crossan in an Appendix in Vol. 1.