Reddit reviews The New Testament and the People of God

Was assigned N.T. Wright's, The New Testament and the People of God in seminary (Regent College, UBC) a decade ago. Very readable and a great place to start. Highly recommended.

http://www.amazon.com/Testament-People-Christian-Origins-Question/dp/0800626818/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372290305&sr=1-8

Not sure what sorts of perspectives you're looking for, but NT Wright is a top notch academic writing from a somewhat conservative Anglican perspective, and has written a ton on these two guys:

Jesus and the Victory of God

The Resurrection of the Son of God

Paul and the Faithfulness of God

And if ~3200 pages isn't quite enough to scare you out of attempting the project, you should also read the first volume in this series, The New Testament and the People of God.

Here are two scholarly books for you:

• Early Christian Doctrines by J. N. D. Kelly (get the blue 5th edition I linked, not the yellow revised edition)
  
• The New Testament and the People of God by N. T. Wright

This series can keep you busy: The New Testament and the People of God/ Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol.1

Wright has lots of other good (and shorter) stuff too. He's a retired Anglican bishop.

>For those of you who have looked in to biblical historicity, on any level,

I guess this technically qualifies me?

>how do you reconcile potential errors and inconsistencies

Such as?

>as well as the concepts that stories of YHWH and Jesus could have been co-opted from other faiths

By asking for primary source evidence for these claims.

>Are there any books or websites you could recommend?

Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Kenneth Bailey

Evidence for Christianity by John McDowell

The King Jams Only Controversy by James White (this is actually a book about textual criticism and manuscript transmission).

Jesus and the Eye-Witnesses by Richard Baukham.

The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach by Mike Licona.

This book series by NT Wright.

> I was wondering if anyone has some solid, unbiased sources for serious Bible study?

They don't exist. Everyone has biases. The very best scholars are those who can divulge their biases and give reasons for them and reasons against the biases of others. That's part of the scholarly conversation.

For background stuff, maybe check out:
David Aune's The New Testament in Its Literary Environment

I liked Shaye Cohen's From the Maccabees to the Mishnah when it comes to understanding "Judaism" in the first century AD.

NT Wright's The New Testament and the People of God is very good.

I also really liked Brant Pitre's Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of Exile - a reworking of his Ph.D dissertation at Notre Dame (under David Aune).

Mark Goodacre's work on Q is good. I read it early in my academic career and it has kept me from believing in the Q theory since.

The biggest journal in the field is probably Journal of Biblical Studies. New Testament Studies is another big one (from Cambridge).

Edit: Also, learn Greek. There are grammars specifically for New Testament Greek (Koine) like David Alan Black's Learn to Read New Testament Greek - which is fine for an NT Greek grammar (though he barely covers the optative since it's so little used in the NT). I would just learn Classical Greek using something like Hansen and Quinn. If you can read Classical Greek, nothing in the Bible (either LXX or NT) will give you a problem.

> Ok maybe the source isn't the best but that's not the only one.

Carrier says that it pretty much is. At the end of that review to which I linked, he laments that no one has replicated Grave's work.

But I'm happy to be convinced otherwise.

>So what are your reasons for Christianity not having ties with pagans?

This isn't how arguments work. The one making a claim provides the evidence.

But I won't deny that some pagan concepts influenced how the New Testament authors wrote. For example, Paul's use of ἱλαστήριον in Romans 3:25 almost certainly has some overtones imported from pagan Greek thought. But that's a far cry from Grave's suggestion, popular among the New Atheists today, that the whole notion of the crucified and risen Jesus is a myth taken wholesale from pagan thought.

I'll repeat my exhortation that I edited into my comment above: studying how the New Testament and early Christianity related to its own historical context is a laudable goal that I would commend to anyone willing to put in the effort, and there are good resources out there to help. Go to the scholars who are well regarded in their field, and avoid sensational, popular-level works. Ehrman's undergraduate-level textbook is a good start. For the more ambitious student, N. T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God contains quite a bit on the historical context of early Christianity in the Greco-Roman and Second Temple Jewish worlds; it appears on many a grad school syllabus.

This is a complicated question. On the one hand, if you're talking about appealing to the historicity of the Bible for evangelical or apologetic reasons, I'd say that would be a poor use of historical research. To some degree, I don't believe western Christianity should just be a reactionary byproduct of post-enlightenment reductionism and rationalism. No one gets converted in their head. As a Christian, (with Eastern Orthodox leanings) the idea of convincing someone of the historicity of Christ in order to introduce them to my faith seems exhausting and a waste of time. I'm not interested in convincing someone to buy into my faith with empirical evidence. That seems counter-productive, and a bit manipulative.

Honestly, your rooting in the Catholic Church probably helps ease this tension because you're an "insider." To some degree, if you're part of a tradition that appeals to Apostolic succession, the question of the historical Jesus is a little (but not totally) insignificant. The question of whether he existed doesn't determine your faith because you know he exists in his Church and has for 2,000 years. Now, to the non-believer that may be a pretty biased conclusion, but conversely, I find most of the Jesus Seminar research to be highly suspicious and biased in the opposite direction. Besides, first century historical research can't really be put toe to toe with subjective spiritual experience. They're just two different animals.

On the other hand, I do believe real historical inquiry is important- just not as a condition of faith. I don't believe that being a person of faith means being ignorant of the questions that our culture is asking. There are scholars that have come up with some very good work on the Historical Jesus from inside the faith. I would highly recommend E.P. Sanders and N.T. Wright on the subject.

So I grabbed my copy of N.T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God It's his book about the historical context New Testament from a somewhat historical perspective.

Pages 252-254

> Jews in general did not divide the world rigidly into the physical and the noumenal/spiritual (254 - first paragraph).

I think he uses Philo (a Jewish philosopher) to come to this conclusion.

I could probably be butchering this though. N.T. Wright's book might be helpful. https://www.amazon.com/Testament-Christian-Origins-Question-Paperback/dp/0800626818

EDIT ::to clarify the book is about roughly First and early Second Century:: Christianity.

God did speak for himself. That's the authority that I case my claims upon.

Ok, links:
https://www.amazon.com/Testament-Christian-Origins-Question-Paperback/dp/0800626818
https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Christian-Origins-Question-Vol/dp/0800626796
http://www3.telus.net/trbrooks/garyhabermas.htm
https://historyofphilosophy.net/

It's hard to answer that. Which specific period are you wanting to learn about?

If you want to learn about first century Judaism, IE Paul and Jesus' time. I would suggest New Testament and the People of God or An introduction to early Judaism