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Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

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Originally posted by IconiumBound:
Please correct me if i'm wrong but I have always taken the intent of the writer of John's Gospel to be that set clearly in the Epilogue.

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Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

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And his reason for doing this was the early suspicion/doubt that there was an afterlife promised by Jesus. Therefore, the inclusion of the Lazarus story (which I agree was probably well known among early Christians) was essential to his purpose 'that you may believe'.

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Far from correcting you, may I 'umbly suggest you read the whole thread? Yeah, it's a bit tedious in parts, I know, but all the same...

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In other words, just because I made it all up, doesn't mean it isn't true (Reginald Hill)

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Originally posted by Pimple
Is it possible to have a discussion on this between those who see the story of Lazarus as a miracle that both confirms Jesus' divinity and gives them a sure hope of resurrection - for Jesus, for their loved ones, and for themselves -
and on the other hand, those who see the story as a true account of one incident in the life of a truly wonderful and remarkable man, compassionate healer, trusted friend, and uncompromising champion of the truth (and many other things) - but not God?

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The entire Gospel of John is an attempt (probably successful) to answer growing doubts and other excursions fom Christianity. Written in the very late or early 2nd century it tries to answer these and gnostic claims to the 'truth'. Thus you have the significance of 'signs', re-organizing of the Temple incident and the story of Lazarus. The latter being the definitive (they thought) rebuttal to anyone doubting the resurrection.

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Originally posted by pimple:

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by pimple:
Yes, I was coming to that. It's not so much belief or disbelief in the evangelist's clarification. More a suspicion that no clarification is necessary. An indecisive, vacillating Jesus is not the best testament to divinity, is it? He stops for two days - he doesn't say why.

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John says he stops for two days. If John is making up the explanation, he could well be making up the pause. You say there's a "real event" here, but you have no evidence of that, or of what that real event was should it have existed, except John's narrative. If John's purpose is served by pulling an explanation of a putative event out of thin air, it could just as easily be served by pulling the event out of the same thin air.

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It's a good point. What, in part, convinces me that this is a real story, the basic facts of which John records without any deletion, is just the necessity for dotting those eyes and crossing those tees. If he'd made the story up, what would be the point of including features that obscure his central tenet?

Bullfrog. I know how exegesis should work. I am not claiming that my "take" is exegetical. Any Christian exegesis is bound to start from John's own perspective - that Jesus is God. I think that by ditching that a priori stance, a more interesting - amd even more inspiring - story might emerge. And it doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility of accepting, after all, John's high Christology (but it begin to look for more substantial foundations).
It's a bit like using the nonsensical notion of the square root of a minus number to arrive at a sensible mathematical solution.

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Originally posted by shamwari:
Bullfrog: Post modernist sounds to me exactly like a pre-modernist below the Bible belt conservative.

Am I wrong?

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Originally posted by pimple:
...: the bible is [garbage] to some and to others the Word of God. Anything in between is meaningless, subjective egotism!
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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
What I do dislike is having the very foundation of discussion of, well, anything yanked out from under our feet. When a question (ANY question) which used to admit the possibility of an answer (right, wrong, or "I don't know") is now held to be only answerable in terms of "How nice for you," it drives me to drink.

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Originally posted by pimple:
I think it's time I signed off here. I've been reassured by the willingness of Christans to engage in dialogue here, but rather disappointed in the lack of any input from agnostics or atheists. It seems I must simply accept the status quo : the bible is bullshit to some and to others the Word of God. Anything in between is meaningless, subjective egotism!

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Originally posted by shamwari:
I wish I could understand what this means (quote)

"I'm not going so far as "there is no ultimate," but saying that there is an ultimate and we'll never quite be able to touch it, so we need to accept our space as subjective interpreters.


The "subjective interpreters" phrase seems to me to underlie the Readers Response way of interpreting scripture.

And its subjectivism means that a text can mean anything we understand it to mean. Why bother with the paraphenalia of Biblical scholarship is the question I am left with.

And my reference to conservatism/fundamentalism as its outcome is based solely on the conclusions which you have seemed to reach in various posts.

But I acknowledge that a Readers Response conclusion could equally well lead to an ultra Bultmannian interpretation.

In other words you pays your money and take your choice - brutally speaking.

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I'm post modern enough to admit to being a subjective interpreter, and to call biblical scholars on the reality of their own subjective interpretations as well. That's the limit as you approach God.

Also, in a certain post-modernist sense, we're all on equal footing. The church fathers worked as well as they could with their hermeneutics, and we work as well as we can within our hermeneutics, and I see no reason to privilege scholarship over the ancients. We're all stuck in our own space, working as well as we can.

I'd never say scholarship is baaad, but that it's also limited. If pimple were arguing for an orthodox read that similarly thought it had the final answer, I'd be equally skeptical.

Being a bit of a middle grounder, I tend to swing in the opposite direction of any hermeneutic I read. Perhaps this is why I'm confusing...liberals bring out my conservative side, and conservatives bring out my liberal side.

Perhaps it's my apophatic streak that makes me seem scathing. I'm a natural critic, and when someone asks for feedback, my first impulse is to deconstruct viciously and highlight every weakness I can find. And I can do it to conservatives as well as to liberals. It's an impulse I'll probably have to work on controlling a bit.

See how I can say I'm post-modernist? I don't think scholars are really on better footing, and when one says "oh, well, we can dice this out and figure out the 'real' Jesus behind John's interpretation of Jesus," I call bullshit because that real Jesus is gone, long gone. All you've got is scholar-Jesus, which is also in a certain sense only a reflection of the real Jesus of Nazareth who's long lost in the dustbin of history, or vanished from the empty tomb to emerged as the risen Christ. It's kind of the same difference to me.

Maybe I've just been reading too much Bonhoeffer, who in some ways was quite a fundamentalist, yet hardly falling into the Bible Belt stereotype.

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Some say that man is the root of all evil
Others say God's a drunkard for pain
Me, I believe that the Garden of Eden
Was burned to make way for a train. --Josh Ritter, Harrisburg

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Originally posted by pimple:
Could you explain how postmodernism can be said to evangelise? This may be a silly question - it's just that the few PM's I know don't go after converts. But they do seek a concensus.

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Originally posted by Woodworm:
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Convincing refutations gratefully received!

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Originally posted by Woodworm:
In A N Wilson's "biography" of Jesus, he put forward a theory that the story of Lazarus captured a form of ritualised play-acting that Jesus and his followers engaged in.

Judaism was divided between those who preached and believed in life-after-death and those who did not. Jesus was not only in the life-after-death camp, it was a key part of his message.

To bring that message home, his followers would undertake rituals in which they dressed in grave-clothes, went into a tomb/cave, and then emerged, "back to life". As a close friend of Jesus, Lazarus participated in this or, since his name became associated with it, may in some way have originated it.

What you have in the story, goes the theory, is the memory of those rituals - which over time became a story of a real resurrection rather than a ritualised one.

I have to say, I have always found this theory pretty plausible. And disturbing to my faith since, if it is true, it is a small step to explaining how stories about the resurrection of Jesus might have started to circulate.

Convincing refutations gratefully received!

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Originally posted by pimple:
Just one. I played down, earlier, the fact that the synoptic gospels don't mention the story. But then, It's a pretty big omission isn't it? Or is it? I'm not sure now. After all, Mark's "early" account of the passion is much sparser than the others. Any thoughts? I'm not trying to resurrect my original thesis btw - not here anyway. I might mutter eppur si muove somewhere else another time.

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Originally posted by pimple:
Go for it!

Omission needn't indicate suppression, as I've indicated before. And correspondence isn't always collusion. My favourite "extra bits" are the stories which include the Beloved Disciple in the fourth gospel. But my take on that is one even the most ardent postmodernists are likely to choke on!

[Expansion by PM or post in a plain brown paper envelope]

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Originally posted by Woodworm:
In A N Wilson's "biography" of Jesus, he put forward a theory that the story of Lazarus captured a form of ritualised play-acting that Jesus and his followers engaged in.

Judaism was divided between those who preached and believed in life-after-death and those who did not. Jesus was not only in the life-after-death camp, it was a key part of his message.

To bring that message home, his followers would undertake rituals in which they dressed in grave-clothes, went into a tomb/cave, and then emerged, "back to life". As a close friend of Jesus, Lazarus participated in this or, since his name became associated with it, may in some way have originated it.

What you have in the story, goes the theory, is the memory of those rituals - which over time became a story of a real resurrection rather than a ritualised one.

I have to say, I have always found this theory pretty plausible. And disturbing to my faith since, if it is true, it is a small step to explaining how stories about the resurrection of Jesus might have started to circulate.

Convincing refutations gratefully received!

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Is there any evidence for this theory at all outside of Wilson's brain (and those he has managed to infect with his meme)? Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's a good explanation. Jesus could have been a space alien, it's possible. But dragging that in to smooth over a rough spot in the text is an act of desperation. Which is what this looks like. There is no need to think up such theories if you just take the story at face value: Lazarus died. Jesus raised him. That's the story. Even if you don't believe it actually happened, that's the story we have. You can say you think the story was made up to reinforce Christ's resurrection, or the whole resurrection idea, or what-have-you. But to invent this play-acting thing? Why?

Again, show me the evidence. If there's other evidence for it, then my response is (partly) refuted. (And I'll deal with that when I have it.)

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
I know I should read the whole thread, but Alan's c.2/2 is obviously right.

Lazarus died. And didn't stay dead. Jesus is, as so VERY often, oracular. As for the young girl, she was either clinically irreversibly dead at the time of Jesus saying that she was asleep, where He is therefore being metaphorical about death and denying the understanding of it as the end of a person, or she had been clinically dead until Jesus said she slept. Either way there is no doubt in all of the witnesses that she was stone cold dead. Only an idiot could have said otherwise. Or God.

There is NO other Christian alternative.

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Originally posted by pimple:
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Its a truism to say that Jesus and his contemporaries would not have encountered the term "clinically dead" nor would they have understood it had been possible to explain it to them. But exactly how Jesus and his contemporaries did understand death is very much a matter of conjecture. That different people could make different diagnoses of when death occurred irreversibly must be possible - because they still do, and mistakes are still made. It looks to me that the people around Jesus were quite sure they knew when someone was dead. And that Jesus was quite sure he knew when somebody was alive. And that when those two certainties became mutually exclusive, the people told Jesus he was a fool. Jesus made no argument, not being there to score points, but got on with the healing. Which sometimes involved nothing more (nor less) than the patience to wait and faith in God (the one up there) to do the business. [/QB]

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