Continuing our summary/review of Tom Wright and Marcus Borg's discussion... For other articles in this series visit http://jmm.aaa.net.au/catalog/section/jc1.htm.

Bishop Tom Wright (the conservative scholar) has a different approach to the Gospels-as-history than does Marcus Borg.

Sample:

'The guild of New Testament studies has become so used to operating with a hermeneutic of suspicion that we find ourselves trapped in our own subtleties. If two ancient writers agree about something, that proves one got it from the other. If they seem to disagree, that proves that one or both are wrong. If they say an event fulfilled biblical prophecy, they made it up to look like that. If an event or saying fits a writer's theological scheme, that writer invented it. If there are two accounts of similar events, they are a 'doublet' (there was only one event); but if a single account has anything odd about it, there must have been two events, which are now conflated. And so on....

'But as any author who has watched his or her books being reviewed will know, such reconstructions again and again miss the point, often wildly. If we cannot get it right when we share a culture, a period, and a language, it is highly likely that many of our subtle reconstructions of ancient texts and histories are our own unhistorical fantasies...

'Suspicion is all very well; there is also such a thing as a hermeneutic of paranoia. Somebody says something: they must have a motive; therefore thay must have made it up. Just because we are rightly determined to avoid of hermeneutic of credulity, that does not mean that there is no such thing as appropriate trust, or even readiness to suspend disbelief for a while...

'I propose a no-holds-barred history on the one hand and a no-holds-barred faith on the other.' (p. 18).

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Shalom! Rowland Croucher