Skrywers se vooroordele in die stories oor Jesus

Hierdie artikel is deel 7 van ‘n 11-deel gesprek – sien die volgende:

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Die vooroordele van die skrywers van die stories oor Jesus

In ‘n ondersoek na die moontlikheid of die stories oor Jesus nie grotendeels opgemaak is of verdoesel is nie, sou ‘n mens wou weet watter rol die vooroordele van die skrywers self kon gespeel het. Daar is alreeds daarop gewys dat die aard van mondelingse tradisie inherent ‘n kontrolerende funksie het vir dit wat in herinnering geroep sou word en wat uiteindelik neergeskryf sou word. Tog is dit duidelik dat elk van die stories van Jesus vanuit ‘n bepaalde perspektief geskryf is, met bepaalde teologiese motiewe en voorveronderstellings. Is dit dan nie ten minste moontlik dat hierdie faktore ‘n skeefgetrekte prentjie sal skets van wie die historiese Jesus was en wat hy gedoen en gesê het nie? As deel van ‘n antwoord op so ‘n vraag maak Boyd en Eddy die volgende opmerking:

“Obviously, determining the extent to which an author’s biases and agendas distort his or her reports is crucial to evaluating the author’s historical trustworthiness. No one disputes that the Gospel authors were in fact biased. They were not trying to give a disinterested, objective account of Jesus’s life. Rather, the Gospels were written by passionate devotees to help people “believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God,” so that “through believing [they] may have life in his name” (John 20:3]). In other words, they were evangelists, not academic historians.”

Later gaan hulle voort om te sê:

“If there’s anything that has become clear in our postmodern world, it’s that everybody experiences the world, thinks about the world, and com­municates about the world from a biased perspective. Try as we might, there is no unbiased reporting. Yet we don’t customarily dismiss reports as unreliable for this reason. Yes, biases color the truth, but they don’t necessarily undermine the truth. So, unless one is willing to conclude that humans can never reliably report events because of their inevitable biases, it’s hardly fair to dismiss the reliability of the Gospels because of their particular biases.”

Craig Blomberg sê dieselfde op die volgende manier:

“Although it is widely believed that theological motives impugn historicity, such a belief rests on a patently false dichotomy. As already noted, ancient history was not written according to today’s standards of scholarly detachment. If sayings of Jesus relevant to the later church must be discounted, then so must the words of the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, and the Jewish historian Josephus, when they help to promote Roman or Jewish causes. In such cases, we would be left with almost total agnosticism about ancient history, a conclusion few scholars are prepared to promote.

The fallacy, of course, is to imagine that telling a story for a purpose, even in service of a cause one believes in passionately, necessarily forces one to distort history. In our modern era, some of the most reliable reporters of the Nazi Holocaust were Jews passionately committed to seeing such genocide never repeated. In this case, it is the appalling later revisionism of those who claimed the Holocaust never happened that has distorted history, not the testimony of those passionately caught up in the events of the time.”

Die volgende opmerking van Allen D. Callahan is ook insiggewend:

“…[E]ven though we’re concerned about the gospel literature as being shot through with all kinds of tendencies and all kinds of biases and exaggerations and however we want to characterize these things, those guys who were responsible for that literature couldn’t sit down and write anything that they wanted to about Jesus…. Among other things, they were writing for an audience, or audiences, who already knew something about Jesus; there was a market out there for their literature, and in order to engage that market, they really had to write about somebody that people knew about. They wanted to tell more about a figure about whom people already knew. And so they couldn’t say any old thing.”

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