Reading the Bible Backwards
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2014/11/03/reading-the-bible-backwards/ Nov 3, 2014 @ 0:06 by Scot McKnight 2 Comments Historians want to know what happened, if possible why it happened, and then they want to string what happened into a narrative that makes sense of what happened. Bible historians tend to devalue the interpretive layer of the Old Testament, like the one that says Israel’s condition was shaped by its choice to obey or disobey, and find out what “really happened” and then string that into a narrative of some sort. We call such books “histories of Israel.” Jesus and Paul and Peter and John historians do the same thing. As an example, most (you can almost write “all”) “historical Jesus” scholars devalue his miracles, certainly the so-called nature miracles, and then construct a narrative that informs readers what Jesus was really like, but the “really like Jesus” for them is constructed without much (or any) attention to someone who did mirac...