Deception and The Gospel of John

An article of mine about The Gospel of John just passed peer review and was published online by The Secular Web, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization dedicated to defending and promoting a naturalistic worldview. I’d love to hear what others think about the article. It’s here: The Justified Lie by the Johannine Jesus in its Greco-Roman-Jewish Context » Internet Infidels

Hmmm, “The Justified Lie by the Johannine Jesus in its Greco-Roman-Jewish Context (2020)”

"There has been some significant pushback lately in the scholarship against the (sometimes apologetic) interpretation that Jesus was in fact not lying to his family in John 7:8-10. This essay builds on work on the Gospel of John by Tyler Smith, Adele Reinhartz, and Dennis MacDonald to build the case that Jesus was in fact portrayed as lying in John 7:8-10, and to determine what hermeneutic implications this entails. In the conclusion of this essay I will include some very recent insights of Hugo Méndez/Candida Moss on the Gospel of John as forgery to fully round out the picture. ..."
To me it sounds like you take the Bible as some accurate historical account, rather than a rambling of tribal texts, edited for tribal purposes. So I'll have to admit you lost me early on, though I did skim most of it, in the end it seemed to me akin to arguing about Sherlock Holmes' parentage and what it was in his childhood that made him such a fantastic sleuth when he grew up.

 

Sorry, I couldn’t do you better

Biblical hermeneutics

Biblical hermeneutics is the study of the principles of interpretation of the Bible. While Jewish and Christian biblical hermeneutics have some overlap, they have distinctly different interpretive traditions.

The early patristic traditions of biblical exegesis had few unifying characteristics in the beginning but tended toward unification in later schools of biblical hermeneutics.

Augustine offers hermeneutics and homiletics in his De doctrina christiana. He stresses the importance of humility in the study of Scripture. He also regards the duplex commandment of love in Matthew 22 as the heart of Christian faith. In Augustine’s hermeneutics, signs have an important role. God can communicate with the believer through the signs of the Scriptures. Thus, humility, love, and the knowledge of signs are an essential hermeneutical presupposition for a sound interpretation of the Scriptures. Although Augustine endorses some teaching of the Platonism of his time, he recasts it according to a theocentric doctrine of the Bible. Similarly, in a practical discipline, he modifies the classical theory of oratory in a Christian way. He underscores the meaning of diligent study of the Bible and prayer as more than mere human knowledge and oratory skills. As a concluding remark, Augustine encourages the interpreter and preacher of the Bible to seek a good manner of life and, most of all, to love God and neighbor.[15]

There is traditionally a fourfold sense of biblical hermeneutics: literal, moral, allegorical (spiritual), and anagogical.[16]

Hi, I have a problem with John: The Jews are sons of the devil, not of Abraham, since Abraham refused to kill his son and the Jews did not refuse to kill Jesus. Jesus is the son of God, and the Messiah, top dog Jew. Thus the father of Jesus is the father of the Jews. Then the devil and God are one and the same. After reading John I wrote a letter on ecology. John might have helped me to be a nonconformist. Sincerely Yoram

 

 

 

Abraham did not refuse to kill his son, God called him off at the last minute. He was on the sacrificin’ rock and everything, all ready to go.

And there’s no reason he would have refused to kill his son. Family didn’t mean the same to them back then that it does to us now. When God slaughtered Job’s entire family it was cool because God gave him a better family in return. At the time this nonsense was written this seemed perfectly reasonable to them.