Dr. James Tabor's latest blog provides great insights about how scholars come up with their interpretations and views about the meanings of the messages of the Gospels. "When it comes to a critical reading of our New Testament gospels and other related texts one can get the impression that scholars end up rather arbitrarily `picking and choosing' whatever they want–especially in trying to construct their portraits of the `historical Jesus.' In other words, as Albert Schweitzer cautioned long ago, all too often historians seem to come up with a Jesus made in their own image, so that texts and traditions they favor are retained whereas those they disfavor are discarded as unreliable. In fact, I would argue that more often quite the opposite is the case. Many of those who claim simply to “take the Bible as it is,” without any critical discernment of sources, traditions, and historical contexts actually end up as the ones who quite arbitrarily fall into this trap of sub...
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