Corpus-Paul

["Bob MacDonald" <bobmacdonald AT home.com>]

Frank Anthony asks:

>>where are those scholars that have put together a model of the
first-century in chronological order? <<

One thing I learned from Northrop Fry: having an answer to a question can
prevent further learning because it can stop the development of better
questions.  (See his introduction to The Great Code, the Bible and
Literature, page xv: "To answer a question is to consolidate the mental
level on which the question is asked. Unless something is kept in reserve,
suggesting the possibility of better and fuller questions, the student's
mental advance is blocked.")

It is obvious from our current perspective that hindsight is not 20-20. The
number of plausible chronologies is infinite given what we can infer based
on what we might know or think we know.

Chronology is not the bedrock we need nor the only reason we search. Rough
chronology is one of many starting points for inquiry. Even if we knew
exactly a particular chronology and visited the time to prove it was 100%
accurate, we would still differ on the interpretation. And the chronologies
we have are widely differing, each one inferred from our distant and
differing perspectives.

What I find interesting about scholarly lists like this one is the
willingness to entertain questions that might be rejected out of hand by the
assumptions that arise from our early learning, whatever culture or
religious tradition we were born into.  For instance, it might be an affront
to us to think that the Word of God is not what Young's concordance
describes, "Truth without Mixture of Error for their Matter". What is this
'perfect in every respect' that a human might imagine, including devoid of
apparent factual contradictions? Or it might be an affront to us that our
Word of God does not have the same books in it in the same order as someone
else's version.

The ancient texts do not harmonize the way we think we would like. The
scholar's questions allow us to learn to change our thinking without threat,
even as our fundamental assumptions are sometimes undermined. What we find
then is better questions and a more real bedrock that we sought without
knowing it.

There are many stories (chronologies) that can help reveal the rock. Some of
the changes in inference that we are called to see are not easy to make.

A note from Fry for academics too: "Just as the 'scholarly/unscholarly'
antithesis had to be got over, whether evaded or transcended, so the
'personal/impersonal' antithesis had to be got over too. Academics, like
other people, start with a personality that is afflicted by ignorance and
prejudice, and try to escape from that personality, in Eliot's phrase,
through absorption in impersonal scholarship. One emerges on the other side
of this realizing once again that all knowledge is personal knowledge, but
with some hope that the person may have been, to whatever degree,
transformed in the meantime."

Bob


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