Aquinas and Apologetics

[Jordan (Jordan Mantha)]

@Jonathan_Burke

The combination of this socio-historical evidence provides strong support for a reading of of the wilderness temptation as an account of Jesus’ internal struggle with his own desires, rather than a battle of will against a supernatural evil being.

That’s an explicit declaration of my interpretation of the passages examined in this paper, and it’s on the first page of the paper. You say you wanted a “straightforward, in-your-own-words type paraphrase”, and that’s exactly what that is. Are you saying you read that and you didn’t understand what it means, or you didn’t understand that this is my interpretation of the passages, or something else?

Actually, I didn’t read it that way. I saw “provides strong support” as “this seems like a plausible interpretation” rather than “this is what I believe it means”. Thanks for the clarification.

@Jonathan_Burke

I don’t see any record of you reading the other paper. Did you read the other paper? If you did read the other paper, you will see that at the end of each section I have an explicit summary, in my own words, of what I think each author means. That’s my interpretation. If any of those summaries are unclear, please let me know why.

I did read it and I did see those nice summaries. Again, I took them to be summaries of particular views from particular ancient authors. There wasn’t really anything that I saw that said that’s what you actually believed (I could have missed it). In particular, you are arguing about what 2nd Temple Judaism and some early church fathers seemed to have thought, not what you personally thought, it seemed to me. For instance, you overview the texts that lack a reference to Satan as a being, but don’t seem to address the ones that do. I thought you were just giving a good analysis of the beliefs of the authors based on what they do and don’t say, not necessarily summarizing your belief on the matter. To me there is a pretty big leap from how 2nd Temple Judaism and some of the 1st/early 2nd century fathers understood Satan/the devil/demons and “this is what Mark thought”.

@Jonathan_Burke

Yes he is accommodating his audience. If you compare the Synoptics to John, you will find that they treat the issue of demons in very different ways. In the Synoptics we find demons and demonic possession. In John we do not, even when John is referring to people with disorders which were typically regarded as the product of demonic possession or satanic attack. The reason for this is that the Synoptics and John were written for different audiences. The Synoptics are written for people who aren’t yet Christians, whereas John is writing to mature Christians. In the gospel written for mature Christians, demons have vanished. We find the same in Paul’s letters. In both cases the authors write the same way people write when they don’t believe in demons; they simply don’t mention them, and they don’t attribute to them the activity commonly associated with demons.

This is an interesting thought, I’ll have to think about this. This kind of unpacking is helpful.

@Jonathan_Burke

My English “plain reading” of Matthew 5:1-20 is that a guy was demon-possessed, Jesus got rid of them, and they entered pigs. It’s a creepy story but I take at face value.

This is the Ken Ham approach to the Bible. It is called “exegeting the English”. Do you understand why this isn’t considered an acceptable approach to an ancient text by professional interpreters?

Yes, but I’m a scientist and not a professional interpreter. I realize my limitations here. That’s why it’s interesting to hear from people more knowledgable than myself. I simply don’t have the time and training to properly exegete the text myself. That’s also why I generally hold my interpretations “loosely” because I know I could be wrong.

@Jonathan_Burke

When you write that, it tells me absolutely nothing about your understanding of the text. There is literally nothing there. It’s just saying “I think this”, without any process of logical reasoning, without any attempt at justification, and without any method of validation. It’s just pointing at a text saying “I think this”. I have no idea why you would think that, how you would reach such a conclusion, how you would test if your interpretation is accurate, or anything else.

Pretty much. That’s why I appreciate people at PS who have done the work and so I can learn from them. That’s also why I can get a little frustrated by distractions and “noise” in the conversations. My interest here is truly trying to learn, not in debating or correcting people.

@Jonathan_Burke

This gets back to an issue raised previously on this forum, how do I know when my interpretation is correct? For most Christians here, it seems that such a process simply just isn’t considered necessary. I read the text in English, I make a conclusion, I’m done. I’ve exegeted the text, my exegesis is correct. I find this an unusual approach.

I don’t know that I’d be that harsh. I do think people need to have an appropriate amount of intellectual humility, but most people aren’t trained in Greek, Hebrew, hermeneutics, or church/ANE history. Personal reading of the English text and maybe a commentary or two is about it. You can be of service to those people, if you want, but I think it may take a bit more gentle and irenic approach.

@Jonathan_Burke

If you want me to address why I think the “orthodox” interpretation isn’t at least as plausible, I can do that, but we might want to start a new thread. I’ll also need written confirmation from a moderator that such a thread is permitted on this forum, so I don’t have a moderator stepping in two posts later shutting down the thread and warning me not to write stuff like that.

I’ve been a moderator for a while and I have never seen any limitation based on orthodoxy. Any censorship or moderation action I’ve seen has been based on violations of community standards and bad behavior, not on theological or scientific content. I agree though that we are far from Aquinas and the original topic. I will create a stub topic for you, and as a moderator of PS I’m saying that a discussion about the strengths and weakness of orthodox and alternative interpretations of Mark 5 is allowed, as long as the conversation itself follows the community guidelines.