By Living Waters

While at the British New Testament Conference I participated in a number of seminars focused on interpreting the New Testament in light of the literature of Second Temple Judaism. One presentation discussed positive and negative forms of “the golden rule”: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It was noted that most often the rule appears in a negative form: don’t to to others what you would not like them to do to you.

Some have proposed that the negative form is more limited since it merely discourages doing harm to others rather than doing service for them. As such, the negative version may lend itself to a more restrictive application (e.g., “hey, I didn’t hurt anyone”). Others have proposed that the two forms imply each other. I could see the positive formulation implying the negative, though the obverse is more difficult to manage (it seems to me). (more…)

Continued from part 1

The Historicity of the Gospels

Here I must quote Derren at length. I wish I could simply reproduce his paragraph without any breaks for commentary and interaction. That simply is not possible since he makes so many revealing or vulnerable assertions.

There are plenty of arguments like this, but all are based on the notion that we can take the New Testament stories as accounts of real events. But to decide that the Bible is history, one must ignore the vast amount of impartial biblical research that shows it really isn’t – in other words, to decide that one’s personal conviction means more than clear evidence. (14, italics added; to be continued below)

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A few months ago, a friend brought Derren Brown (a well-known British magician) to my attention, noting that a number of “episodes” from his programs could be watched on YouTube. I watched a number of them and found them, overall, to be fun and fascinating, with a few quite stunning and a few less than profound.

For the past fifteen years I’ve read about and into “the New Age movement,” often suspecting that some of the more prominent spokespersons were charlatans, or at least employed the methods and means of charlatans. Thus I’ve had a keen interest in “the debunkers,” those who expose the fakery and deception so often found among claimants to supernatural powers.

Thus I decided to purchase Derren Brown’s book, Tricks of the Mind (Amazon-UK, not available in the U.S. yet) and see if I could pick up some new pointers. I suspect I will, but in the meantime, I’ve been rather disappointed at his naïve and rather sophomoric departure from, and critique of, his former (and my current) Christian faith.

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