Ronald V. Huggins

Bart Erhman (Photo: R. V. Huggins) I've noticed that when Bart Ehrman debates the historicity of the Gospels his presentations are shaped by exploiting what I call the "freshman advantage." This is no doubt due in part at least to his spending much of his time teaching college freshman and only slightly older students. The "freshman advantage" relates to arguments that seem more plausible precisely because the audience you are trying to persuade are young. So when it is stressed, for example, to the disadvantage of the Gospel accounts, that were were written 35 years after the events described in them, or even longer, such a statement might easily seem, to the freshman, to represent an unbridgeable temporal barrier against the possibility of the Gospels' representing accurate memory. After all Thirty five years is longer than freshmen and most other undergraduates have even been alive! Once one's years have doubled and then tripled, however, 3...

“Critical Vision: The Research and Writings of Jerald and Sandra Tanner.”  As I reflected on what small contribution I could bring to such a distinguished panel, of all the subjects I could have spoken on I decided to speak on something that only I can speak on, namely what the Tanners have meant to me first as a Christian and then as a scholar, or more particular as a Christian scholar. I apologize in advance for speaking so much about myself in a session dedicated to the Tanners but given my subject it was unavoidable. Psalms 31:5 and 65:16 refer to God as the God of Truth.   When I first became a Christian in 1976 I expected that Christians would be honest, and be careful to try and make sure that what they said was true.   Very quickly I learned that that unfortunately wasn’t always the case. Naturally very early on I came into contact with Christian writing on Mormonism.  Some of it was quite good and accurate, as I knew even then from havi...

The Koran and the Book of Mormon share several common features.  This fact was not lost on nineteenth-century Americans who often referred to Joseph Smith Jr. as the American Mohammad.    Both books were the product of a single individual (one ostensibly translating from golden plates and the other taking down  dictation form the mouth  of the Angel Gabriel). Both ultimately stand of fall on the validity of the claims of a single prophetic author.   This is in marked contrast to the Bible, which was written over many centuries by a multiplicity of prophetic authors. Both bear the same relation to the Bible, namely they both represent themselves as the final step in the flow of biblical revelation, the third “Testament,” as it were, supplementing the Old and New Testaments and bringing divine revelation to a final, divinely authoritative culmination.     Both claim to serve as confirmation of the Bible. We see this, for exam...

Jesus, Abba , and the Seminar  Ronald V. Huggins Midwestern Journal of Theology 8.1 (Fall 2009): 41-56 Robert W. Funk is dead.  Even as I report the fact a pun flutters near at hand begging me birth it in print. Out of respect for the dead and delicacy over the tender feelings of certain of my readers I resist to return once again to my original point: Robert W. Funk is dead. But it wasn’t always so. Yes, I know: that goes without saying, since being dead implies you were once alive, as in the well known sepulchral epitaph: sum quod eris, fui quod sis (or as a memorial brass in St. Olave, Hart Street, London puts it: “as I am you shall be, As I was, so be ye”). For a long time during my scholarly transversions Funk seemed more than a little alive, indeed bigger than life, and at no time more evidently so than when he gave his opening remarks on “The Issue of Jesus,” at the very first meeting of the once infamous and now sometimes recollected Je...

The present article first appeared as "The Ox and the Donkey," Midwestern Journal of Theology 9.2 (Fall 2010):179-193. It appears here as it was originally, with two exceptions: (1) I have used color pictures, which was not possible in the original publication, (2) I have made some small changes in detail in the captions, and (3) I have made one spelling correction ("hue" for "hew"), and removed a redundant definite article. I have also retained the original pagination .  Fig. 1: Gherardo di Jacopo Sarna, “Adoration of the Magi,” c. 1405,  Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Photo: R. Huggins) O lux beata Trinitas!  He lay between an ox and ass,  Thou mother and maiden free;  Gloria tibi, Domine . 1 The woman kitty-corner me across the table asked: “But where are the ox and the ass?” We were reading Matthew’s infancy narrative in Schuyler Brown’s doctoral seminar at Saint Michael’s College, Toronto. The questioner was doing her doctorate in Karl B...