Ronald V. Huggins

Podcast: What Does Sandra Tanner have to Say About Biblical Forgeries I've been enjoying listening to this part of the interview between Rick C. Bennett and Sandra Tanner. Since my own area includes Gospels and Patristics, I thought I would chime in with few comments and corrections.  For the most part my comments follow the sequence of the discussion, and probably doesn't make much sense if you have'n't listened to the discussion. (1) The context of Paul’s warning against people preaching other Gospels (Galatians 1) had to do, as becomes clear as one reads on in Galatians, with forcing Gentiles who converted to Christianity to become Jews first, through circumcision and what not. I have never encountered a New Testament scholar who would make the case that Paul was referring to Gnostic Gospels. I can’t say for certain that there is no scholar who does not make that case, but it would certainly be an idiosyncratic one. (2) When what might be called proto-Gnost...

My friend Daniel Bradley posted something on Facebook Today reminding us that today (July 14) is Woody Guthrie's birthday. This got me to thinking and remembering. And to commenting on his post, which I repeat here. Have you been to his museum? I was a huge fan of Woody when I was a kid hitch-hiking around with my guitar. Learned to play all the songs I could including Tom Joad with all the verses. Woody had a special connection with the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up due to his once being hired by the Bonneville Power Administration to write songs ins support of their dam-building efforts (See his song "The Grand Coulee Dam.") His song "Roll on Columbia Roll On," has a line "Other great rivers add power to you, Yakima, Snake and the Klickitat too." Well, much of my youth was lived in that stood on two of those rivers. Read Bound for Glory and idealized the life described there.  I idealized sitting around with a bunch of old...

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...