NT312 The Gospels and Ancient Pedagogy
Overview
The Gospels are 2000-year-old texts, so as you read them it is important to understand the ancient genre they represent. In this course, Evans surveys the Gospels, discusses issues of text criticism, and explains ancient teaching methods so you understand not only what Jesus taught, but how he taught it and why his lessons are recorded as they are across the Gospel texts.
Top Highlights
“The purpose, of course, was to educate, not entertain. Ancient historians recognized that verbatim was not always possible and not always, in fact, the most helpful. After all, a speech that took an hour or two would have to be reduced to just minutes. Therefore, condensing, summarizing, and editing were permitted, and it was recognized as perfectly acceptable.” (source)
“‘Chreiai are practiced by restatement, grammatical inflection, comment and inversion, and we expand and compress the chreia … Practice by restatement is self-evident, for we try to express the assigned chreia, as best we can, with the same words or with other words in the clearest way.’” (source)
“Very likely, Jesus spoke, preached, taught all day long. So what we have, then, is a summary, a distillation, a selection of teachings crafted together as a single speech. But even if there was selectivity and a little bit of creative composition, the ancient historian always knew that truth was the goal.” (source)
“We have about four dozen manuscripts, Greek nt manuscripts, that date to the year 300 or earlier. In other words, before Constantine even became emperor, before the Council of Nicaea took place in 325. And these four dozen manuscripts contain almost all of the nt when they’re added up together. We have a large chunk of the four Gospels that’s in a manuscript called P45. It dates to perhaps as early as the year 200, maybe 210 or 220. In other words, it’s written about 150 years or so after the original Gospels were composed in the first century.” (source)
- Title: NT312 The Gospels and Ancient Pedagogy
- Author: Craig A. Evans
- Series: Logos Mobile Education
- Publisher: Lexham Press
- Print Publication Date: 2014
- Logos Release Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Courseware
- Subjects: Bible. N.T. Gospels › Criticism, interpretation, etc; Christianity › Historiography; Education › Bible. N.T. Gospels--Criticism, interpretation, etc; Education › Christianity--Historiography
- Resource ID: LLS:NT312EVANS
- Resource Type: Courseware Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-02-12T04:49:59Z
Craig A. Evans earned his PhD in biblical studies at Claremont Graduate University and received his decretum habilitationis from Budapest. He is Payzant Distinguished Professor of New Testament; Acadia Divinity College Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada; John Bisagno Distinguished Professor of Christian Origins (Houston Theological Seminary); a New Testament scholar; and a prolific author and popular teacher/speaker.
Evans is well-known for his work on the Gospels, the Historical Jesus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the archaeology of the New Testament. His passion for archaeology has him frequently participating in Middle East digs and leading Holy Land tours. He has regularly appeared in television and radio interviews, such as the History Channel, BBC, and Dateline NBC, served as a consultant on the National Geographic Society's Gospel of Judas project and for The Bible television miniseries, and is featured in documentaries like Fragments of Truth and the Archaeology and Jesus series.
He's written hundreds of articles and reviews and published more than 70 books, including Jesus and His Contemporaries, Ancient Texts for New Testament Studies, Mark in the Word Biblical Commentary, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels, God Speaks, and Jesus and the Remains of His Days: Studies in Jesus and Archaeology. He coauthored Jesus, the Final Days with N. T. Wright.