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Obres de Gerd Lüdemann

The Resurrection of Jesus (1994) 61 exemplars
Jesus After 2000 Years (2001) 13 exemplars
Rediscovering the apostle Paul (2011) 8 exemplars
What Jesus Didn't Say (2011) 6 exemplars

Obres associades

The Once & Future Faith (2001) 32 exemplars

Etiquetat

Coneixement comú

Nom normalitzat
Lüdemann, Gerd
Data de naixement
1946-07-05
Data de defunció
2021-05-23
Gènere
male
Nacionalitat
Germany
Lloc de naixement
Visselhövede, Niedersachsen, Deutschland
Lloc de defunció
Göttingen, Niedersachsen, Deutschland
Professions
theologian
Organitzacions
Protestant Church

Membres

Ressenyes

This book sets out as a corrective for the idea that the New Testament is all about peace and love, and the violence and intolerance in the Bible is restricted to the Old Testament. The author is able to show that there is plenty of intolerance and violence to go around.
 
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Devil_llama | Apr 18, 2011 |
The author Gerd Lüdemann is who was the Professor of New Testament at the University of Göttingen, Germany and Director of the Institute of Early Christian Studies. He has also served as Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee, and as co-chair of the Society of Biblical Literature Seminar on Jewish Christianity. His many books include The Resurrection of Jesus, The Great Deception, The Unholy in Holy Scripture, and Heretics: The Other Side of Early Christianity. He is also research fellow of the Westar Institute and the Jesus Seminar. With all that said he is a bad historian and theologian who is part of a number of liberal scholars with advanced degrees in biblical & religious studies who have denied the faith and use the guise of biblical criticism to grind there axe against the church and the bible.

In his book The Unholy In Holy Scripture - The Dark side of the Bible, which was originally written in german then translated for broader english audience. Lüdemann has become one of the most prominent and sharpest critics of the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus with a provocative hypothesis that early Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection was the product of hallucinatory experiences originally induced by guilt-complexes in Peter and Paul. This rebuttal to this argument is provided in an article by Dr. William Lan Craig titled “Visions of Jesus: A Critical Assessment of Gerd Lüdemann’s Hallucination Hypothesis.” Craig in the past debated with Ludeman on this topic in the past Jesus’ Resurrection: Fact or Figment? which was published.

The pages of the this book are full of bad anti-apologetics and is biased and he states presuppostions for his arguements without any evidence or historical background. Inturn his statements are straw men not able to withstand the the winds of imposing question by the reader. Obvious he sounds like he has an axe to grind against the church and the bible. The worst bit is the part about New Testament exgesis of selective text. To make a long story short, here is an example of Ludemann’s type of “reasoning”: he just lines up a sample of anti-jewish polemic out of the New Testament (ignoring completely the context), puts it along with some nasty bits by Eusebius and Luther, and here we go. And this man (who, nervetheless, did some good job in the past) pretends to be a serious historian. He sets up these straw men titled by his two man attacks on scripture Unholy Violence against others covering the wars of Israel against surrounding tribes especialty the canaanites. The other being Anti-Judaism in the New Testament which he aspires to explain how Paul and the scriptures teach a theology of hate towad the Jews for the murder of Jesus and those who would follow him. Some of the anti-thetical statements he make in his book are stated.

In other words, the gulf betwen historical fact and its alleged meaning, between history and proclamation, between the actual history of Jesus and the variegated picture of his history in the NT, makes it impossible o continue to argue seriously that the writings of the New Testament are inspired, or even to indentify the Word of God with Holy Scripture. Page 2

“It is high time to understand the Bible in a human way, to arouse it like a sleeping beauty and thoroughly to do away with the monopolistic claim which the Christian churches and large areas of so-called academic theology have successfully established in their highly selective biblical exegesis.” Page 26

So the fact remains that there are thousands of Christ, i.e. human pictures of a super-earthly Son of God, but only one Jesus…..But the divinised Christ has little to do with Jesus. Page 132

In the end Ludemann was expelled from his chair on the theology faculty at the University of Göttingen by reason of the content of his academic writing and lecturing on the history and theology of earliest Christianity. He was expelled from his post as professor of New Testament and assigned a professorship of the history and literature of Early Christianity thereby losing all his academic rights and being forced into a ghetto existence within the theological faculty. The expulsion of professor from his academic post came as a public consequence of his poor scholarship. Sadly Ludeman denies the faith he grew up studying and taught in a the halls of theological lecture halls in Germany.
… (més)
 
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moses917 | Sep 13, 2009 |
The author correctly stresses the papal (Benedict XVI) flaws in his book 'Jesus of Nazareth', in which the pope makes use of an unacceptable methodology in dealing with the historical Jesus.

However, I did not appreciate the overall tone of the book which should have been simply objective, detached, professional, and not denigratory in any way.

I think that a passionate, objective research aimed at revealing the historical Jesus is needed in a society in search of more complete answers than those 'delivered' by the Catholic Church. It is of the higher importance that such an inquiry would not be devalued by unacceptable behaviours.… (més)
 
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Adalberht | Aug 2, 2009 |
In his introduction, the author portrays the Gnostics of the second century as misunderstood, open-minded, liberal spiritual seekers whose "unsurpassed religious creativity" was brutally repressed and whose mythic literature was regrettably extirpated by a rigidly dogmatic catholic hierarchy.
"Suppressed for reasons of dogma and church politics, the Gnostic prayers nevertheless are evidence of an earnest and deep religious sense without which the history of Christianity would certainly have lost some of its richness. Even if the Gnostics were fought against or defamed with every possible means and their prayers fell victim to church censorship, the fascination of Gnosticism remains to the present day."

However, since mainstream Christians (not just the ones that Lüdemann labels "orthodox/catholic", but Montanists, Arians, and a whole host of other streams of faith) actually believed in their religion (as he clearly does not), it is not surprising that they considered truth (as they perceived it) to be more important than mythological "creativity", and were at the very least deeply suspicious of Gnostics, who suborned and reinterpreted Christianity as part of their own esoteric mythic system. The subtitle "Gnostic Spirituality in Early Christianity" is misleading: it might suggest (as does the passage above) that Gnostic spirituality was a thread within the tapestry of Christian faith-history; but the author himself shows that it is, on the contrary, to be seen either as an attempt to import elements into Christianity from sources quite alien to its ethos and origins, such as Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, and pseudo-Egyptian magic traditions; or, alternatively, as an attempt to annex the narrative of Christianity to a broader pagan mythos (much as figures from Roman Catholicism are absorbed into voodoo cults). It seems entirely reasonable that the Christian church should have regarded Gnostics as essentially subversive.

Lüdemann's presentation might seem more justifiable if the Gnostic prayers in his anthology offered something of clear spiritual or literary value to the contemporary reader. I was hoping that this would be the case - that one might find texts of the stature of the sayings from the Gospel of Thomas or the teachings of the Didache. One of them (from the 'Acts of John') at least has a literary history in modern times, and was set by Gustav Holst as the Hymn of Jesus (miscalled by Lüdemann Hymn of Christ). However, the texts are for the most part extraordinarily tedious, irritating in their repetitiveness and their pointless contradictions ("he is uncircumcised, even though he has been circumcised"), with inserted spells and magical gibberish ("Zoxathazo, aoo ee ooo eee ooo oee...[etc.]") which probably served merely to make a grand impression even when first written down.

I praise you, light-truly-unmoved, you [light] for those who have been moved in your [light].
I praise you, silence of all light-silences.
I praise you, saviour of [all] light-saviours.

(from "The Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex")

Hear me - I sing your praise, O first mystery, (you) who have shone in your mystery, (you) who have caused Jeu to establish the eleventh aeon; and you have instituted archons, decans and ministers in the eleventh aeon, whose imperishable name is plouzaaa. Save all my members which have been scattered since the foundation of the world in all the archons and the decans and the ministers of the eleventh aeon; gather them all together and take them into the light.
(from 'The Books of Jeu': the surviving verses repeat almost identical wording from the fifth aeon - whose imperishable name is psamazaz - to the thirteenth - Iazazaaa - and beyond!)

A handful only are worthy of a second look, such as the 'Psalm of Valentinus' (seven lines preserved by the Christian writer Hippolytus, possibly not even Gnostic in origin) and the 'Christ Hymn' already mentioned.

Calling these texts "suppressed", and writing up their authors as the victims of ancient church repression and censorship, is obviously designed to increase their "fascination" for the modern anti-establishment book-buyer: one always has some delicious guilty feeling when reading something that has been banned by the authorities, even if only by the authorities of 1,800 years ago. But the modern reader will have a hard time satisfying anything beyond mere historical curiosity about a religious tradition whose outpourings were justifiably buried in the dust of ages, and on balance could just as well have remained there.

MB 16-vii-2009

PS: I was amused to discover that my assessment of Gnostic literature unintentionally echoes that of a distinguished scholar in the field. In the Preface to The Apocryphal New Testament, M. R. James comments that
"while the Pistis Sophia is just readable, the Books of Jeu are not. The revelations they contain are conveyed in mystic diagrams, and numbers, and meaningless collections of letters, and it requires a vast deal of historical imagination and sympathy to put oneself in the place of anybody who could tolerate, let alone reverence, the dreary stuff."

MB 27-vii-2009
… (més)
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MyopicBookworm | Jul 16, 2009 |

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Obres
36
També de
1
Membres
647
Popularitat
#39,006
Valoració
2.9
Ressenyes
10
ISBN
67
Llengües
3

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