Search results for ""author michael r licona""

The question of the historicity of Jesus' resurrection has been repeatedly probed, investigated and debated. And the results have varied widely. Perhaps some now regard this issue as the burned-over district of New Testament scholarship. Could there be any new and promising approach to this problem? Yes, answers Michael Licona. And he convincingly points us to a significant deficiency in approaching this question: our historiographical orientation and practice. So he opens this study with an extensive consideration of historiography and the particular problem of investigating claims of miracles. This alone is a valuable contribution. But then Licona carefully applies his principles and methods to the question of Jesus' resurrection. In addition to determining and working from the most reliable sources and bedrock historical evidence, Licona critically weighs other prominent hypotheses. His own argument is a challenging and closely argued case for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, the Christ. Any future approaches to dealing with this 'prize puzzle' of New Testament study will need to be routed through The Resurrection of Jesus.

Read more less

The differences and discrepancies in the Gospels constitute the foremost objections to their reliability and the credibility of their message. Some have tried to resolve Gospels contradictions with strained harmonization efforts. Many others conclude that the Gospels are hopelessly contradictory and, therefore, historically unreliable accounts of Jesus.In Jesus, Contradicted, New Testament scholar Michael Licona shows how the genre of ancient biography, to which the Gospels belong, actually allows biographers to be flexible in how they report events, construct a narrative, and make an argument. Licona demonstrates that the intentional changes to the Jesus tradition by the Evangelists reveal that the differences in how the Gospels report events are not grounds for their rejection. Instead, they are a result of the Gospel writers employing standard literary conventions common in their time for writing ancient biography.Licona introduces readers to the genre of a

Read more less

Anyone who reads the Gospels carefully will notice that there are differences in the manner in which they report the same events. These differences have led many conservative Christians to resort to harmonization efforts that are often quite strained, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Many people have concluded the Gospels are hopelessly contradictory and, therefore, historically unreliable accounts of Jesus. The majority of New Testament scholars now hold that most if not all of the Gospels belong to the genre of Greco-Roman biography and that this genre permitted some flexibility in the manner that historical events were narrated. However, few scholars provide a robust discussion on how this plays out in Gospel pericopes (self-contained passages). Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? provides a fresh approach to the matter by examining the works of Plutarch, a Greek essayist who lived in the first and second centuries CE. Michael R. Licona discovers three-dozen pericopes narrated two or more times in Plutarch's Lives, identifies differences between the accounts, and views these differences in light of compositional devices acknowledged by classical scholars to have been commonly employed by ancient authors. The book then uses the same approach with nineteen pericopes narrated in two or more Gospels to demonstrate that the major differences found in them likely result from the same compositional devices employed by Plutarch. By suggesting that both the strained harmonizations and the hasty dismissals of the Gospels as reliable accounts are misguided, Licona invites readers to view the Gospels in light of their biographical genre in order to gain a clearer understanding of why the differences are present.

Read more less