Monday, November 06, 2017

New Licona post: Over-reading

I have a new post up on Licona examples. This one concerns over-reading connected with chronology. It's a theme that comes up repeatedly that those who want to argue against harmonizations will insist that an author is implying a chronology, while traditional harmonizers will often argue that an author isn't implying a chronology at all. If anything, if we're concerned about anachronism, the "bias" here concerning the Gospels should go toward the traditional harmonizers, since ancient authors did more writing than we do in which they were just narrating things that occurred close to one another in time without implying that the narrative order, often connected by non-committal words like kai for "and," is the chronological order. As I have often said, it is particularly ironic that those who are pressing for us to "understand the conventions of the time" seem so anachronistically rigid in insisting that chronological order is present in passages. This does not solve all apparent discrepancies. I myself don't think it solves some of the apparent discrepancies between Matthew and Mark concerning the chronology of Passion Week, for example. But it solves a fair number of them concerning chronology. Why, then, does Licona so seldom avail himself of this explanation?

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