Someone gave me a recording of a lecture from Princeton University. The speaker has nearly as much education as I, along with the distinction of having published papers and books and having received various awards and grants. Most noteworthy of all, he was hired by Princeton, so the guy ought to know his stuff.
He doesn’t.
Oh, he knows a lot, I suppose, but he doesn’t know that he’s as blind as a bat in a tanning salon. He’s lecturing, ostensibly, on the Apostle Paul, but he totally misses Paul’s point again and again and again. One example: he claims that Paul addressed the sex lives of the Corinthians because he wanted this new religion of his to have a different reputation than the Dionysian cults it competed with. It never seems to have occurred to Dr. Bat that maybe Paul condemned fornication because it is wrong. And this is but one example among dozens. No neophyte could ever listen to these lectures and actually learn what Paul taught.
Dr. Bat went on to say that the letter to the Colossians was spurious. (Against all of the English speaking world, he chooses to pronounce it “koe-loe-shee-ans.” I’m so impressed!) This kind of presumption is called “New Testament Criticism” or, as we said in seminary, “N. T. Crit.” It has all the orderliness of a group of flies buzzing against a window: they all make similar noises, but they never agree and they all constantly change their position for no real reason. “This is genuine, this is spurious, this paragraph is an interpolation, this was poorly redacted . . .” N. T. Crit is about as reliable as someone who tells the future by examining bird guts.
I was at a meeting of such scholars once. They never could get a discussion going about Paul’s writings because they bogged down in the debate over which writings were Paul’s and which were forgeries.
Your tax dollars at work, mind you.
Why do Christian parents send their kids to such schools?
