|  |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Reasons > Scholarship > Con: Reverend Arthur Darby Nock |
| Scholarly Authority | Yes! | History of Scholarship | Amateur Scholarship | |
| Con: J. Z. Smith | Con: AD Nock | Con: BM Metzger | Sourcebooks |
 |
What,
you thought I was making this up? |
 |
A review of Dr. Nock's reasons. Lots of kettle logic. |
|
| Believers
in their own words Doctor of Divinity A. D. Nock His criteria make it impossible to discover Christian borrowing from Paganism. |
| Here's
how Doctor of Divinity A. D. Nock puts
it in the believers' canonical "refutation" of Christian- Pagan
syncretism >>
"Much" of what we know about the Pagan mystery religions dates from the third or forth centuries, asserts Dr. Nock expansively, pointing a finger and slurring his speech ever so little, and by then Paganism was "probably" assimilating Christian ideas. Dr. Nock apparently doesn't need much—any—analysis to see Pagan borrowing. Borrowing is conceivable; therefore borrowing is "probable" and "obvious." QED. Who's ready for lunch? |
|
||||||||
| But right away Doctor of Divinity Nock lets on that his standard for accepting Christian borrowing is just a teensy bit different. I use "teensy" here in its inter-galactic astronomical sense. For
Christian borrowing we must
And, says Doctor of Divinity Nock, it is impossible to know all those things!! >> So, according to Doctor of Divinity Nock himself, his criteria make it impossible to discover Christian borrowing from Paganism. |
The
greatest caution must therefore
be exercised in determining what was the precise
character of any particular mystery which might be supposed to
have influenced [pg 59] Christianity in the first century ; we
need in effect to know its
character at the point of contact, since it is unsafe to assume
that there would be complete uniformity in any such cult wherever practiced
(we know that later this was certainly not so with Mithraism, which varied
in details from East to West). Further, we require some means of estimating
not merely in what cities a
particular mystery was observed, but what the local
intensity was, whether it was
for instance impossible for any man in those parts to be unaware of its
more characteristic features, or at any rate of its existence.
To all these questions there cannot be complete and satisfactory
answers . |
Much
of what we know of the 
Doctor of Divinity Nock's analysis uses different criteria to identify Pagan and Christian borrowing. Pagan borrowing that is conceivable is "obvious." Christian borrowing is always—always!—excluded by Doctor of Divinity Nock's analysis.
Doctor of Divinity Nock's analysis fails because it is designed to make Christian borrowing impossible. |
We've
been sitting in a wagon with no wheels. When your analysis makes
it impossible to discover borrowing, and then you don't discover
borrowing, the only real information in that "no borrowing"
result is that your analysis was designed not to work. When you sit is
a wagon with no wheels, you always go nowhere.| Remember, I'm not telling you about Doctor of Divinity Nock because I think his analysis is weak. I'm showing you what he wrote because on the subject of Christian borrowing from Paganism, Doctor of Divinity Nock is the most famous, most admired, most cited, most quoted anti-borrowing scholar there is. And this book, Early Gentile Christianity and its Hellenistic Background is the most famous, most admired, most cited, most quoted anti-borrowing book anybody anywhere ever wrote on the subject. |
| Early
Gentile Christianity and Its Hellenistic Background
|
You'll
find:
First
published in 1928 and reissued and updated in 1964, this is the
canonical refutation of the late 19th and early 20th century
scholarly claims that Christianity borrowed from Paganism.
This essay is widely cited as an authority, "Dr. Nock has refuted
the German School. . .", and the arguments Nock developed here are
the same ones believers use today.
|
  |
Nock was a Harvard professor who read and understood the scholarship. He did not—could not, in that generation when scholars knew better—deny the deep similarities between Christianity and the Pagan mysteries. For example >> |
The
Eucharist ... is in line with contemporary mysteries, which purported
to represent the sufferings and triumph of a god, in which his worshipers
sympathized and shared....The
Eucharist is a mystery, as mysteries
were then understood, and Christianity, the heir of Judaism, has also
an essential spiritual continuity with Hellenistic religion.
|
|
|
Nock was also a committed Christian, a Doctor of Divinity who wasn't about to admit Christianity borrowed from Paganism, so for every similarity he comes up with a reason the similarity doesn't count. The 1964
Harper Torchbook edition is expanded with Nock's
later thoughts and arguments. It is
out of print, but often available used through Amazon
|
