Phronesis

In the summer of last year, I spent my birthday wondering the historic streets of Dublin, Ireland. There was no shortage of Irish heritage for me to behold, from the still-present bullet holes in the GPO building from the 1916 Easter Rising to the Book of Kells sitting comfortably in a dimly lit and strictly no-photographs room in Trinity College. The summit of my visit was the Chester-Beatty library, not too far from Dublin Castle.  Looming adjacent to the room where fragments of the famous P46 manuscript are housed stood a info-board that read the following: " The early Christian movement was exceptionally diverse; the numerous Christian groups in the second and third centuries had a wide range of beliefs and practices. Most had gospels written by 'apostles' to back up their claims. In the fourth century, one group became dominant, deeming itself orthodox (true) while marginalising all others as heretical (false) ." The use of terms such as "diverse," ...

I am naturally sceptical whenever experts of one academic discipline step into another. Scientists often make bad historians. Historians often make bad philosophers. Examples of these abound. It's the philosophers, however, that wield a certain advantage. Because their field encompasses all fields of inquiry, philosophers are in a reasonably good position to inspect other disciplines even if they have little or no specialist knowledge. The entire intellectual world is the philosopher's playground.  So in the case of The Godless Gospel , I am honestly unsure of how to take philosopher Julian Baggini's attempt at wading into theology and the study of the person of Jesus. This is primarily because Baggini is not  commenting on either issues, but rather the ethics of Jesus and applying what he taught in a secular moral system. The first half of the book is dedicated to an in-depth analysis of Jesus' moral teachings (p. 13-178) . The second half is his own version of the gos...