I had a wonderful day yesterday at Yale! During the morning a senior student took me on a walking tour of the campus. Like Oxford and Cambridge, Yale is composed of residential colleges. The buildings reminded me very much of Oxford, where Jan and I overnighted last November in St. John’s College. But there’s this major difference: whereas the college buildings in Oxford and Cambridge really are old, the college buildings at Yale only look old, many of them having been built in the 1930s! The student told me that they even used tar to blacken the buildings to make them look ancient! We had lunch at Mory’s, a traditional Yale eatery with tables deeply carved with patrons’ initials over the years. I had salmon bites, which was very good. After resting and studying back in my room during the afternoon, we went to Battell Chapel, a beautiful, darkly paneled chapel at the heart of the old campus where our meeting was to take place. I spoke on the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection and then entertained questions from the students. It was fun to be speaking on Jesus’ resurrection just prior to Easter. One thing that struck me was that students have a very difficult time understanding how NT scholars treat the New Testament documents as sources of ancient history. Its extraordinarily difficult for them to free themselves from the notion that one is assuming the reliability of the New Testament when one examines what these documents have to say about Jesus. One has to go to great lengths to get them to understand that NT historians are treating these documents neutrally like any other documents of antiquity and exploring what historical facts we can glean from them. The other thing I noticed that was unique to the Yale audience were the questions about liberal Christianity (their label, not mine). Probably as a result of the influence of Yale Divinity School, some students wanted to ask about understanding Jesus’ resurrection in a purely symbolic or metaphorical sense. I never get questions like that anywhere else! One student told of how his professor marked down his paper because he referred to Jesus’ rising “from the dead.” She objected to that phrase, saying only that Jesus rose (which, I suppose, could then be interpreted non-literally). I explained how out of touch such an attitude was with first century Judaism. So it was a great time! Now I’m eager to get back home.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 11:04:08 +0000
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