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HOW CONFIDENT CAN WE BE IN RECONSTRUCTIONS OF THE PAST?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2013

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Extract

When I purchased Verdict on Jesus: A New Statement of Evidence, published by SPCK in 2010, I hoped it would confront me with the very latest attempt to vindicate Christian doctrines. In fact the book turns out to be fundamentally a reissue of a very conservative apologetic work of that title, first published sixty years earlier by an Anglican – Leslie Badham, who later became Vicar of Windsor and chaplain to the Queen. Admittedly, he updated the book in 1971, and in 1983 his son, the Revd. Professor Paul Badham, further revised it after the author's death, and later reissued it as a fourth edition, with further revision, in 1995. The present edition is thus the fifth, and includes a new introduction by Paul Badham and three new chapters (one of which he has written himself) presented with his conviction that the book is ‘a religious classic’ and ‘its central argument of permanent validity’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2013

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References

Notes

1 Evans, R. J.. In Defence of History (London: Granta Books, 2000), 219fGoogle Scholar.

2 ‘You can't reduce even ordinary simple statements about cigarette cases and glasses and ash trays to statements about sense data’. Ayer in : ‘Logical Positivism and its Legacy; a Dialogue with A. J. Ayer’, by Magee, B. E., in the latter's Men of Ideas (London: B.B.C., 1978), 130fGoogle Scholar. Ayer conceded in this dialogue that his famous Language, Truth and Logic is ‘nearly all false’, although he still affirmed ‘the general rightness of the approach’.

3 ‘Perception is something added to the actuality of the sensation proper. It is, in fact, that element of the ideal that gets so mixed up or associated with the actual as to be the chief obstacle to our quoting sensations, purely and properly so-called … There are many instances where a thing presented to the sense carries with it, in intimate fusion, ideas or elements not presented.’. Bain, A.The Senses and the Intellect, 4th edition (London: Longmans, 1894), 384fGoogle Scholar. James, William discusses the matter at some length in Chapter 19 of his The Principles of Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1901) and gives some account of the history of the idea of perceptionGoogle Scholar.

4 On Xenophanes, see Burnet, J.Early Greek Philosophy (London: Black, 1930), 122 (or later reprint)Google Scholar.

5 Räisänen, H.The Rise of Christian Beliefs (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 3Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., 122, 141, 171, 323, n. 52.

7 Sanders, E. P.Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM, 1985), 330Google Scholar.

8 Bauckham, R.Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids, Michigan and Cambridge, UK.: Eerdmans, 2006), 240Google Scholar.

9 Badham, P.. ‘Some Secular Trends in the Church of England’. In Religion, State and Society in Modern Britain, ed. Badham, P. (Lampeter: Mellen Press, 1989, 2333), 24fGoogle Scholar.