Ted Hoffman

Thanks Toto. It seems Muller may not respond after all. (You did move my last instalment on Muller's reconstruction into the new thread)

Yuri Kuchinsky

Agreed.

Morton Smith also springs to mind here, somehow. Yet another "radical" who is often not so radical at all...

Only Loisy is the true radical. He never accepts anything uncritically!

Nice little book.

But that's a commonly expressed view.

Well, I don't know if I agree with any of them on this...

These titles, "Christ", and "Son of God", are both heavily loaded theologically, with a number of possible interpretations.

AFAIAC Peter was slammed in Mk and in other gospels because he was one of the close followers of Jesus, and because he was a Jewish-Christian. These are the folks who were slammed post 140 CE. Which is when such passages were added IMHO.

Best,

Yuri

Amaleq13

Yet the author of Mark depicts Peter as identifying Jesus only as "Christ". Goulder sees this as applying the purely human title of "Messiah" in contrast to the author's belief in the Pauline divine title of "Son of God".

It is this same contrast that is the central thesis of Maccoby's book though I don't see Goulder reading it with the same significance.

Arg! More suspected interpolations!!

Wouldn't it be nice if the devoutly faithful early Christians had treated the original version of the story to be unchangeable history?

Amaleq13

He asked me to try to fix it so here you go:

THE FOLLOWING WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED BY JACOB ALIET:

I informed him after the fact that I reproduced his article here.

Now that we are done with that...

On Muller's Reconstruction

For my preliminary reading, I printed over 50 pages of Muller's website and have read through From Nazareth to the desert:
The early years (HJ-1a) Conception, birth, family, Galilee, education and language John the Baptist (HJ-1b) Pilate's blunder, John's meteoric public life and the Kingdom of God.

I am impressed at Muller's willingness to admit fabrication in several parts of the gospels and prophecy-slutting on the part of some evangelists. But am also disapointed at the work.

Muller makes almost no arguments at all. His work, in this respect, is comparable to Josh McDowell's The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict - McDowell also swarms readers with mounds of evidence without explaining what he is trying to prove and how the evidence is related to whatever he is trying to prove.

Muller lays out evidence in the first 50 pages without synthesizing them and tying up the argument to what he is trying to prove. His website is largely a collection of quoted references. The range of data and sources is impressive but the reader is left wondering 'where is he going with this?' 'What has he proved so far?'

Muller simply 'argues' through the subtitles he uses but doesn't do the work of stating x shows us y and therefore this proves that p. He doesnt explain what he has established and what he is establishing - its up to the reader to figure that out. His usage of the gospels to buttress his subtitles, as if they are independent sources, also speaks about the quality of his work.

I respond below to a few passages that are his, where he seems to come within the references and say something related to the reconstruction of a HJ.

He also has the habit of providing negative evidence (e.g. disprove that Jesus was born in Bethlehem) then after discrediting a theory, making a positive claim about the contrary position (Jesus was therefore born in Galilee [Nazareth]) and then following it with unexplained references that supposedly support the position he favours.

Just like in his intro, where he disproves the idea that the evangelists were fabricating the son of a perfect, omniscient, glorious God and therefore Jesus must have been a HJ, so does he make several other arguments one of which is below.

Here is the example I reference above.

Regarding Jesus' brothers and sisters, Muller writes:

These are passages that are in dispute and I think Muller knows this is and probably addreses the disputes elsewhere. Muller even quotes Josephus on James being the brother of Jesus and yet he knows the usage of the word brother does not necessarily mean 'blood brother'. Early Christianity was like a brotherhood of sorts.

spin explained earlier that "When Paul uses the absolute "the Lord", not "my lord" or "the lord (someone)", he is referring to Yahweh. When the term "o kurios" is used without any qualifications, ie in the absolute, a reader understands that it refers to God.

When the term "o kurios" is used without any qualifications, ie in the absolute, a reader understands that it refers to God. "kurios" used in the LXX. Look at Ps 110:1 with its "the Lord said to my lord" (Gk: eipen o kurios tw kuriw mou, Heb: N'M YHWH L-'DNY). Reading it might be confusing if you didn't realise that o kurios, "the lord" refers to God, o kurios mou, "my lord", does not."

I think Muller also fails when he presents evidence supporting a certain position without revealing to the readers that the argument he is making, or the passages he references and their interpretations are in dispute and without indicating whether he addresses those disputes elsewhere.

Given that Muller leaves to the reader the burden of assiduously analyzing the evidence, sythesizing the information to create knowledge, I will stop here in analyzing Muller's reconstruction. If its a work in progress, he can update us when he is done so that it reads like an integration of evidence with whatever theory he is propounding.

He also doesn't seem to pay due regard to Markan priority (or whatever priority he prefers), the question of independence attestation and giving priority to the earliest strata.

Otherwise, nice galaxy of sources, even though they are almost all questionable and unexplained. And some of his 'evidence' are simply a waste of pages perhaps to dazzle readers for example on Judas and Simon:

Is all this necessary? What happened to elegance and economy?

Thats my bit on Muller's reconstruction. Muller could perhaps write a summary of his work - one that explains what he has achieved and how he has achieved it.

END OF JACOB ALIET POST

Llyricist

Ameleq,
Could you bracket that whole thing as a quote by jacob? I got a little confused reading it as if it were you because I had already read it in the other thread by him.

Amaleq13

What are you, a trouble-maker?


I think it will be easier and more intelligible if I just put a bold, colorful preceding statement identifying it as originally Jacob's. And, as I type it, so shall it be.

DramaQ

Thank you! This is precisely what I was wondering about for here. Off to do more reading!