JoeWallack

JW:
Can you summarize her main points here?

JW:
I'm thinking in terms of the link of Sources all The Way to the Original source. What were the sources for The canonical, non-canonical Gospels and Talmud.

JW:
1) They are Biased.

2) They do Not agree.

3) They lack Scientific Methodology.

4) They lack Provenance.

JW:
No.

JW:
Hart: Kingsfield, you're a son of a bitch.

Kingsfield: That Mr. Hart, is the first intelligent thing you've said all semester.

JW:

1) Paul - No mention of Jesus as a miracle-worker. The ability to explain this is Secondary to the lack of mention.

2) "Mark" - This Jesus is definitely a miracle-worker but there's a Distance between "Mark's" definition and yours. And what was "Mark's" source? "Mark" is mainly interested in Discrediting those who supposedly knew Jesus best. "Mark's" primary Source looks to me to be Paul. All the major themes match up:

1 - The Passion is what's important.

2 - Irony of Jesus' prophecy fulfillment.

3 - Historical witness unimportant.

4 - Faith is what's important.

5 - Knowledge of Jesus comes from Revelation.

6 - Jesus' history was the Jewish Bible.

7 - Jesus had Authority to change the Law.

8 - The important Jesus' Revelation is "Son of God" and not Messiah.

It looks to me like "Mark" took basic ideas from Paul and fleshed a Narrative out of them. The purpose of the miracle-working in "Mark" seems to be just a Literary device to show Contrast between Works, which are shown as unimportant, and Passion, which is shown as Important. Related to this "Mark" follows Paul's "Type" Assertian that Jewish Bible events were a Type for subsequent Jesus' events. "Mark" has paralleled Jesus' miracle working to Elijah/Elisha. All pretty good evidence that "Mark's" Jesus' miracle working is a Literary device to some extent as opposed to Historical miracle-working.

3) Q - No emphasis of Jesus as miracle-worker

And what about the Historical witness? Why doesn't anyone who supposedly knew Jesus have anything preserved claiming miracle-working? Because there wasn't any, or at least it was not the important part of Jesus?

JW:
There's a reason.



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

waltms

No, I don't have time for that. You can get her book from the library and read.

Provenance? You're here wandering into the area of textual criticism.

Do you expect any ancient text to provide the reliability of a modern peer-reviewed science journal article? This is all a big strawman. All ancient historians are aware of the problem of sources; this is why things like form, source and redaction criticism exist.

I did not even mention Paul as a source for the historical Jesus because Paul has virtually nothing to say about his life except that he knows that he died on a cross.

I'm not going to engage in a literary analysis of Mark here. If you want to do that, start a thread on http://neonostalgia.com/forum/.

Q still has miracle material, e.g. Mt 8:5-13/Lk 7:2-10, Mt 12:22-30/Lk 11:14-23.

No one who would have known him has any text surviving, period.

Toto

I added the Amazon URL to your original post, so anyone with an Amazon account can go and read those pages (just seach for 'documents.')

This is very disappointing. Fredricksen assumes, based on nothing, that there were oral traditions about Jesus, and a collection of his sayings in Aramaic. She then discusses the various criteria that conventional scholars use to try to sift through the obviously unreliable gospels, written much later and in a different language, that we do have, and extract some sort of reliable history from it, but her emphasis is on how uncertain this all is. One gets the sense that she approaches this puzzle with relish, as if the difficulty of it adds to the enjoyment in finding a solution. But when you drop her assumptions, she gives no good reasons for finding a historical man at the core of the mess of documents.

What am I missing? When someone asked Fredriksen to justify a historical Jesus and sent the results to Doherty a few years ago, she seemed to just flounder, as if she had never really thought about it.

mens_sana

I would have thought the presence of oral traditions was fairly obvious. A couple of the Apostolic Fathers even appear to prefer the oral over the written. I imagine her use of an Aramaic collection of Jesus sayings derives from the Papias' mention of Matthew's collection of Jesus' logion. And, of course, it is all uncertain, e.g. the number of differing portraits of Jesus floating around today, all drawn by reputable scholars. It all makes for an interesting number of probabilities.

Toto

The presense of oral traditions is not at all obvious, when so much of the gospels can be traced to the Septuagint.

We have a second hand quote from Papias about a collection of sayings, which have conveniently been lost.

How can anyone be sure that these reconstructions of Jesus, based on this flimsy evidence, are anything other than projection and imagination?

renassault

Haha, is that akin to Cicero's: "The reason I'm writing to you a long letter is because I don't have the time to write you a shorter one."?

Doug Shaver

It is obvious only under a presupposition that there was a historical Jesus for some oral traditions to be about.

Once it became apparent that, contrary to many centuries of Christian tradition, the gospels were not eyewitness reports of anything, NT scholars had to posit some other source for the stories. There being no known earlier writings about Jesus' life and teachings, the authors must have relied on oral traditions -- if they were writing about a man who had actually existed. Since his existence was thought to be beyond question, there were oral traditions about him. QED.

mens_sana

The LXX was the most popular version, I suppose the KJV of the day.

"Conveniently" is a convenient way to put it, but the citation is still there and it does speak of a sayings collection in Hebrew/Aramaic. Considering that in almost the same breath Papias cites Mark as being less than an orderly account, it's worth keeping in mind.

It is a scholarly penchant: find something unique and build a book contract on it — rather like the cottage industry built on Q. But all of these portraits acknowledge that elements of the "other portraits" are contained in theirs. Jesus-as-an-Apocalypticist seems to have a little bit of an edge — though not much of one, probably because the apocalyptic end never came. I like the apocalyptic portrait.; it turns Jesus into a very human figure.