andrewcriddle

Although the idea of a personified cross may seem bizarre, there appear to be ancient Christian parallels. See Peter Head's comments on Mark's blog post.

Andrew Criddle

jgoodguy

I don't see how you can claim one assertion is more bizarre that the other. One side a huge walking talking cross and on the other a huge walking talking dead man.

That is not to say that the mythical scribe or scribes/redactor/redactors did did not have a brain fart or intent to deceive, but impeaching the plain text requires a bit more. Taking a brief look at the thread shows several objectives. A unanimous slam dunk support for this assertion is not seen.

Sheshbazzar

...Towering all the way up into heaven.'
Visualising what is being described, it is like a scene from a old Warner Bros. Loony Toons cartoon.
And a debate on the specific details is like debating the specifics of a 2 second clip from a old W.B. cartoon.
It just don't make no fugging difference, being nothing more than a form of inane entertainment for childhood level mentalities.
May as well argue the antics of Popeye and Bluto, Bugs Bunny, or the depicitions of the ferocious Tweety Bird. :Cheeky:

DCHindley

More like one of those corney J C Chick comic tracts.

FWIW, didn't some late Roman era Jewish mystics speculate about God's anthromorphic dimensions, all of which give incredibly huge distances between different points of his body? Of course, they are implying that God is beyond all comprehension. It's like a gazillion dollars. The GoP is supposed to have been written in the late 1st or in the 2nd century CE, well before the period I am refering to.

DCH

Sheshbazzar

Mega-churches are in the business of providing a form of popular entertainment.
Its nothing new, it used to be performed around campfires, then on 'high places', in temples, and churches, and through popular writings.
I even watched a little bit of it this (Sunday) morning on TV. There is always a gullible audience willing to listen, and ready and willing to be fleeced.
Whatever a preacher can dream up or imagine, there is always someone willing to eat it up, pay for it, and crap it out all over the place.

JoeWallack

JW:
This sounds like an excerpt from the Republicans' Debt Ceiling Plan.



Joseph

ErrancyWiki

JoeWallack

JW:

The Gospel of Peter Translated by Raymond Brown

JW:
I don't think Goodacre has anything here besides an Argument from Incredulity. He has no External evidence and the Internal evidence is against him.

Regarding Internal, he starts out with The Difficult Reading Criterion going against him so he would need a majority of Internal evidence to overturn it. Here though, the evidence for an animated cross has scope:

1 Jesus being supported implies he is incapable of speech.

2 The conjunction shows that what follows is different from what precedes.

3 It says "cross".

4 The latter is animate (following)

5 Jesus is beyond the heavens, and it is the soldiers who are witnessing this, so the implication is that the voice is directed to the ground.

6 See 5

7 Brown demonstrates in The Death of the Messiah that GoP best parallels "Matthew" and "Matthew" has an implication that dead Jesus was busy visiting the dead while on the cross. The best/only witness to the question here of witnessing to the dead would be the cross.

Brown further notes that "Matthew" has future plans for the cross:

Matthew 24:30

with signs that sound reMarkably like signs at the Death and the implication that this cross is not just a cross.

http://www.epicfail.com/



Joseph

ErrancyWiki

mountainman

I would like to still maintain that it is a post Nicaean satire of the Constantine Bible, and that Mark Goodacre's "solution" is ad hoc.

Chronology

Big E. provides the mainstream dating estimate c.170 CE for The Gospel of Peter. Eusebius cites Origen, Justin Martyr and Serapion as mentioning this text although in the case of Justin, MR James comments that “the evidence is not demonstrative”. Eusebius has an unknown Serapion report that he walked into a Gnostic library and “borrowed” a copy of this text.

IMO Big E. is just lying about the momentous reception that Constantine's Bible received at the hands of the non-Christian Greek Alexandrian academics which occurred in his lifetime, and is retrojecting the "Gnostic reaction" into his fabricated history. There is no evidence corroborating Big E, and the C14 results for similar evidence (gJudas) support a later chronology (220-340 CE).

Satire against Constantine's Bible

One of the strongest elements of evidence pointing to this interpretation is the wistful admission from Eusebius himself ....

The "Gospel of Peter" is a sample of 4th century "Monty Pythonesque" satire aimed at the sudden appearance of the new centralised monotheistic state Universal "Church" and its Constantine Bible. It's a 4th century "Life of Brian". "Let's look on the bright side of life". The Constantine Bible was deadly serious bullshit and someone wanted to laugh at it. I dont blame them either. The orthodox prohibited laughter against "The Serious Official Jesus Story", and thus censored burned and destroyed the "Competitive Non Official Stories" that were appearing among the academic dissidents, for the purposes of popular entertainment. The theatre was the 4th century version of Hollywood. Jesus first appears in ancient history c.325 CE as a very very CONTRAVERSIAL historical figure and got bagged left, right and center by the Gnostic Greek "Gentile" heretics.

Toto

This is just crazy. There is no indication that this gospel was written in the 4th century, or that it satirizes orthodoxy. It was rejected by the church for its docetic tendencies.

Goodacre may be incorrect, but his solution is not "ad hoc." Please refer to the discussion above of that term.

That is not evidence for your interpretation. It is evidence that nonbelievers ridiculed Christians, but ridicule was a common theme in Roman theater.

Go back and review the history of the Life of Brian. The Monty Python humorists liked Jesus. They were not making fun of Jesus.

Please stop repeating your talking points until you actually have some evidence to support them.

mountainman

The object of the ridicule as stated was "the sacred matters of inspired teaching", suggests the Constantine Bible, not its followers.

Political satire was a common theme in Greek theatre, and the context is quite explicit in that we are dealing with Greek theatre in Alexandria, not Roman theatre in Rome.