mountainman

The gentiles were the audience. The Greek civilisation was to be magnificently converted to the group of Christian INSIDERS. This was to be accompished by preaching the "Good Faith" of the gospels, although if the historical truth be known, this approach was augmented by Constantine's pragmatic use of the sword. With the assistance of Christianity and the Good Faith of the gospels, he single-handedly converted the entire Greek civilisation in the Roman Empire to Galilaeanism. It took another thousand years to recover and the mess has still not be clarified.

Doug Shaver

I believe that the Jesus of the gospels was a fictional character. I believe that the Jesus of the Pauline epistles was something else.

No, I do not believe that that is what happened.

Yes, I am aware of that. From it, I infer that Eusebius believed (quite mistakenly, of course) that the gospels were works of history.

A total irrelevancy.

Well, then, they must have believed that the gospels were not to be questioned.

Yes, we can do that now.

That depends entirely on whether the gospel authors intended for their readers to think the gospels were something other than fiction.

Your opinion, or mine, of their value to humanity is irrelevant to any inquiry into the motives with which their authors wrote them.

Chili

They are called myth-makers who neetly wrap images of truth with words into a story that has no resemblance to the literal meaning of the words at all. A good example here is how [our] Advent is identical to the Flood story, and also that the 'temptation' allegory is the flip side of John's Cana event (notice that there is no infancy in John at this time which means that the infancy in the synoptics is allegory in itself and Mark actually confirms this).

Then they back-date this thing (the bible we call it) to let all skeletons die and attached it to history where gawkers can look so they might believe and hawkers tell them to go look so they will believe, while in fact the very word believe (be-lief) has nothing to do with second hand opinions but with being one with our indoctrinated values wherein we are branded as one of their own. Hence the 'fishers of men' allegory is appropriate but I would call them people ranchers and we are a slave not just to their vices but also to their virtues from where liberty is found from the illusion that fostered us.

The temple top, shoreline, Bethany, desert, Gethsamene, and all those places are mental stages or events and recurring events to help us get our ass out of purgatory so that our nocturnal past will also be a thing of the past.

(Don't forget here that we are determinate creatures who's freedom to think is not equal to the freedom from thinking.)

mountainman

So you suggest a composite. Do you regard the Pauline Jesus as fictional or historical or something else?

Do you believe then in some form of integrous preservation from the early epoch to Eusebius - probably via Pamphilus via Origen?


To cite Richard Carrier's "Eusebius was either a liar or hopelessly credulous" again, you appear to be following the latter option. How hopeless must the credulousness become before you are willing to entertain the possibility that the mass of writings under the name of Eusebius contain purposeful falsehoods?

Compliments of the seasons.

spamandham

Let's not use the "f" word, but yes, they were writing their own origins story with no concern for accurately recording reality past.

I'm not saying the audience helped write it, I'm saying that both the author(s) and the intended audience knew it was an origins story (originally at least) and not a record of reality. The ancients did not make sharp divisions between myths and reality the way we do, well some did, but that was the exception rather than the rule.

Larkin31

agreed

Larkin31

Early believers were quite credulous.

This is nothing new.

Doug Shaver

I'm not sure what you mean by that.
Something else. Paul thought Jesus inhabited some kind of spirit world that he believed existed separately from the material world. He believed that the spirit world was at least as real as this one, so he was not writing fiction. But events happening in that world didn't happen in this one, so he was not writing history, either. (I'm here defining history as accounts of human activities in the material world.)

If by "integrous preservation" you mean "faithful copying," then no, I don't believe that is what happened. And I have no opinion as to who was involved in the transmission of the documents between Paul (and the other canonical authors) and Eusebius.

I have no idea what Carrier meant to imply by "hopelessly credulous." I see no reason to suppose Eusebius was any more credulous than the average apologist of modern times.

As a matter of general principle, I do not infer purposeful falsehood on the part of any writer from my personal assessment of how credible their writing is. I infer it from evidence, if there is any, that (1) they knew what they wrote to be false and (2) they wrote it with intention to deceive their readers.

aa5874

The Gospels as found canonised appear to be anonymous, but, it can be reasonable deduced that the authors who wrote that Jesus did exist as the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God, walked on water, transfigured, resurrected and ascended to heaven wrote known fiction.

By placing Jesus in Jerusalem and Judea, and making him a Jew, it is almost certain that there would have been no Gospels if the authors were historical.

mountainman

So why should we not use the 'f' word? If the gospels are neither history nor biographical history then they are simply fiction. Why is there a reluctance to call a fiction a fiction?



Thousands and thousands of texts are written everyday but not widely published. We know that the text of the gospels was widely published and thus received by the eastern Roman empire population of Greeks around the time of the Council of Nicaea.

There are two separate considerations about the audience:

(1) "Earlier Period Audience"

Lets call the "Early Period Audience" the people who read the gospels before they were widely published c.325 CE.

(2) "Later Period Audience"

Lets call the "Later Period Audience" the political audience of the gospels from Nicaea onwards.

When you say the intended audience knew it was an origins story are you referring to the 1st or 2nd or both audiences defined above?


I dont agree with that. The ancients were not idiots.