steve_bnk

'..And even Saul/Paul while being blind in Acts, still recognised Jesus by voice only when Jesus was in heaven..'

You are invoking biblical myth to substantiate biblical myth. If you believe the the NT tales are all truth then there is no debate possible.

'..But, people who see the Virgin Mary in a spaghetti don't need to see the supposed real Mary..'

That's the point, the myths would builod quickly. Just look at Scientology.

When you wrer a kid did you ever do the thing in whcih a bunch of kids line up and a message is given to the first and is whispered down the line?

aa5874

Religion is based on belief in Gods not mere rumors. The Jesus belief most likely started because people believed the words of Jesus were the words of a God not the words of a man.

Joseph Smith started his religion by getting people to believe he had copied the words of a God from "golden plates".

Belief in the Jesus story may have simply started by people believing an anonymous writing contained the words of the son of God about an immediate apocalypse believed also to be predicted in Hebrew Scripture.

And further the "rumor theory" does not make much sense since after 1600 years the Jesus story is essentially the same. Up to today people still spread the same story that Jesus was the offspring of the Holy Ghost, walked on water, was transfigured, resurrected and ascended to heaven.

Try and spread a rumor in the Churches that Jesus was not raised from the dead today and see what happens. It won't work not even if you invoke the Gods.

graymouser

Why do you need to move the Gospels to the 2nd century? In the specific case we're talking about, the epochal event was the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem in 70 CE - an event which creates an undeniable "before" and "after" where any kind of legend-checking becomes impossible and probably kicked all the Jewish apocalyptic sects into high gear, since accommodation of the Romans among Jews and their sympathizers was no longer possible. The idea of a messiah who had come and warned of the Temple's destruction would have become highly potent afterward, and probably triggered the writing of what would become the Gospels.

The real problem that the euhemeristic "first Jesus minus miracles, then an increase in mythology" narrative has is not the short timeframe between the death and the Gospels but the relatively high Christology in Paul, who would be before the Temple destruction. Paul's Christ starts out high and never really delves much to the mundane levels. Of course, if Paul was some kind of proto-Gnostic whom the proto-orthodox later sanitized because they couldn't escape his influence, that may take care of that as well.

steve_bnk

Creating a myth is much easier than destroying a myth or image, as any polititian knows.

Doug Shaver

I don't know what you would regard as a "need," but I think there is some evidence for a second-century provenance and none at all, aside from orthodox dogma, against it.

steve_bnk

Would not the commonality, and differences, of the gosples infer an existing set of scraps of writngs and oral history that couldd have been written in the 2nd century?

According the NRSV commentary there was likley a 'folder' of writings floating around from a number of sources.

spin

That's true for Jews, but not for christians. What does the temple of Jerusalem have to do with christian communities in Greece and Asia Minor? Paul's pre-gospel Jesus has no interest in the temple. Paul's Jesus is turning away from Judea to the diaspora. John of Patmos looked in a similar direction to Paul, as later did Ignatius. The Jews were talking about the temple for centuries. When did it seep into christianity? -- when the Marcan "little apocalypse" was written... but then that's a mixture of christian and Jewish thought. Take an archetypical Jewish lament and place it before the fall of the temple. When was Lamentations written? Would you think before the fall of the first temple? Predating stories is par for the course in Jewish literature: think of Daniel, Esther and Judith.

Why should one place the gospels so close to the time of Paul and the reputed time of Jesus?

Then again, working from the theology of Paul, how long would it take for fertile minds to imagine what the life of Jesus must have been like, given a collection of sayings attributed to him, such as Thomas or Q?

Given a simple story to pass on to a chain of people who can only communicate in whispers, stories get transmogrified. A story told by an itinerant preacher is seeded wherever he passed and the hearers retell the stories to acquaintances. The stories and sayings get expanded upon in little time. You get different versions of the same story, such as the feeding of the thousands or the healing of the blind man or did I say deaf man...

So what's a "short timeframe" to you and how would you check your claim? If it took one determined man the latter part of his life to create scientology, how long would it take many people elaborating on the stories in circulation to produce the raw material for a gospel of Mark?


spin

Clivedurdle

I'm confused.

If Mark is a play, a fiction, a story with the intent of using a character Jesus to tell a story, what is all this about time for the myth to develop?

There may in fact be a repeat of this scenario with Islam. The Koran may be one third xian text expanded for various reasons, the first muslims may actually have been a xian sect and uncle mo may also be a fictional character!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Günter_Lüling

mountainman

Major empire-wide controversies about Jesus arose in the 4th century which is consistent with the hypothesis that jesus was a fictional character. The controversies were finally settled by the orthodox christian imperial sponsored class when all the witnesses of the controversies had died off, or had been exiled, anathemetized or otherwise disposed of. This of course included the texts available in the library of Alexandria, which were disposed of by fire under imperial command.

Thus the trustworthiness of the Gospel account is highly unlikely because there just wasn't ***ANY*** opportunity for them to be questioned by the academics of the 4th century empire -- they were simply forced by the sword to submit to the will of the christian emperors.

spamandham

Well, the best reason is because of the internal evidence for a later dating, but it also allows a bit of graciousness on the part of the authors. They no longer need to be overt con-artists, although that's obviously not out of the question anyway.

Jerusalem was not destroyed in 70 CE, and the temple was ruined in 70CE, but not razed. The *complete* destruction referred to in the gospels happened as a result of the Bar Kochba revolt in the 2nd century.

...and also would have been created after the fact. This type of after-the-fact prophecy fills the Jewish scriptures.

Which is more plausible really:

a) Some dude in ~30 CE predicted the fall of the temple. This dude went mostly unnoticed until the temple actually did fall 40 years later. People (who would have to have been at least ~50-60) then remembered the prediction (at a time when the average lifespan was around 40), and thought it was so amazing they created a new religion around it.

b) When the temple was ruined in 70CE and subsequently razed in ~140, some of the messianic sects started searching the scriptures trying to figure out how this could have happened without the return of the messiah. So they invented a messiah and placed him an exact symbolic 40 years prior to the initial destruction.

There is no compelling argument that Paul pre-dates 70CE.