Sheshbazzar

Religion works in peculiar ways. By its very nature it demands acceptance and credulity of its partisans.
There are social and cultural pressures at work that demand conformity and a confirmation-bias of the cults beliefs and practices, no matter how illogical or irrational they may be.

I have observed it multiple times in my own family, once one has been maneuvered into proclaiming they 'Got Saved!' from then on they are constantly monitored and manipulated by other family and cult members to recite the approved cult mantras and rituals, and in Christianity, engage in 'witnessing' which the more it is engaged in, the more inextricably its victims become ensnared in their own words and obligations to maintain and further the cult.

Once you say you believe, you are pretty much stuck with at least pretending to believe whatever your particular flavor of cult expects you to believe or to 'confess'.
And when mom and pop, grandma, and your uncles Bill and Clyde and damn near all of your kinfolk and neighbors have their eyes on you, it is damn awful hard to step back and publicly say; 'Whoa! I didn't really get saved, and I really didn't mean those things that I confessed' and 'witnessed' to.

Under the liberties of modern society many do manage to edge away, but in tight social groups it can be very difficult for one to ever extricate themselves, and a cultivated cognitive dissonance becomes the means of survival.

In my view, religious writers both then and now are pretty much victims of the expectations of their society, manipulated by others into the affirming and producing what their society desires them to affirm and produce.

So did Matthew and Luke believe that what they wrote was literal history? Can we 'get into their heads'?
I tend to think they were cultivating the same kind of cult cognitive dissonance my cousin the Preacher has been manipulated and forced into by the expectations of family and friends to engage in day in and day out, and from which his only hope of escape will be his death.
Say what is expected of you or else...

Vorkosigan

Probably because it is sheer inertia. That also informs a lot of what goes on in NT studies. Another issue I've observed is the academic pecking order -- if you do HJ you're doing history, which has a higher status than lit....

There's no such thing as hyper-skepticism. That's an ideological judgment.

Whoops! I think you missed my original comment, which was too terse, so not a problem. Not that I didn't enjoy the lecture.

The methodologies that HJ scholars use to examine the texts critically are DOA. The field, at the moment, has no reliable methodology and hasn't had one in years. So when you come to me and make comments about hyper-skepticism and mythicist desperation, you're defending a field without a credible methodology.

Actually, we'd have both, but no one would give a shit.

That's so symptomatic. There's 150 years of scholarship on the fictional paul. The Dutch Radicals have been thoroughly and successfully ignored. The wildest NT scholarship can get is H Maccabee.....

it's just rhetoric. No need to blow up about it.

No, actually, because of all the works I read on Mark, it offers the most thorough explanation of how Mark works, as well as its structure at many different levels. I have innumerable books and articles on Mark, but few discuss the structure of the text at all. Most seem to write from the unexamined default position that Mark has no structure.

Also, please stop constantly attributing to me bad faith, and especially stop with the asshole position of "I'm ok, you're ideological". It's mortally wrong and incredibly stupid.

You should read Helms. He has much to teach. Have you read Brodie?

Vorkosigan

Horatio Parker

Does anyone claim that eyewitness accounts of Socrates are not contemporaneous?

Granted that much of Socrates could be mythic, is there not a fair amount we can say? His dates, occupation, appearance and anecdotes etc.

As ancient figures go, it seems to me that there is much more evidence for Socrates than Jesus. You're comparing apples and oranges and accounting for the difference with ideology.

LegionOnomaMoi

I'm actually stealing another's comparison, namely that of Navia from his book on Socrates. Of course, Navia isn't alone in comparing the historical issues and history of scholarship of Socrates and Jesus.

andrewcriddle

The only surviving account of Socrates written in his lifetime is the Satire/Parody by Aristophanes in The Clouds.

Our other accounts are written a number of years after his death and are probably not intended as objective history.

If we are not just talking about evidence for bare existence, the issues in studying the historical Socrates are quite similar to the issues in studying the historical Jesus.

Andrew Criddle

Horatio Parker

A very critical point for most Xtians is whether or not Jesus was historical.

Who doubts Socrates historicity? Bare existence is an important point.

aa5874

Again, it is of very little consequence if people believe Socrates did or did NOT exist since there is still a QUEST for an historical Jesus and now I hear of a QUEST for an historical Gospel.

The Quest for an historical Jesus and Gospel is a direct admission that we have NEITHER an Historical Gospel or Jesus.

Whatever we think of Socrates is irrelevant.

There is NO history for an historical Jesus--Even Scholars are trying to find him without any success.

gLuke and gMatthew are NOT historical accounts of Jesus at all. In fact, both Gospels appear to corroborate his Mythological nature and their Myth biography circulated throughout the Empire and accept by even the Roman Emperor.

Jesus, the Son of a Holy Ghost, was well received by Constantine.

This is Constantine's Jesus based on excerpts of the Nicene Creed.

People of antiquity who used gMatthew and gLuke did NOT believe Jesus was historical, that is, they did NOT believe Jesus existed as a mere human preacher.

They believed Jesus was God, Divine, Non-historical, in effect, a Myth.