tanya

They may be big, but they are not necessarily red:

http://waynesword.palomar.edu/colorbl1.htm

Sheshbazzar

If Adam is blind to the facts, at least he has heard reports from living eyewitness that the BIG RED WORDS appearing above are the color RED even if he his-self is blind to the fact.

arnoldo

Anthony Le Donne, in his book entitled, Historical Jesus: What Can We Know and How Can We Know It? (or via: amazon.co.uk), presents an argument that there is no need to strip the gospels of religious/supernatural elements to arrive at a historical Jesus.

However, the issue of developing an alternative gospel may have historical relevance regarding

• A possible alternative gospel which the Ebionites used to minimize any supernatural attributes of Jesus.
  
• Marcion’s alternative gospel which minimized natural attributes of Jesus.
  
• Tatian’s alternative Diatesaron gospel which harmonized both the natural and supernatural attributes of Jesus.

Toto

Le Donne did NOT equate religious and supernatural.

Real historians do not credit ancient documents' supernatural claims.

The rest of your post does not make any sense at all. Tatian's Diatesseron harmonized the four gospels, each of which combined (but did not necessarily harmonize) fleshy and supernatural aspects of Jesus

Adam

I have no objections to what Arnaldo and Anthony Le Donne have to say, but for my current purposes here I have to stick with uncovering any gospel sources that may be without supernatural trappings. (And in looking at the preview of Le Donne's book, judging by Note 5 on page 142 he is wary of miracles.) If we could only find sources that are necessarily tied to miracles, then those people who are biassed against the supernatural can cast aside these sources as just legends. Whenever someone wants to write down legends or such, he would have no reason to encase within it some non-supernatural portions unless these latter were surviving natural records of the person whom the legends had grown around. These non-supernatural sources show us that there was an actual person and might even give good information about him.

I continue to claim that I have disproven MJ. Yes, my intention was to present seven early eyewitnesses to the gospels, but I never expected to prove that to an atheist group. I'll settle now for acknowledgment by open-minded MJers (if any such exist) that I have disproven MJ.

maryhelena

Disproved MJ? The only way you can do that is to establish historicity for the gospel JC. To claim that you have so done is nonsense. Man - you would be in line for a Nobel Prize. Adam, your claim is hollow and does neither you nor your participation on this forum any credit.

Adam

Actually, what I would expect if there were such a thing as an open-minded MJer (apparently as hard to find as an open-minded Fundamentalist) would be something like this:
"If Adam has honestly presented Teeple's strata and if such non-supernatural segments exist as the Passion Narrative and Nicodemus as the author in the main of the Discourses, and if Q and L are likewise reasonably free of supernaturalism, then it would seems MJ has been disproven."
Otherwise I would be expecting you to take too much on faith in my honesty and rationality. But I have seen no indication whatever of even such hypothetical acknowledgement.

Toto

This is rank nonsense. When people write fiction or legends, they could have many reasons to include non-supernatural parts of the story.

Or do you think you have proven the existence of the historical Little Red Riding Hood, the historical Hansel and Gretl, the historical Sleeping Beauty ???

tanya

These are your eye witness accounts, attesting to the existence of J.C.?

Adam, one does not even possess a single, universally accepted, copy of Mark 1:1, let alone agreement on hypothetical, non-existent, documents called "Q", or "L". How does one establish the presence or absence of supernatural elements in the text of a non-extant document?

Based upon the Byzantine, (majority text) of Mark 1:1, which asserts in plain Greek, that J.C. was the son of god, I maintain that the entire NT is a mythical treatise, no different from Homer's Ὀδύσσεια.

Sheshbazzar

This speaks to the crux of the problem with Adam's theses; Exactly what does even the first verse of his Gospel say?

Hundreds of posts, and as yet he still seems unwilling to commit to even as little as identifying what he would have as the first verse of his form of a 'historical' Gospel.
Given what he has thus far been arguing, it could hardly be Mark 1:1