Solo

But that's a different point that I was making to aa.

Yep, that's about it.

When I was about five years old I was goofing in the living room and broke a small ornamental vase which was my dad`s favourite. I was frightened. I knew I was going to get a big spanking, because mom was there and she would report my crime. But I thought there was a way how to handle that. When my dad appeared in the doorway, I ran up to him, saying "daddy, daddy, I want you you to know that it was not me who broke the vase; it was grandma. I really think it was an accident." And dad looked at me and looked at my mom who was silent and said. "Naw, I don't think so ! You better tell me the truth !" Boy, was I ever scared....he did he know it was me and not grandma ?

So how did he figure out that something happened and I was not reporting historical fact to him but gospel truth ?

Jiri

Toto

You continue to miss the point.

The gospels did not mention Jesus' married state because they are mythology, as we all seem to admit, and Jesus is an entity somewhere between a spirit and the embodiment of god. Spirits don't have to be married.

But IF Jesus is historical he was either married or not married. Paul addresses followers about the decisions that they need to make about this basic human institution - to marry or not? Why does he not use Jesus as a teaching example?

Why not? Absense of evidence where it would be expected is evidence of absense. Paul did not mention Jesus' married state. He did not report speaking to the putative followers of Jesus about their friend when he went to Jerusalem.

But all this could equally be an indication that those gospel details were seen as mere story telling, and that Jesus was regarded as a spiritual entity.

Remember, there were no historicists until the Enlightenment. Those 2nd century letter writers were not historicists. They thought that Jesus was God incarnate, preexistent at the start of the world. They might also have thought that he took on human form and got himself born of a virgin, but they felt no need to find any historical evidence to prove that. They had all the evidence they needed in the Scriptures.

No, the elephant in the room is the total lack of historical data on Jesus.

You and aa just keep repeating your mantras, but it doesn't make them true.

The dating of Paul's letters to before 120 relies on external evidence.

Paul does not include historical details, but, as discussed before, he includes personal details about himself, his travels, the people he knows, the levels of heaven.

fatpie42

Nice story. I suppose an application of this to Hermeneutics would be the promenance of the them of 'repentance' and the prevalence of healings in Luke's account. We can tell from the differences in that account that the writer has a particular agenda.

The problem is, asides from seeing differences between the accounts and how they relate to other documents of the times, we have no idea what the authors of the gospels were like. If we had an extra-Biblical account of figure of Jesus we might be able to use the gospel accounts better because we would be in a better position to work out which parts are additions due to bias. While we can do this to some extent we are always rather limited by the fact that the gospel writers would be expected to have very similar biases for the most part.

Toto

Yes it is.

I think you have been asleep.

Richard Carrier is writing a book on the historical evidence for Jesus. Doherty is coming out with a revised edition. The Jesus Project has just started, with no more than the usual problems of such enterprises, and is not scheduled to reach a conclusion for 5 years. The JesusMysteries yahoogroup is still alive and well, and has some interesting work that makes Doherty look very establishment.

Meanwhile, mythicists don't really need to lift a finger. They can sit back and watch while mainstream NT scholars and historians who claim to believe in a historical Jesus reexamine their evidence and destroy their own case. Is that "rolling along?" Where are the historicists who are working on improving the weak case for a historical Jesus? We are no closer to knowing any more about the historical Jesus than Albert Schweitzer did, and the more research, the less we seem to know.

What's wrong with Bauckham?
Bauckham at SBL

Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

aa5874

This is getting really ridiculous.

What mantra have I repeated that is not true?

Yiou are constantly making mis-leading statements about me.

Why don't you point out what I have posted that you think is not true instead of making these blatant erroneous statements about me?

No Robots

For they considered him a plain and common man, who was justified only because of his superior virtue, and who was the fruit of the intercourse of a man with Mary.--"The Heresy of the Ebionites". Eusebius / Church History, 3, 27.

Ben C Smith

Surely this is not the reason. Spirits do not have to hunger, either, yet Jesus hungers in all three synoptic gospels.

You use such silences at your own peril. Why does Paul not quote the Lord on resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15? We see in 1 Thessalonians 4.15 that he had such a saying to hand.

Ben.

bacht

Vermes in "Jesus the Jew" argues that an unmarried Jew of adult age like Jesus (say 30ish) would have been unusual enough to attract attention (bachelorhood was discouraged apparently). OTOH maybe he was supposed to have been acting out prophetically, like Hosea, or was instructed not to marry like Jeremiah (?) Neither Elijah nor Elisha were married were they?

aa5874

But, there may have been something mythical about his eating habits.

Clement of Alexandria Stromteis 3.59.3

Toto

Jesus eats for symbolic reasons, but often it is others who are hungry, as in the feeding the multitudes, or the Lord of the Sabbath pericope:

Matthew 12:1
At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them.

Jesus is described as hungry in the fig tree incident, where it seems a set up for condemning the poor tree, and after fasting for 40 days in the desert (Matt 4, Luke 4), where it is part of the temptation (if he were not hungry, there would be no temptation.)