Kapyong

Gday,

Pardon?
You claim to not be making an argument from silence, then go right on to make one? How odd.

So, why did you ignore the answer that was made to this?

Was there any dispute about the existence of, say, Apollo?
No.

Was there any dispute about the existence of, say, Bacchus?
No.

Was there any dispute about the existence of, say, Hercules?
No.

Because there was essentially NO doubt about ANYTHING back then. Does that make Apollo, Bacchs and Hercules real?

Your argument makes Jesus as real as an ancient myth or legend or fantasy. There were almost NO doubts of existence of gods and legends in that period.

So having no specific doubts about the existence of Jesus means nothing about the existence of Jesus.



Kapyong

GakuseiDon

I don't understand your objection. I'm not saying that they believed that Jesus was God, but that the pagans believed that from reading the Gospels that Christians believed that there was a HJ. That is, the Gospels didn't obviously fall into the genre of fiction, so that, whatever the authors' beliefs, the Gospels had an inherent historical credibility about them, such as even educated pagans of that time would have taken them as being about a person who actually existed. Does this not appear to be the case?

bacht

Maybe, but Luke could also be referring to the circulation of what we call apocryphal gospels that were excluded from the Catholic canon. Marcion had his own gospel, and there were others in the 2nd C.

Maybe the original followers of Jesus were illiterate, or expecting the end of the world. But the claim in the NT is that there were Christians in existence in Syria, Asia Minor, Greece and Rome as well as Palestine before 66. Apparently none of these people could write, or felt no need to.

Toto

No.

Justin Martyr compared the gospel stories to Greek myths, so if you think that educated pagans thought that the Greek myths were real history, perhaps they would class the gospels along with the Greek myths as historical.

Otherwise, no one at the time seems to have been concerned about whether the gospels were historical or not. The Emperor Julian does seem to have assumed a historical basis for the gospels, but he was raised as a Christian after the church had decreed that Jesus was born of a virgin and crucified under Pilate on earth.

I'm not sure where this is going. Are you trying to argue that, because the gospels might be mistaken for history, that they are therefore history?

GakuseiDon

:notworthy:

Well, exactly. Justin Martyr certainly thought so. And the thread title includes the word "Euhemerism", which gives us an idea of what they thought back then. For example, Tacitus writes that Jupiter was a king on Crete, who deposed his father Saturn, whom then fled to Italy.

And that's my point. Everyone appears to have accepted them as containing history about someone who actually existed.

Ah, my secret motive, right?

I'm saying that, whatever the intentions of the authors of the Gospels, they appear to have presented the life of Jesus in a genre which would have led the people of that time to think that the Gospels were about an actual person who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. This is in response to someone earlier claiming that Mark was a work of intentional fiction, where both the author and his audience knew it is allegorical fiction.

aa5874

But, it was Christians, the very Jesus believers, who vehemently DENIED that Jesus was a mere man.

Jesus believers claimed Jesus was of a SPIRIT of God, some claimed he was a God with FLESH, some claimed he was the LOGOS of God, some did NOT name Jesus as the Son of God, the son of God was named the LOGOS.

It is most bizarre that the very pagans who were considered EVIL and Liars by Jesus believers are the ones who you are NOW claiming believed in an historical Jesus.

But, you are so wrong. Pagans did not believe in Jesus.

Pagans claimed Jesus was NOT a God and could have ONLY been a man if he did exist at all.

Examine "Dialogue with Trypho" LXVII So, Trypho tells Justin that he should be ashamed of himself for claiming Jesus was born of a virgin just like the fables of the Greek.

It is evident that Trypho Jew had NOT heard of a Messiah of called Jesus who lived in Galilee for about 30 years OR of Jesus the Messiah who was born of a virgin and a Spirit of God.

Juststeve

Steven Carr:

I agree that a mutual awareness of Mark is a good explanation for the places where Luke and Matthew agree and that therefore Mark may be among the accounts Luke refers to. He did however suggest many accounts, not just two or three and I see no reason to instantly discount his use of many, Do you?

Recognition that Mark was a source for Luke raises an interesting problem for inerrantists since it can be shown that there are places where Luke altered Mark’s account, which suggests that at least the author of Luke didn’t regard Mark as inerrant. I doubt there are inerrantists about to join this issue.

Luke goes further in stating that aware of other writings he made his own investigation before writing his orderly account. I take it that this consisted of talking to other Christians and recording some of what they told him. I do not take it that he has claimed that he spoke to eyewitnesses, only that at some time there were eyewitnesses. Do you credit Luke when he claims to have talked with others before writing his Gospel?

My own assessment of Luke’s investigation is that he gathered tales that were circulating about Jesus at the time without much ability to separate truth from fiction. Do you believe that at the time Luke did what he calls an investigation there were tales in circulation? If so how do you account for them?

Steve

spamandham

I really don't know what Lucian would have made of the gospels. My *guess* is that he would have equated Jesus with Hercules and categorized the gospels as fables. The purpose of bringing Lucian up was merely to demonstrate that the practice of writing fables which were then taken seriously was rampant at the time the gospels were penned.

The question isn't whether Greeks would have failed to see the obvious Jewish allegory in the gospels, it's whether or not Jews would have failed to see it. I say it's so blatant that Jews could not have failed to see it, and from that we can ascertain that the author did not intend his audience to view the story as literal history/biography.

Juststeve

Bacht:

I doubt Luke was making reference to the apocryphal gospels since by the modern scholarly view they were written long after Luke. That’s one of the reasons they were considered apocryphal. As another has suggested Q or Matthew would be candidates but that wouldn’t add up to many. Perhaps there we a lot of writings about Jesus now lost to us.

Given what the Gospels tell us about Jesus’ early followers they were most probably illiterate or at best minimally literate. Not the kind of guys who could have written something like the Gospel of John a good reason for denying that the Gospel was written by the Disciple.

Not only is it likely that the early followers that the world was about to end so did Paul. Whether this is a memory that Jesus had falsely said so or something else is a matter of dispute here. If there was no Jesus he couldn’t have falsely promised to return soon. I think he had made that claim and being just a man was wrong.

Steve

Juststeve

Kapyong:

I have made no argument from silence. I simply asked a question. I never asserted that the absence of ancient claims that Jesus never existed proved anything, because I don’t think it does.

I think thou doth protest too much.

Steve

PS Impressed as I am with your seeming encyclopedic knowledge of what wasn’t disputed in antiquity how is it you know that the existence of Apollo, Bacchus and Hercules was never disputed. Is there a place you can look that up or is it something you just know? Just asking now, not making an argument.