No Robots

Bacht, I know that you are one of the few who have some openness to discussing the NT in the context of Jewish literature. I guess I'm just harking back to those mythicists who see the NT as primarily Hellenistic rather than Jewish. All the same, I think the discussion of midrash in connection with the NT does take mythicists outside their comfort zone. I invite you to prove me wrong.

No Robots

Historicists who oppose mythicism have been forced to grapple with all the pagan parallels that the mythicists have put forward. When will the mythicists reciprocate by grappling with the Jewish parallels that historicists discern?

HaRaAYaH

This will give you some idea of what Midrash really is. There is no correlation at all with the New Testament.

No Robots

See The Testing of God's Son: Matt. 4:1-11 & Par, an Analysis of an Early Christian Midrash by Birgir Gerhardsson.

No Robots

Robert M. Price has a good presentation on the subject of midrash in the NT: “New Testament Narrative as Old Testament Midrash.”

Of course, I disagree with the position that, “we must view the gospels and Acts as analogous with the Book of Mormon, an inspiring pastiche of stories derived creatively from previous scriptures by a means of literary extrapolation.” While it is obvious that there is much in the NT that is midrash, I hold to the mainstream view that Price expresses as follows:

[E]arly Christians began with a set of remarkable facts (whether few or many) and sought after the fact for scriptural predictions for them, the goal being to show that even though the founding events of their religion defied contemporary messianic expectation, they were nonetheless in better accord with prophecy, that recent events clarified ancient prophecy in retrospect.

This is a discussion worth pursuing. Chaucer has done well by challenging mythicists to discover anywhere in midrash a wholly mythical parallel to the figure of Christ.