Toto

It is hard to identify the document that Papias refers to as the gospel of Mark, and Papias is a generally vague and unreliable source reported by Eusebius, who had an agenda.

Except that you can't date Paul with any degree of confidence, and you can't date any particular passage in a Pauline letter with any confidence, and it wouldn't be the first time that apocalyptic movements have moved their goalposts for the projected end of the world.

I don't think that Matt is any more definitely historical than Mark - it still looks more allegorical than historical.

Luke gives some of the appearances of being a historical account. But the companion to gLuke, the Book of Acts, is more of a historical novel than straight history, and it would be puzzling for aLuke to write or rewrite a gospel of the life of Jesus as history and then write the later story of Paul as a novel.

So I don't see any good reason to assume that Mark was interpreted as history before Iraeneus at the earliest.

Ben C Smith

This is one of the disputed references to Papias. The source is Philip Sidetes, century V, who says (in codex Baroccianus 142):

[Papias] also reports other wonders and especially that about the mother of Manaemus, her resurrection from the dead; concerning those resurrected by Christ from the dead, that they lived until Hadrian.

Prima facie, Philip tells us that Papias reported that some resurrected people lived till the time of Hadrian; however, it appears to many (myself included) that Philip has confused Papias with Quadratus, who addressed an apology to Hadrian and whom Eusebius quotes as follows in History of the Church 4.3.2:

And he himself makes apparent his own antiquity through these things that he records in his own words: But the works of our savior were always present, for they were true. Those who were healed, those who rose from the dead, who not only looked as though healed and risen, but also were always present, not only while the savior was sojourning but even after he left, were around for enough time so as that some of them stayed even unto our own times.

Our own times would be, of course, the time of Hadrian.

Ben.

jjramsey

Something Ben C. Smith pointed out in this thread on what Matthew's polemic against the story that the disciples stole the body from the tomb says about the genre (though not the accuracy) of his work:

kokiri

i belive that jesus existed, just that he wasn't the son of god. or divine in anyway, since there is no god. but lets not go into that there is no god.

Toto

I'm a bit dubious. Story tellers can put a lot of effort into creating realistic details.

jjramsey

But this is missing the point, entirely, which is that Matthew's counter-polemic presupposes the empty tomb story to be literally true. This does not mean that the story is actually true. However, as Ben C. Smith pointed out above, if Matthew meant the empty tomb to be taken as allegory, he would have defended it as such. Instead, he treated it as literally as his Jewish opponents.

If the Gospels are allegories, then it is awfully strange that a literal interpretation of them comes so naturally.

Doug Shaver

One if one's allegorical purposes include commentary on the different ways that certain kinds of people would have responded to a messiah who was crucified and resurrected?

Amaleq13

Maybe.

The author's defense is also consistent with a desire to allow at least some of his audience to consider the story literally true (presumably new converts) and with the notion that the author considered the story sacred regardless of whether it was literally true.

I can only assume you are referring to reading them after the rather substantial amount of blatant nonsense has been removed but that calls into question how "natural" such a reading can be considered.

Doug Shaver

Let's try this again without the typo.

What if one's allegorical purposes include commentary on the different ways that certain kinds of people would have responded to a messiah who was crucified and resurrected?

Response to a request for elaboration:

I have no definite opinion on what theological, philosophical, political, or other points the gospel authors were trying to make in their accounts of the resurrection. It's not that I don't have any ideas, but that my research on that particular topic has not been that extensive.

It seems clear to me, though, that one of the authors' common purposes was to distance Christianity from what, by the second century, many people assumed to be their Jewish origins. To that end, it was not necessary to say "This is what the Jews did to our founder." It would have been sufficient to say, "This is our opinion of Jews and their leaders: They are stiffnecked, stubborn, stupid, treacherous, and deceitful."

It matters little what, exactly, were thought to be the facts about Christianity's beginnings. The intended message was: "Whatever we Christians used to be, we're not Jews now."

Another message that I see running through the gospels and other early Christian literature (not to mention modern apologetics) is the notion of prevalent incorrigible skepticism. Christianity's declared opponents in particular are presented as so depraved that they not only will accept not evidence favoring Christianity but are driven to invent evidence against it. To the early church, Jews were the evolutionists of their day. They would not have believed in the Christ even if he had appeared before them in the flesh, been killed, and then had risen from the dead. Quite the contrary: they would have killed him themselves and then, after he had risen, they would have denied it and made up some half-baked story about the body being stolen.

Spenser

I'm sorry but it sure seems some here are willing to trust the gospels as history simply because they exist.

Is it just me?