andrewcriddle

It has been claimed in this forum that
a/ much of the material in the Gospel narratives is derived from the
OT/Hebrew Bible
b/ that hence these narratives were not intended to be taken as history but were meant as fictions/parables/allegoris.

IMHO the degree to which the OT was used as a basis for the Gospel stories is substantially less than many on this forum belief. However this thread is intended to challenge b/ the idea that if a Gospel writer consciously based part of his story on the OT then he did not believe that things had literally happened the way he described them.

I think this is probably wrong. It is common among consrvative Christians today to use OT material when retelling the Gospel stories, eg to claim on the basis of Isaiah 50:6 that the roughing up of Jesus at his trial extended to pulling out hairs from his beard. The claim is that we know on the basis of Isaiah that this really happened although the Gospels do not explicitly say so.

In the same way it seems likely to me that 'Matthew' had no other source than the OT for his claim that the payment to Judas was 30 pieces of silver but he believed on the evidence of prophecy that this is how much it was.

To clarify, this is not an argument for the historical accuracy of the Gospels but an argument for their historical intention. Even if the ways in which the writers composed their accounts seem strange to us they may still have been trying to tell it as it really happened.

Andrew Criddle

Clivedurdle

Do we not have to first ask what set of writings these might fit in or be related to, for example

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/...#ref=ref299536

If we did not have the Nt, and found these writings in a desert somewhere last year, what categories of writing would they be put in or near to?

Solo

Hi Andrew,

I don't think that the gospel authors believed for a minute they were describing external events in the the normal sense of story-telling. It looks like Mark invented a genre, either fictionalizing the Jesus ministry out of whole cloth or (,as I prefer to think,) artfully rearranging fragmentary, disconnected lore about Jesus as a double-entry log, paralleling the progress and disappearance of the Spirit (in the ones to whom it is given - i.e. the true disciples of J.), and the imaginary travail and death of a minor Jewish prophet who popularized the ideas of liberation from conventional reality. IMHO, Matthew, Luke and John merely copied this genre.

For Mark, the journey of Jesus fulfilling OT prophecies would then have more than one function. Above all, they would serve as pointers to, or exciters of, the pseudo-cognitive patterns of thought which beset the partakers of the Spirit. The OT fulfillers would validate the magical thinking - and it seems clear that even though Mark knows, that seen conventionally, the prophetic faculty is delusional (14:65), he is deeply caught in its "reality". Other than that, the OT references may have been used around known stories about Jesus, and made to highlight uncanny coincidences, which abound when pneumatics get high. Other possibility is that the OT fulfillers were simply "fillers" of historical gaps or embarrassments. The attempted stoning of Jesus at the temple (Jn 8:59) seems to have been corroborated by the Egerton 2 fragment. So, the borrowed theme of Nehemiah in Mark 11 may simply indicate the gospeller was unhappy about what he had before him (i.e. the story of Jesus being driven out of the temple) because it did not fit the plan of psychomachy that Mark was reading.

Jiri

dog-on

Author of Mark read the Septuagint...not that difficult...

youngalexander

I think that you are probably correct.

However, 'consciously' basing 'part of his story on the OT' does not support historicity. Furthermore, regardless of what "he?" believed are we to understand that 'things had literally happened the way he described them'?

One of the things that I keep banging on about is the curious fact that Early Christian Art (200-250 CE) is totally OT orientated. This after a supposed 170 yrs of NT Christology. There is no doubt about the importance of OT theology in early Christianity, but where does the HJ fit in?

rhutchin

The gospel narratives deal with the life of Jesus and that which He taught. In this context, it was Jesus who consistently referred to the OT in his teachings and it was Jesus who claimed that the OT spoke of His coming. If anything, the gospels should be viewed as historical accounts of the life of Jesus and that which He taught as recounted by those who claimed to be eyewitnesses of these events or to have received their information from eyewitnesses of those events..

spin

On what grounds do you make this claim?

Wouldn't you have to be a mind-reader to know that?

Isn't it hard to claim that the gospels are historical accounts of the life of Jesus when you don't know when the gospels were written, who the authors were, or where they were written? Usually we need to show that our sources 1) can know about the time they declare to refer to; and 2) contain at least some verifiable information related to the core of their content.

The gospels we have are texts written in Greek, so there is no necessary connection with the land they try to represent. In fact the earliest gospels, Mk, has difficulties with geography, suggesting it was definitely written outside the Judean context. Mk also features a number of Latin linguistic influences which strongly suggest a Roman context of writing, ie not simply a place under the possession of the Romans, but where Latin was spoken and the most likely location is Rome.

Two of the other three use Mk as their primary source, so they can in no way help us establish any historical content for the gospel tradition.

I would like to hear any evidence you have which will change the status of the gospels, so that they could be conceived of as we would classical sources such as Tacitus whose works are full of verifiable information, sources which offer problems of their own, but which leave know doubt that they contain the food for history.


spin

Ben C Smith

IMHO, Charles Talbert has persuasively answered this question in What Is A Gospel? His answer is heroic biography, like the ancient biographies of Empedocles, Romulus, Augustus, and Alexander.

Ben.

Malachi151

#1 You can't lump all of the Gospel writers together. You can't talk about Matthew one minute and Mark the next and just interchange them as if it doesn't matter. They were different people with completely different concepts of what they were doing.

#2 You can't lump all of the types of literary allusion together. In some cases it is very clear that they couldn't possibly be intended to describe real history.

I don't have time to go into detail on this now, but I'll get back to it later.

A lot of the info is gone over in here:

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar...ospel_mark.htm

If, for example, my cursing of the fig tree explanation is correct then I would say that this would be an example where the author clearly knew that the scene he was writing was not historical and had no intention of presenting it as history.

On the other hand, if you take John 19:23, well then probably the author of John may have believed himself that this was real history and he was certainly presenting it as such.

Solo

How do I know that Matthew and Luke, and to a certain degree, John, copied Mark's gospel mind-games ? I think there is plenty of internal evidence for that.

Let's look at the baptism for example: Mark's JtB says that Jesus will baptize you with Holy Spirit. Was that meant literally ? Of course not. Jesus here is practically given away as an allegorical rendering of Christ's (self-)revelation to the knower. There are no baptismal events performed by Jesus in Mark or elsewhere. Matthew, and after him Luke, add to the baptizing with Spirit also the baptism of "fire". Matthew, especially, is fond of "hinting" at Mark's ciphers and twists. He ties Jesus "baptism" therefore explicitly to the eschatological judgment. The fiery ordeal (manic fever) that is alluded to, separates the true believers from the damned. It was believed by the earliest Jesus-professing communities, that this was a test of spiritual fitness. (1 Cr 3:13, 2 Th 1:7, 1 Pt 4:12, 2 Pt 3:10, GoT (82)).

In Mark's gospel's Jesus coming out of the water sees the Spirit descending upon him like a dove (1:10). GJohn gives the cipher away (1:32-33): it is the Baptist who sees the descent of Spirit on Jesus.

Jiri