outhouse

Doesnt explain why the NT surrounds the last week of his possible life.

Doesnt explain a passover event, we see took place, when there would be no reason to create one.

stephan huller

Well the reason why I seem to go 'off topic' often times is the very same reason why I don't go along with Doherty's ideas. As I see it our New Testament was created or modified to support a specific theological conception - negatively defined. As such I don't see what the point is of confining any arguments to a paradigm which consists of (a) 'the four gospels' or some smaller section of that collection (i.e. 'Luke' or alleged Marcionite differences (b) the Pauline canon or the supposition about 'the person of Paul' reflected in the specific Catholic recension of those texts or (c) Acts and its alleged 'historical understanding'.

To be frank then, by not accepting (a) (b) and (c) it puts me at a disadvantage. Who am I going to have a discussion with besides myself. Nevertheless I think my premise is logically consistent - if nevertheless isolating.

Now to answer your question. Yes the Catholic gospels all reinforce the same basic structure:

I am not sure that this was the original structure of the gospel. The Marcionite gospel for instance does not seem to have the baptism by John and begins instead with a descent from heaven. As such I have my doubts about other parts of the gospel narrative being consistent too.

My insight is the 'centonizing' of the New Testament material. What I mean by that is that Irenaeus and Tertullian - and in modern times a number of scholars with respect to 'Secret Mark' but most notably Francis Watson - have noticed a pattern that the heretical canon had passages moved - not merely whole passages but individual lines and words too - in order to reinforce specific theological POV.

Perhaps the most easy to demonstrate is that in the Diatessaronic tradition Luke 11:27 (= Blessed be the womb that bore Thee) and Mark 3:32 (= "Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you") appeared back to back. We know this because the same pattern appears in the Arabic Diatessaron, Codex Fuldensis and perhaps most importantly Ephrem's Harmony Gospel. In that text we completely tear a whole in the wall that separates us from the truth because it is clear that Ephrem knows that Marcion's text also resembled a Diatessaron when he writes:

It would seem that Luke 11:27 and Luke 8:19 - 21 originally formed a unit. Notice this in the Arabic Diatessaron chapter 16:

Compare this with what is noted both in Against Marcion Book Three:

And On the Flesh of Christ:

It would seem very clear once this is connected with the consistent 'error' made by Tertullian that Marcion cut things from his gospel which were never in Luke that the original author of the material against Marcion was using a Diatessaron.

The point then is that when Watson notices that the individual lines of the additional passage in Secret Mark can be traced back to individual lines of other stories in the Markan gospel the question we have to ask is - which came first 'the chicken' or 'the egg' - meaning is Secret Mark something that Morton Smith invented from canonical Mark or is canonical Mark made up of pieces of an original heretical text? The answer isn't easy to figure out on its own because the reality is that there are so many examples of what we just demonstrated from the original heretical Diatessaron (i.e. of passages being coupled together to give a new order/new meaning to the overall narratives.

To this end, the 'resurrection of Jesus' after his death was certainly not in the original edition of Mark. Nevertheless it appears there now. Where did the new ending of Mark come from? Undoubtedly from centonizing bits and pieces of the original heretical gospel. Who did this? The first person to identify a longer ending of Mark is Irenaeus. Irenaeus also demonstrates himself to be a master 'centonist' in Against Heresies Book 1.

One more thing about Irenaeus. It is one of the cornerstones of Irenaeus treatment of Mark that it 'agrees with the Law and the prophets.' Look at Against Heresies Book Three chapter Ten where he speaks only about the beginning and end of the canonical gospel:

The way I read this material - and the way I read Irenaeus generally - is that he is citing our text of Mark against the heresies even though they did not use our Mark but another text. Look at how rarely Mark is ever cited by the orthodox. There are no surviving Commentaries on Mark from the early period. Our canonical Mark was an invention by Irenaeus and no one trusted or liked it very much.

But the point Irenaeus makes about his invented Mark agreeing with the Law and the prophets is very instructive because it allows us to understand the means by which it was produced - its guiding 'paradigm.' For look at the baptism narrative albeit from John here:

All the gospels basically reflect the same idea - a dove came from the skies and swooped down on the baptized one. But Christians are so utterly ignorant about Jewish tradition that they don't even realize that this idea is borrowed from one of the only references to the resurrection of the dead in the Pentateuch.

We begin with a childless Abraham lamenting that his servant Eliezer will be his only heir:

God first promises Abraham that "this man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir" and then he says "look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them ... so shall your offspring be.” Philo already identifies this as a promise to be translated into angelic beings.

What often fails to get noticed in many of these discussions is that Abraham goes on to ask God for a sign that all these things will come true and so God asks him to bring him some animals for sacrifice. The section is usually translated as:

Is it coincidence that the collective body of 'descendants' of Abraham end up as slaves just like Eliezer? Perhaps. But first let's examine how the rabbinic tradition treats the 'sign' that God gives to Abraham (Gen 15.10,11), the sign of the dove (bar yonah which not surprisingly becomes the only sign which is given to the generation at the advent of Christianity. Here is how it is usually translated again:

Here is what I found when looking at the rabbinic interpretation of Genesis 15:11. Saadya Gaon (b 882) follows a surprisingly well-attested line of interpretation that reads like this. Abram asks in verse 8 how he can be sure of what he is promised, but he seems to be given no sign till you look at verse 11 properly . Here is what verse 11 literally says. It does NOT say ‘he chased them (i.e. the birds) away”. It says he breathed on them. (Not the same verb as in Gn 2:7). I promise you that this is what the word really does mean. Only refusal to let it mean what it must mean lets you read it any other way.

The first words can be read as “He put the bird on the bodies”. (The verb can be read as “it came down” [qal] and as “he put it” [hif‘il]). The meaning is that all the sacrifices came back to life when Abraham breathed on the bird and the other bodies. Saadya translates:

Notice that in verse 9 gozal meaning a young bird is translated bar-yonah by Onkelos and bar-yon in the Palestinian Targum and the Fragmentary Targum. There is also something else quite remarkable. The word meaning “bird” in verse 10 is tsippor. In verse 11 it is ‘ayiṭ, which normally would mean an eagle, but can mean birds of prey collectively. It is highly unexpected here as a reference to a young dove. Some kind of transformation has clearly taken place to make a bar yonah (dove) emerge as an eagle ('ayit).

If you want to read more about this, I have this discussion at my blog. There is no reason to take up too much space here:

http://www.stephanhuller.blogspot.co...f-lazarus.html

Chili

That is good enough to be heretic from their point of view.

Macion may have been right, I do not know, and am not interested either way.

To them, via Baptism a continuity was sougth in the Communion with the Saints, to say that heaven is here to stay wherein Christ will do greater things among beleivers now first hand to them. I.e, 'Christ Among Us' is a very Catholic theme for which a pyramid is needed for protecion inside their playing field, ie. the pasture of their flock wherein it becomes a life-line wherein they belong, as if branded for life with the mark that now is 6:56 wherein daily communion is made manifest.

Not that hard to figure out.

stephan huller

I've checked over and over again and Theodotus uses the received text of John 1:14 not the gnostic text cited by Irenaeus - "δόξαν ὡς Μονογενοῦς" (Ex Theodoto 7.2) "σὰρξ ἐγένετο" (ibid 19.1). The gnostic text reads differently.

stephan huller

Compare Aeschylus's use of the term:

stephan huller

Clement in the Stromata seems to echo the heretical conceptions associated with the enemies of Irenaeus:

The Logos is not Jesus (as Photius already notes from the Hypotyposeis) but the tree of life where Jesus hangs as a fruit (there is a similar conception in the Gospel of Truth).

These are gnostic ideas having nothing to do with Jesus being born from Mary or any human mother.

Chili

Correct, Jesus is not Logos and did not appear in sight until the next day in John 1:29. It is there to show that the infancy was prior to his appearance, and critical here then is the awakeing of becoming.


Mary was not human and therefore sinless as woman, and that already isolates it to metaphysics only. John is the parthenocarpic seed reborn in the purity it was created in the mind of the father of this upright carpenter with 12 shepherds on the go as wily entrepreneur who they called Joseph, who actually 'choked on the final lie' that he could not tell, and of course, Margareth Mead as expert in that field did not know what the secret to 'tale tale telling' was in Samoa, not do most people here . . . chasing history to to find out what happened back then.

So Jesus will never be born of a human mother as Mary was not, but is, the perfect image of mortal beauty . . . to already say that she was not mortal but the aim of every girl 'to be', as in 'to on' in becoming. It is just the ideal that they see as it is already within and available to them.

outhouse

They attributed divinity and mythology to a mortal man, the same exact way they did for Caesar and Augustus.


If one focuses on the mythological parts, one will only see a MJ.

There is no shortage of mythology either.




Fact is they used mythology whether there was a mortal man or not.

stephan huller

Yes but it's not that simple. For instance, in the Jewish text of the Book of Numbers (not the Samaritan text) Hoshea becomes Joshua by means of the substitution of the letter 'y' (yod). In the LXX text however Ause becomes Jesus and the early Church Fathers took this as pointing to some sort of adoption rite (i.e. 'the name' = Jesus being added to individuals through some sort of mystic practice probably baptism).

The point here is that the assumptions about a historical man named Jesus aren't as strong as they appear once we acknowledge how important adoption rites were in the early Church. In other words, how does it make sense that an individual named Jesus was adopted by 'the name' Jesus to become Jesus? Not very. The more likely scenario is that the individual called Jesus was originally named something else - and probably Simon.

I know it is easy to get locked into this neo-Protestant notion of the gospel as 'the life sort of a man named Jesus.' But what evidence do we have for a Christianity that doesn't take a profound mystical interest in 'the name' (= Jesus)? None. The idea then of limiting ourselves to the simple minded understanding that Jesus was the name of the guy in the gospel narrative isn't that productive.

The heretical gospel had Jesus float down from heaven. That's a notable difference and these gospels were clearly earlier than the existing ones. Moreover there were docetic tendencies in early narratives (= the 'flying Jesus' of the Diatessaron). The point is that if we really want to determine what the truth was we can't start and finish with fixed notions of 'what we are looking for.'

For instance, in some parts of the world if they want to determine if a man has homosexual tendencies they don't hang around all day trying to find out if they can catch him 'in the act' with another man. They hire a proctologist to figure out his 'past history.' The point is that you have to change your way of thinking in order to track down the truth. By remaining rigid in your thinking you are unlikely to determine anything.

outhouse

Would not his name have been Yehoshua anyway? not Simon.


How about adoption rites in Judaism. look what we have with their two key players Abraham and Moses, both 100% mythical creations.

You could make a stronger point staying within Judaism then later christian fathers who were far removed from the events surrounding the fables origins.