blastula

This is pointless because even if they did believe it, what makes you think they would know whether any of it is fictional or not?

Who cares if people writing decades later of the alleged time believed it? People alive centuries later also believe it.

Toto

OK, you don't like the idea that Luke was a liar. So what about the possibility that Luke was a terrible researcher and totally mistaken. Why is that so improbable?

ApostateAbe

I think that is a worthy argument, and it is the kind of argument that needs to be done, among those who suspect that the history in the gospels is minimal. There needs to be explanations for the same details of the evidence.

Scenario #1 seems to require:

1) that Jesus was a myth believed, not just among the Christians, but also among the Baptists, who
2) then integrated the myth of Jesus (who didn't exist) with their own myth of John the Baptist (who did exist).
3) Christians reacted by accepting their myth and changing it to their own ends.

This explanation has explanatory power, I'll grant you that. but I think it comes a little short on plausibility and less ad hoc. The first and second points are points that we don't know until this hypothesis proposes them, and they are not so much expected from what we know about religious myths: they tend to focus on their figureheads, not so much the myths believed on the outside. And we have very few (if any) myths of actual human cult leaders closely associating with merely mythical character.

Compare it to the competing hypothesis:

1) Jesus really was baptized,
2) this was a well-known fact, and
3) Christians spun it to their own ends.

Claim #1 is a new claim, and it plausibly fits history, given that we know that John the Baptist baptized many people (per Josephus). Claim #2 is also a new claim, and it follows very directly from claim #1. Claim #3 follows from the New Testament evidence.

So, what about Scenario #2 that you proposed?

2. Mk simply made up the account, because in it, John is just announcing the coming of Jesus, and John can't stress enough that Jesus is greater.

Unfortunately, this does not have explanatory scope, because it explains the humility of John but does not explain why John baptized Jesus. There is a better way to stress that Jesus is greater: John offers himself to be baptized by Jesus, and Jesus accepts.

Sheshbazzar

My opinion is that Luke was a writer, and what he wrote was that which he thought would best put food on his table and coin in his purse.
I doubt that these writers ever set out with any intent to write 'lies' or to set up any new religion.
They were simply writing imaginative 'Messianic' tales to make a buck by supplying a niche market that was saturated by and fascinated with religion.
They were writing in a popular contemporary genre, a first century equivelent to our old 'penny dreadfuls' and 'tales of the Old West'

They had no way of foreseeing how their tales would become co-opted and re-written by others and used to build a tyrannical religious empire.

Juststeve

Shesh:

And people took these imaginative messianic tales for history for how long? Good thing you and the other mythers tumbled to the fact that it was all fiction all along.

Steve

Juststeve

Toto:

Lousy, or at least uncritical researcher is fine with me. Looks to me like Luke started with a copy of Mark and added to it some of the stories that were floating around, the ones he found credibly or elevating, and wrote his Gospel. Neither of us think what he wrote is entirely true. The question is, where did he get his information if people weren't telling stories, often fanciful, about a real Jesus.

Steve

Sheshbazzar

From what we can recover of real history, it appears that there have always been people who were not taken in by by these tales, and did not take or accept them as being history_ from the beginning. Most of Judaisim has never 'bought' it, most of those 'pagan' people the Church massacred didn't buy it, and Julian certainly didn't hold it in much esteem. We haven't tumbled to nothing they didn't know even way back then.

blastula

Are you kidding? People still today take them as history.

dog-on

In the end, it's the Lord, Liar, or Lunatic lipstick smeared on a different pig...

Sheshbazzar

Where do Old West writers get their material? Do you believe Matt Dillon was a real old West sheriff?