Chaucer

I don't pay any attention to anything in Mat. or Luke if it's already in Mark, and that's the case here. So let's stick with what we see in Mark .......... I find your reading of this passage utterly bizarre ........ the author's question? The author of Mark makes it perfectly clear here that he's quoting Jesus's fellow Galileans in this question. Jesus has just returned to his home ground and the folks there cannot take him seriously because they remember him when he was Jesus Who and not the big I Am.



Mk: 6:3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him.
4 But Jesus, said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.



Moreover, there's nothing ambiguous in this at all! Some Galileans are plainly quoted as grumbling about the sudden uppityness of the home town boy, and Jesus responds to them directly, even though the grumbling has been partly behind his back. The key point is, he knows perfectly well it's him they're talking about all along! And his response plainly shows that their description tallies with that.

You're just getting hysterical now. You remind me of a character in an old Star Trek episode: the Captain and Spock are caught in Salem, Mass. during the era of its witch trials (don't ask), and there's this judge who's also gotten stuck in the same town, same time. But he too is from the future, only the witch-burning mania has him terrified of seeming anything other than more witch-hunting than the witch-hunters. So when the Captain and Spock show up with their "magic powers", the terrified hysterical judge has to bend over backwards in pretending to share the kneejerk witch phobia of his neighbors. Once the Captain and Spock are locked up and the judge visits them in jail, any declaration by the two that there are no witches and they are not wizards, the judge says hysterically as loudly as he can, so others can see how zealous he is, "THERE ARE WITCHES, THERE ARE!" -- and from there, he goes into an hysterical diatribe saying that witches are fact, that the danger the two Enterprise officers pose is fact, that their being of the devil is fact, that his neighbors being always right is fact, and so on. That's you.

I've heard it all before, that Paul's Jesus does not tally with the Synoptics' Jesus, that Carr doesn't see the aptness of some of Paul's remarks if Jesus himself also preached to the Jews, that there is an exclusively skygod concept in the letters basically at odds with the bio of a human being on Earth, that the emphasis on the resurrection proves Paul knows nothing of the sayings, and so on and so on and blah blah blah. Then when someone inevitably points out that 1 Corinthians shows that Paul was familiar with at least some of the sayings, like those on divorce, etc., or that Paul also shows familiarity with the last night before crucifixion where he has Jesus breaking bread one last time with his disciples, and so on, you guys turn things right around and say "Well, Mark had that from Paul" -- or whatever. It's became like a ritual incantation. Give me a break.

In case things here aren't ludicrous enough, you say too that "Jesus of the NT had no briother." You mean that you don't credit the NT Jesus with having a brother, not that the NT itself has him with no brother. That's really what you mean. The NT itself does indeed have him with a brother. Galatians has him with a brother. Mark has him with a brother. Matthew has him with a brother. Last I heard, Galatians, Mark and Matthew are all in the NT! You can certainly claim that these are all suspect claims. O.K. But you can't claim these aren't NT texts, for crying out loud. That's absurd. There are NT texts out there that have Jesus with a brother. They may or may not be bogus claims, but they are certainly NT claims, and it's no use pretending they aren't.

What an absurd question. Josephus identifies James by the most notorious celebrity associated with him, his brother, so he never gives the father. Big deal.

I heard you the first time. Just what are you trying to prove? You're still sounding like that Star Trek judge who wants to impress everyone with how rigidly doctrinaire he can be.

What a shell game you guys play. It's blatantly obvious that we're pointing to AJ 20's agreement with Galatians and Mark on the question of a sibling of some kind and not on the question of a parent at all. You're deliberately switching signals just to confuse our readers. Cute, I must say.

We're not discussing AJ 18, which may be a Eusebius interp. anyway.

LOL!! I have to wonder if you're really this obtuse or just pretending to be. I said array of evidence in reference to my first "evidence, of a widely varied nature": "the gamut from Antiq. 20 to Pliny to Suetonius to Tacitus to Galatians to Mark to Q to Thomas (which never made it into the canon) to Matthew to Luke to Acts to John". I imagine it was quite obvious to a number of readers that I was referring - again - to these dozen or so texts as a group cited at the top of my previous post and not to one bloody sentence!

There's no father of Jesus in AJ 20, and there are two in the NT: Joseph is the adoptive father and God the natural -- er, supernatural -- one. SO?

Josephus mentions Jesus when he mentions James. Is James not a Christian? And I note that once again you will not address the distinction between evidence and proof. How pathetic.

Says you. Has it ever struck you as a remarkable coincidence that you guys take everything that's Jesus and Christian related in Josephus and in Pliny and in Suetonius and in Tacitus and on and on as all uniformly forgeries. How far are you willing to take that? How many convenient coincidences do we have to swallow?

Chaucer

judge

You need to get out more.

A book that hasn't been released and may never be released is at the forefront of a movement?

By someone who, according to that esteemed source wikipedia is..."best known for his writings on Internet Infidels (otherwise known as the Secular Web), where he served as Editor-in-Chief for several years."

Are you sure you are not being just a teensy bit biased?

Steven Carr

So many inaccuracies in one posting.

Where does 1 Corinthians 11 say 'last night before crucifixion'?
Where does 1 Corinthians 11 say that any disciples were present?
Where does 1 Corinthians 11 say that it was 'one last time', as though there had been previous times?

This is why mythicism is so strong, because all historicists can do is distort the Bible, in way which are as easy to debunk as it is easy to debunk the claim that there were no moon-landings.



What exactly is a mythical founder of a cult supposed to do except found the cultic meal, as a way for the cult to have access to a body that they would not otherwise have seen?

If I read a story of a deity instructing his followers in the art of invoking his body by ceremonial uses of chickens and tomato juice, my first thought is not 'Wow! This is obviously an historical meeting between the followers and the deity.'

No, my first thought is that this ceremony involving chickens and tomato juice was how the cult 'saw' the body of their deity.

spin

The author makes it clear he's quoting... etc.?! Who are you trying to kid? Trying to get historical data out of purely internal content of a body of literature! You get nowhere.

More of the same.

I doubt that. so much comes across as new to you.

You seem to be covering up you own total lack of ability to product historical evidence by deflecting onto positions you feel you can heep scorn on. Well, that's ironic. You are a dismal failure in presenting a serious position of your own. Answer these questions:

1. Who exactly wrote the gospels?
2. When did they write them?
3. Where did they write them?
4. What were their real sources?
5. How do you test any of the substantive content?
6. What contemporary reports do you have to support the substantive content?

You certainly are unable to provide satisfactory answers to any of these to a scholarly audience. You and the various sundry quislings have jack shit to justify your persistent ruckus, so WTF are you on about? You are no better than those you criticize, are you?

The big deal here is your slavish following of a compromised text. How can you repeat this like indigestion? Your selectiveness is representative of your lack of content. The use of the religious term "christos" in the short passage you will not brooch. You certainly don't accept it in AJ 18, giving you evidence that it was introduced to the text. We have here clear signs of disturbance in AJ 20 due to unaccountable word-order, ie the fronting of the familial relationship with no recent prior reference, and more interest in Jesus than in James. Deal with the text before you use it again or you give the impression of being doctrinaire.

I presented a brief critique to the use of Tacitus who was writing in the second century and who at best is a reporter here of hearsay. You totally ignored it, yet you present the material here as if nothing has been said of it. Tacitus knew the situation with regard to procurators, as I said (and my extended comments are in the archives), though later christian commentators obviously didn't.

Your gullibility level regarding the apparent purity of the pagan sources that get tarted out is nothing strange. You will not consider the cultural hegemony of christianity in western society for well over a thousand years. Everything needs to be examined with extreme care, before it can be admitted as veracious. How about looking at the Suetonius passage about christians being executed among restrictions to maintain public order... pantomimes banned, charioteers kept under check, street vending curbed, oh and christians get the extreme punishment. Yeah, sure.

Your performance so far shows no willingness to evaluate your sources, just repeat modern apologetics. Are you a literature major or something?


spin
(This is post 11,111!)

Loomis

Be honest: Does Mark 6:3 seem to you like something someone would ask during the course of a normal conversation?

If everyone already understood that Jesus was a carpenter; the son of Mary and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon, then why would it be necessary to spell it out like that? Why was the author so explicit?

It looks to me like a literary device to establish a setting - some sort of background. It reads like fiction. And it looks like a setup for the proverb in 6:4.

-------------------------------------

And what’s the deal with the name ‘Joses?’

Isn’t that just another ‘Jesus?’

judge

Just keep repeating it. We have clear signs, we have clear signs, we have clear signs..we haveclear signs.
As usual you have the sniff of a sign and this gets magically transformed into a clear sign.
But do you really belive what you say?
The evidence from this forum is that you will talk big but lose your nerve.
On and on you went about nazareth..on and on. You would submit a peer reviewed paper...blah blah blah.
All the while you carried on the same way you do here, You know the truth...no one else can see it because they are dishonest....etc etc...

But of course it never gets past this amatuer internet forum. On here one can trumpet how absolutely clear things are. In the real world it is a bit more difficult.

And so if a person does not see your clear sign, or does not accept it then the religious guilt trip follows.
You are gullible etc..you are not honest....blah blah blah. just like a preacher.

Toto

I can't get through to your one link, but look what you have here

Reviews in Religion & Theology

Perspectives in religious studies,

Journal of Biblical Literature,

Pacific Theological Review

The Harvard Theological Review, 1997.

Biblical research, 1996.

Revista Catalana de Teologia

TYNDALE BULLETIN, 2003.

The Journal of Religion,

Journal of Early Christian Studies

The Expository Times, ???

Novum Testamentum,
...

Journals of theology or Religious Studies or Biblical Literature, not one historical journal. Ehrman declined to take part in the Jesus Project, which was designed to actually evaluate the historical evidence for Jesus.

Toto

I get out quite a bit.

That movie was aimed at a particular non-academic audience. It made a number of statements that were easy to shoot down, so the Christians loved taking potshots at it - and historicists like to bring it up. Acharya S tried to take credit for it, but then had to write a long essay explaining some of it away.

That is the cutting edge.

judge

Delete

Chaucer

I would have thought it would have been crystal clear that when I wrote "Paul also shows familiarity with", I was intentionally referring to texts outside 1 Corinthians.

Does it occur to any of you that Jesus himself -- especially in cases where both Synoptics and Pauline letters (the early authentic seven) converge -- may have been deliberately invoking such symbolism himself through his actions?

Chaucer