Toto

As long as you keep on using that stupid term Gospel According to the Atheists, I have you on virtual ignore.

Just because there is something that is not supernatural, that doesn't mean that it happened.

Adam

Of course, but it removes the automatic free pass to deny any historicity to the gospels. My "Gospel According to the Atheists" is objectively defined based on source criticism, yet contains almost nothing that an atheist could dismiss out-of-hand as impossible. I believe this disproves MJ. Yet no atheists here are studying it seriously, so I'll go on using that title until they do.

After that I can consider a more technical name like Proto-Luke/Passion Gospel or The Jerusalem Gospel. Yes, I do think that it once existed as an actual text used by Christians in Jerusalem by 60 CE, but I don't want to get side-tracked on whether the text(s) existed individually as Q, L, and the Passion Narrative or two or three integrated together. I personally favor the first two together that stopped where they already had the Passion Narrative from the outset.

Adam

I can't extend my "Gospel According to the Atheists" to include much of gMark because of so much of the supernatural in it, but I certainly could expand the Q section in it to the Q within gMark. Many of the short sage sayings in Mark are Triple-Tradition that is also in gThomas, (see Mark in Robert Funk's The Five Gospels), so must be from a very early source, probably Q. Some not-so-short examples are the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:3-11) and the Leased Vineyard (12:1-11). The Passion Narrative (Mark 14:1-15:47) is usually regarded as from the earliest source. Note that the authentic parables of Jesus would seem to indicate that if gMark is allegorical, the allegory originated with Jesus. If gMark is fictional, Jesus was the writer?

Vorkosigan

Adam, can you let the adults talk? Really.

Read Solo's post above and note all the scholarly names that appear there. Go read those books.

Vorkosigan

Lawrence Wills should be mentioned in this discussion, and so should the entire genre of Hellenistic historical romances. Legion, are you familiar with anything outside the tiny circle of right-of-center apologetic writing on the Gospels? Burridge's position is laughable --


-- wish I could arrange to write the handbook entry so my own writing formed the basis for the "consensus" and then cite people in my own citation circle for evidence. Yay!

Have you read Sowing the Gospel or The Quest of the Historical Gospel or Bowersock's venerable Fiction as History or anything like that? Or Helms, Brodie, or similar? It seems that when you run for the books here, your bookshelf is skewed toward people who are arch-historicists, desperate to recover an HJ out of Mark.

Vorkosigan

Adam

Referring you back to my Post #13 in Jesus as an Exorcist:
Jesus not as Exorcist?

As is obviously implied in your quote from me in my Post #39 here, my "Gospel According to the Atheists" is based on Luke and John only, not on Mark. Shesh shows no evidence that he has read it as he claimed, but apparently you're standing on principle that only Mark needs to be read because it proves your case. But if you refuse to read anything else, how can you or anyone believe that you are right?

Nevertheless I'm glad you've taken me off Ignore. Maybe spin will have the courage to do so soon. However, you'd do better to find someone else out there who can start defending MJ against my disproof.

Sheshbazzar

WTF do you expect? We have read your eviscerated snippets of texts, and have examined your claims repeatedly and and found them to be vacuous.
Repeating and linking to them in thread after thread will never succeed in making them any more persuasive.
Your alleged 'disproof' has the fatal flaw of only existing within your own mind.
You were never able to persuade even Bible believers to 'buy' into your pet theory, so you shouldn't be too disappointed that the Atheists here have even less regard for your textual hack-job.

Adam

Still no evidence, Shesh,
That you've read it much less demonstrated it to be vacuous.
Insults from you or Vork or spin are mere ad hominem fallacies. No one has yet argued against my Gospel According to the Atheists. I keep making links to give you guys an opportunity to start refuting me.

The inerrantists think they have God proving their position. Who proves MJ? Is it just that Carrier will in his next book?

Sheshbazzar

Yes, we know that has been your problem all along. Throughout your "Gospel Eyewitnesses" thread you were asked to provide evidence for what you were claiming.
Time and time again, you came back with a litany of 'could have been's', 'Maybe's' and 'Perhaps's'.
Oh I've read all of your listed verses well enough, and of course was forced to do so multiple times as you kept changing your mind about what you wished to 'omit', to 'add' or to 'substitute' time and time again. The evidence of that fact is plain and in black and white for anyone that cares to read through all of that crap.
The final results of your arbitrary clip, mix, and match were no better.
You cannot recover any 'original' text by simply cutting out any parts of the texts that do not fit in with your personal preferences or theory.
As I most patiently explained to you previously, no one can mount an argument against your assertions regarding things that are not patently visible or researchable within the texts as they actually stand.
When you choose to randomly excise huge sections of texts, based upon on nothing more than your own preferences, and pursue forcing that small remnant to conform to your personal theory, you are estranging yourself from any valid discussion of the actual textual content, or of the writers intentions in the composition of these texts.
And we have kept refuting -you- in thread after thread, because the arguments you are attempting to force are fashioned out of pure horse-shit and are not possible to be reasonably examined or supported.

For example, You want us to accept, solely upon your say so, that Nicodemus was really a not a upright and righteous man, but just an underhanded conniving spy, in the employ of the Sanhedrin, sneakily shadowing and gathering as much dirt on Jebus as he could, so that he could then turn this 'espionage report' over to his Jewish bosses so that they could use it as evidence against Jebus.
THAT succinctly sums up your stated reason that Nicodemus was one of your alleged 'eyewitnesses' going about writing down everything Jebus said or did.

That isn't any 'scholarship' that can even be examined, it is nothing but a pure damned totally unjustified and libelous horse-shit character assassination against Nicodemus.
How are we supposed to even begin to address or to refute this kind of made up horse-shit?

Adam

Reminds me of something I heard on some Christian radio station (the Catholic one, I think), "Scratch an atheist and you'll find a Fundamentalist."
Considering your current proclivities, you'd prefer to preserve Nicodemus's sanctity to demythologizing gJohn from the despicable exclusivism Fundamentalists find there by assuming every word there is exactly as Jesus spoke it. I would reject gJohn totally if there were not some way to avoid the harsher rhetoric attributed to Jesus. That would get me back into the mainstream of scholarship, the Synoptics-only school. However, for half a century I have known of gJohn as an early and honorable presentation of Jesus, but coming from a distorted perspective or at least requiring some sophisticated theologizing. (For example, that it works out all right with Jesus as God the Son, but is ruinous exclusivism if Jesus is understood as an exalted type of prophet.)

If the horseshoe fits, wear it. Maybe you're starting to come along. Was Nicodemus really that superior to Jesus? Wait, wait.... there never was a Nicodemus, right? What are you getting so upset about?