aa5874

I simply no longer entertain assumptions as evidence when dealing with the NT.

I just do not accept that unknown authors should be granted any credibilty without external corroboration when their stories are fundamentally outrageous and implausible.

An unknown author of gLuke claimed John the Baptist was the offspring of an old barren woman as predicted by an angel who made her husband dumb.

The unknown author even have a word for word dialogue of the angel and the husband before he was made dumb.

Now, if these outrageous implausible stories are in the NT and were believed to be true, a plausible non-event can also be believed to be true when it was actually manufactured.

I just cannot accept such nonsense as true or grant these unknown authors any credibilty without corroborative external information.

I am looking for evidence to support my position, not to change your mind.

TedM

I totally agree. Yet, I still find the "against the grain" material to be worhty of thinking about. If it is all made up, it still seems like the authors would have had a good reason to make everything up, and I'm hard-pressed to find one for several things related to JTB...

I would ask, what would be your explanation for having Jesus baptized by John when Jesus was supposedly sinless, there is no scriptural support (that I know of) for the idea that he was a sinner until baptism, and for the use of baptism by Jesus' disciples and throughout the early Christian church when the JTB crowd appears to have been unaccepting of Jesus?

Do you find those claims to be unworthy of even thinking about?


What kind of evidence would that be? There is no denying that the claims are outrageous and that the authorship is quite unproven. What exactly are you looking for since you have already made your decision?

ted

dog-on

Do you apply this same logic to Joseph Smith?

bacht

There doesn't seem to be anything implausible about baptism, we know that ritual bathing was employed by the Essenes and others. The question would be: should we be skeptical of JtB's treatment in the Christian story? Was he or his followers some kind of embarassment to the proto-orthodox?

Maybe John was more popular at some point, or maybe his followers were a problem in the 2nd C. There does seem to be a lot of secondary polemic in the NT aimed at heretical competitors.

Loomis

Ben,

I already knew that you don’t agree but I don’t care. I posted it because I know that there are other folks reading this thread.

Ben C Smith

Well, just so long we agree that we disagree....

Ben.

Chili

. . . is John the baptist here who parallels the dove that Noah send when he and his life-houseboat stuffed full of goodies was about to find new land on the other side of life. This sentiment was presented by Zechariah for whom Elizabeth was the dove that bore the good news of better days ahead in the life of Joseph the upright sinner, to say that turbulance must 'be' for a calm to bring peace over the waters (= remove the reproach of Elizabeth). Now notice please that Matthew does not recognize the calm before the storm in the absense of the birth of John to say that for Matthew the dove returned without a branch and so new life will not be found in Matthew wherefore Ascension was not part of Matthew and back to Galilee he went to get purified some more and in the end will die as one more child of Israel that failed to mature as/in Is-ra-el.

Elizabeth actually becomes the manger in Luke that was absent in Matthew who so left on his own to Bethlehem with a good plan but an empty life-house-boat later called Egypt that he entered in the dark but with his eyes wide open because the 'angel of the Lord' (read lucifer) had told him to do so.

The only difference between the flood and the birth of John is that Zechariah was representation, which is something that Noah did not have in his days as covenant maker. This is expressed by his Canticle that is followed by the tributes of Simeon and Anna wherein his status as Nazarite-by-nature is confirmed (and of which circumcision is a symbolic foreshadow). Contrary to this in Matthew Jesus becomes a Nazorean with a vengeance on account of Herod's revenge that persisted with Archelaus in his wake and so now have 2 different Jesus' in Galilee of which only one is going to succeed . . . which now means that Matthew is used to show why things went wrong for the children of Isreal. Apart from this does it tell us that Jesus was real but obviously not quite real in the way that historians would like him to be real.

aa5874

I thought about this first.

Mark 1.1 I don't think the John the Baptist story, as described, where John baptised a God is credible. I have rejected the author.

I will no longer accept assumptions about the John the Baptist story as credible without some external corroborative source.


You don't know what is evidence? It is simply NOT imagination.

I read sources external of the NT. Today, I had a look at Tatian's "Diatesseron" and I found some more evidence to support my position.

TedM

I've never studied it in depth, but yes I would. IOW before rejecting his works as entirely invented I'd look at the parts that could be historical to see if there are clues to whether they are. My understanding is that the archeological record doesn't show what one would expect if it were true. That is not the case with the JTB story.

TedM

It IMO is against the grain to depict your leader as adopting the beliefs of a heretical sect, especially if by doing so you imply that your leader didn't have the character you now claim he does when there is no reason to do so. Further, if you are claiming such a heretical belief was unnecessary for your leader to adopt, and in fact that your own leader brought in a new and improved version of it. Very against the grain.