Steven Carr

No more than when I read somebody write that he received from his dead deity a way of using chickens and tomato juice to have access to the dead deity's body.

I tend to assume that for that cult, the chickens and tomato juice were the only body of that deity that that cult had seen.

ApostateAbe

OK, the way I see it, those journals are focused on a specific area of history, and they are essentially in the same academic field as that of the Jesus Project. I provided that list because your claim was, "Yes, there is an academic 'consensus' (which is better labeled "conventional wisdom,") but it is not a consensus based on independent investigation and peer reviewed research." Each of those articles represents a conclusion on Jesus from independent investigation and peer-reviewed research. Each of them sifts a historical human Jesus from the mythical Jesus of the New Testament literature. Historical journals of broader subjects leave the questions of the New Testament and Jesus to journals like these, journals of equivalent scholarly weight that are more focused. They have "Theology" and "Religious" and "Biblical" in their names because that is their subject and that is their roots.

spin

As usually judge you have nothing meaningful to say, no analysis, no dealing with evidence. What is the point of such null posts? Back to ignore.


spin

Toto

The impetus for the Jesus Project was that academics avoided the question of the actual historical evidence for a human Jesus.

Have you read these articles? I suspect that they all start with the common, but unexamined, assumption that there was a historical Jesus.

ApostateAbe

Sorry, I didn't know that was the relevant point. I haven't read the articles, but I'll take your word for it.

aa5874

Once it is admitted that New Testament literature propagates a mythical Jesus then there is no literature to support the historical Jesus.

The historical Jesus cannot be examined there is no extant information to support such creature.

Chaucer

I was not addressing historicity or non-historicity here at all. I was questioning aa5874's bizarre reading of "Is not this the carpenter, the son of" etc., as the author's question apparently spoken in his own voice(!) instead of a plain quote of a character in the narrative, in this case the home folks a-grumblin'. Since Jesus is shown responding to such grumbling himself, whether historically or not, it's plain that Mark means to tell the reader that Jesus indeed has certain siblings, one of whom is James!

Real scholars don't pretend to know, but the consensus emerging from scholars like Funk, Miller, Crossan, Ehrman et al is that each gospel may each emerge from an anonymous writer or writers who may be -- possibly -- connected to communities where Matthew or Mark or Luke or John once proselytized. Mark suggests a more pagan author than the others, and also one somewhat less reluctant to place a lot of the blame for the execution on Roman shoulders than are the later "gospelers". Luke is also more pagan in tone, and in fact his dedicatee appears to be explicitly Roman, but the unfortunate -- ad hoc -- demonizing of the most orthodox Jews seems further along than in Mark. Matthew comes off as more Judaic and John as possibly the most Judaic of all, while also appearing the most overtly anti-Semitic (in fact, John is just plain weird).

Mark is generally judged as ca. 70 c.e.; Matthew as ca. 80 c.e.; Luke as ca 90 c.e., and John ca. 100 c.e. While this is the general assessment, it's suggestive for some that the earliest physical scrap of writing from any of the Gospels appears to be a fragment from John, whose carbon dating has been analyzed by some as being as early as 125 c.e. Might this suggest, say a tiny few, that John itself was the earliest of all and that the order now commonly assumed is all wrong? Most don't believe so, but a few do.

In addition, if we accept the general understanding that Acts and Luke come from the same pen (or pens) -- actually, I don't necessarily -- then some recent attempts to date Acts may also throw this Gospel chronology out of kilter: Some recent researchers into Acts have started to seriously wonder if Acts might not be as late as 120 c.e. But I've been unable to hunt down the exact reasons for such dating or the degree to which such reasoning has or has not been properly vetted a la the scholarly research that ApostateAbe cited. But if Acts is as late as Luke, that could throw the order of both Luke and John into question.

Depends on whom you read. The consensus respecting that is practically no consensus, although there are theories, respectable and otherwise, galore. Still, it's not the kind of growing consensus we see in (much of) the hypothetical chronology. Nor is it comparable to the consensus growing around the types of sources. Essentially, Matthew and John appear to have been written closer to Jerusalem and environs, while Mark and Luke/Acts were probably written in primarily more pagan areas. But much in that is even more speculative than is already usual in such analyses.

The main consensus surrounding this question is described readily enough, although not everyone subscribes to the prevailing theory. Still, there is a wider consensus respecting this than is the case respecting some of these other quite legitimate questions. Using the current consensus order of Mark/Matthew/Luke/John, it appears that Mark was assembled first, primarily from oral traditions. Also, in tracing through the general consensus regarding sources, it is necessary to stay focused on some aspects of chronology in addition.

First of all, there is apparently a relatively casual, conversational tone to the Koine Greek in Mark that is highly suggestive of oral transmission, and a good part of the narrative is given in the present tense, also suggestive of an active story-teller keeping his hearers' attention. Other oral devices may include the frequent narrative use in Mark of "immediately", thereby heightening the tension of the story-telling as well. But whether or not this necessarily reflects oral tradition is less clear.

Going back to chronology for a moment, Mark's being regarded as the earliest is also contingent on certain details in it that get steadily played down in the later Gospels, details potentially embarrassing to a steadily growing process of hagiography in the later Gospels. The reason why such details involve sources is because this factor may also suggest oral sources less rigidly screened than in the later Gospels. But not all professional scholars hold to such reasoning. Essentially, whatever the nature of the sources for the embarrassing details that disappear in succeeding Gospels, the fact that more and more such details disappear while more and more hagiography gets substituted suggests both the chronological priority of Mark and also the distinct possibility that some of the (probably but not definitely oral) sources behind those details are not sources out to "transfigure" anything. They suggest unvarnished gossip collected before the man was virtually deified.

Two examples of this type of "embarrassing" detail spring to mind immediately. Only in Mark is Jesus's family shown as believing that Jesus has lost his wits and is no longer sane once he starts to preach. There is even a vague suggestion in Mark that they're seriously contemplating either taking him home as some naughty boy or maybe even locking him up(?). This puts certain details of the virgin birth and early childhood stories in Matt. and Luke in an interesting light (such stories do not appear in Mark, while John, which also does not have these stories, substitutes an even more startling account of Jesus's "parentage" in its opening verses..........). In fact, Matt.'s and Luke's stories seem to bend over backwards to show Jesus's family, especially his mother, as deeply understanding of what compels Jesus to go off and preach! Could this be partly a corrective to the embarrassing description of the "happy royals";-) in Mark?

Also in Mark, we have the blind man at Bethsaiba (sp.?) having to undergo an unsuccessful Jesus healing at first before being successfully healed, an incident nowhere found in the later Gospels (surely, Jesus should never need to trot out a test model before unveiling Model .02 -- tsk, tsk, tsk ;-). The absence of such details from later Gospels appears to suggest to some scholars that the record is deliberately white-washed to some degree in successive Gospels.

We see a small example of that kind of "hagiographizing" in this very thread. You see it in this thread's citation a while back of two parallel passages in Mark and Matthew describing the Galileans' grumbling. There is a textual variant in which Mark has the Galileans describing Jesus as a "carpenter" where the later Matthew reads a "carpenter's son". Evidently, to the later "Gospelers", the notion of Jesus himself and not his father being a hard laborer with his hands is too humble a proposition to tolerate, so it has to be his adoptive father who's the carpenter instead in Matt. and Luke. In fact, a number of these embarrassing details in Mark, later scuttled, have also been cited as possible evidence that there is a real relatively messy and historic human being here that successive Gospels are trying to "tame" for hagiographic reasons, and not a fictitious character at all.

Moving on to Matt., we see here a great deal of Mark being lifted verbatim. But there is one huge difference: suddenly Jesus becomes an extremely humanitarian philosopher with a profoundly countercultural outlook to boot. According to some, but not all, scholars, the Koine Greek here of yards and yards of often profound reflections is marked by almost as colloquial and oral a feel, apparently, as in Mark, evidently contrasting sharply with the more self-evidently literary style of Matt.'s surrounding narrative material, which, though largely lifted from Mark, suggests the writer's lamp in the way it's been recast far more than the oral story-teller of Mark. Why this contrast between the self-consciously literary style of the recast Mark material versus the more conversational style of the startling philosophical material put in Jesus's mouth? While it's evident that the bulk of the narrational material is sourced from Mark, the source of the extremely profound but more colloquial Jesus sayings is still uncertain to some scholars. But when we move on to Luke, theories as to the source of the sayings start to gain sharper focus.

In Luke, we see both newly recast Mark material plus almost the same Matt. sayings also rabbited together, but in often very different ways from what we see in Matt. Not only is the Greek style for the adopted Mark material now almost poetic in its high literary style, making even Matt. seem plain by comparison, but by contrast the sayings are very occasionally even sparer in style than in the Matt. version, although more often the sayings are almost word-for-word identical with their counterparts in Matt. The most striking difference in the Luke treatment of the sayings versus the Matt. use of the sayings is Luke's apparent decision (or is it a reflection of what Luke had in front of him?) to let what are called the individual pericopes of the sayings stand separately at many different parts throughout the Mark material. What we saw in Matt., OTOH, are ambitiously sewn together sermons, linking whole swaths of this sayings material into elaborate unified structures with very occasional connective tissue, sometimes facilitating the extending of these effective sermons into lengths of at least two chapters. This rarely happens in Luke. Instead, individual pericopes are used sometimes to illustrate discrete points in the Mark narrative as we move along. The sayings are more omnipresent when used in this way in Luke, but by the same token, they are sometimes less complex, more gnomic, and more fragmented as a result.

From both the differences and the similarities in the (sometimes differing) texts of the sayings, switching from the second Gospel to the third and back again, scholars have generally agreed that distinctive characteristics in the evident source for these sayings can be deduced up to a point. Since it was one or two German scholars in the 19th century who first analyzed these sayings, the original scholarship into the evident source for these sayings used a German word to designate the evident source behind these sayings, "Quelle" (which means "source"), usually abbreviated to "Q". What these German scholars discovered was that, notwithstanding the Aramaic language evidently used by most folks in that area in the first half of the first century c.e., the choice Greek turns of speech here, often highly individual and idiosyncratic and, yes, colloquial in the Greek texts that we read in Matt. and Luke, are virtually identical in both the Matt. and Luke versions of the sayings again and again, leading to the supposition that not only is a written rather than an oral source behind the sayings common to both Matt. and Luke, but that that source was most probably a source originally in Greek. What "Q" then may have been was a Greek text of disparate sayings, partially based on oral tradition, like Mark -- hence its occasional colloquial and conversational nature -- but one that already had a few earmarks of the written-down form in which Matt. and Luke found it.

Right now, precisely because of the seemingly less "edited", seemingly less "redacted", nature of the Luke presentation of the "Q" sayings across different junctures within the (originally Markan) narrative, most scholars take the Luke presentation as possibly reflecting more closely the original form of "Q" than does the more elaborate "inter-stitched" sequences in Matt.

John's source seems entirely separate and not related to any of the textual history for Mark, Matt. and Luke (the latter three generally termed the Synoptic Gospels or Synoptics). The Greek style in John is evidently often eliptical and very hard to parse. A small minority have even suggested it might constitute a translation from Hebrew, but not many buy into this idea, SFAIK. Personally, I am simply far less interested in John than in the other Gospels, and frankly have read fewer studies of it than the others. Its usefulness for me is confined to a few aspects described further on below in addressing some other questions. With respect to this question, its source could be as entirely within the Judaic community as is the case for Matt., but I'm not sure that that necessarily means that its of comparable vintage. The consensus that this one is really significantly later than the others really seems compelling, IMO. For one thing, the figure of Jesus has now been amplified in its supernatural stature to such a marked degree that the more human Mark depiction (sorry, couldn't resist:-) now seems largely left behind. While there is less of a consensus as to the source behind John than there is for the others, most would agree that it seems to derive mostly from written material (unlike the Synoptics), perhaps closely associated with rituals in predominantly Judaic Christian communities (you won't get everyone agreeing on this either). Ironically, although the source for John may be predominantly Judaic, the tone of John also seems the most disconcertingly anti-Semitic, in spots, of all the four Gospels. And some feel that the writer or writers of John have a great deal to answer for in having switched the burden of the execution much more heavily over to the Jewish community over the Roman than it ever is in Mark (even though even Mark is not entirely free of a slight layer of anti-Jewish resentment in Jesus's execution).

This is as good a rough overview of where the consensus now stands on the sources for the various Gospels as I can supply right now. I don't pretend that the extent of whatever knowledge I have isn't far more wide-ranging on the Synoptics than on John. There's a bald reason for that: the Synoptics seem closer to reality in their description of the Jesus bio than John, and therefore the Synoptics just interest me more. Add to that the fact that only Mark has no virgin birth and no physical appearances after the disppearance from the tomb, and you can readily understand why Mark would interest me the most of all --

-- except when it comes to the sayings, which seem almost as colloquial and oral in tone as Mark and which first appear in Matt. Going beyond the overview, now, of where the prevailing consensus stands, I'll provide here some additional thoughts of my own, based partially on some more recent textual analysis that I've read, from which I spin off some further reflections of my own, which are offered with a grain or two of salt.

Having studied the Gospels in editions ranging from Funk & Miller to Harper/Collins to the New Revised, etc., all I've gleaned has been strictly from translations and from modern analysis from the likes of Crossan, Funk, Kloppenborg, Borg, Mack, etc. For years, I would have essentially agreed that the First Tier materials, chronologically, are the earliest Paulines, the letter of James, Q (as redacted in Matt. and Luke), and the non-canonical Thomas.

Then I came across -- just in the past year or so -- a seemingly detailed analysis of the original Koine Greek texts, purporting to find where certain stylistic affinities in basic idioms and characteristic turns of speech lie in the originals and making conclusions accordingly. All well and good, except (so far?) I only seem to find this kind of analysis on line and not in the bricks-and-mortar off-line world (which I frankly trust a bit more than the on-line world). The conclusions reached in these new studies are boiled down in these three on-line pages --

-- http://www.davegentile.com/synoptics/main.html

http://www.davegentile.com/synoptics...pretation.html

http://www.davegentile.com/synoptics/Q_forgery.html --

-- and the nub is that distinct affinities in linguistic style in the original Koine Greek have (apparently?) been found between the parallel "Q" passages present in both Matthew and Luke and much of the bulk of Matthew elsewhere -- not the bulk of Luke, and not Thomas, and not an individual "set of linguistic fingerprints" of its own either! This has really "rocked my world", so to speak. Since I'm more inclined to place some value in detailed philological and statistical analysis than in analysis primarily based on philosophical preferences only (which can be maddeningly subjective), I was delighted to come across this (what to me is/was) more nuts-and-bolts approach dealing with the original texts, which I'm still not equipped to read in their original myself. But while delighted to see that detailed stylistic analysis of the originals has emerged in the most recent decades, the fact that I see such studies rarely referenced elsewhere has made me leery of leaping to too many conclusions. That is, certain (surprising) conclusions do leap to mind, but since they upend certain conclusions reached in the Jesus Seminar, etc., and contradict certain conclusions that I admit I've long accepted myself, I'd feel better if some less partial eye than any I'm aware of at present including my own, and one thoroughly versed in Koine Greek unlike myself, were to vet this new research and the three cited (above) web pages first.

Consider: if the parallel Q passages have their strongest stylistic/linguistic affinity with Matthew after all, then that could mean -- for starters -- that the long-held assumption that Luke comes closest to preserving the Q original (due primarily to Luke's more fragmented -- and so less edited(?) -- presentation of these parallel passages) could be in question. In addition, if Q's strongest affinity is with Matthew rather than having an individual linguistic "set of fingerprints" of its own, then that -- maybe -- could point to Q emanating primarily from a stratum closer to Matthew than to the earlier Thomas/Pauline/James stratum, thus inadvertently casting Mark as even closer to First Tier material than before, possibly superseding Q chronologically, something few modern scholars have suggested -- so far.

All that would go against what I readily concede has long been my subjective impression: that a "committee" is far less likely to have cobbled together the highly individual, highly idiosyncratic "Love your enemies" nexus of sayings in Q than one lone counter-cultural individual who (it would seem) has less of an incentive for group cohesion than would a whole committee. For altruism this startling, it remains unlikely, though not impossible, that a mere transcribing disciple -- however dedicated to the spirit of Jesus' sayings -- would bother to offer caveats admonishing a general love of one's opponents when his primary concern would be to promote an acceptance of Christians and Christianity above all.

Again, it remains barely possible that someone else sincerely extrapolated Jesus' message through proselytizing with admonishments so profoundly selfless and specific as these, admonishments not strictly reflecting the letter of Jesus' own formulations at all, merely their spirit. Nevertheless, that still seems unlikely. I recognize the cogency of what others have argued, that a later more pluralistic outlook could conceivably emerge in later generations after all. But cogent as that sounds, it still seems (marginally) less likely to me.

(continued)

Chaucer

Of course, weighed against that is this new statistical analysis I've cited in this multi-part post, which could really end up placing Mark as earlier than any Q material once and for all. Before jumping to such a conclusion, my initial reluctance to do so leads me to say that I'd very much appreciate anyone else's more qualified efforts here in gauging the Web pages I've already cited above and in indicating for the rest of us just how valid this new statistical analysis really is. Ideally, I'd like to hear from someone thoroughly conversant with the original Koine Greek texts first of all. Can we dismiss this new statistical analysis cited above as a crank exercise? Has there already been precisely this kind of survey already done elsewhere that has led to an entirely different conclusion, that the Q material does indeed have an altogether individual "set of linguistic fingerprints" after all, separate from either Matthew's or Luke's? Does anyone know? Or could this really be a significant breakthrough, based on possibly stronger grounds than the (more subjective, IMO) impressionistic philosophical grounds that have led me and others to (wrongly?) accept Q material both as First Tier hitherto and also as unrelated chronologically to either Matthew or Luke?

Now, Luke seems at great pains to break up the elaborate contextual presentations of Q material that Matthew brings forth, and to trump that fragmentation of Q material by ignoring much of (if not all) the narrative material that Matthew adds to Mark. This is a puzzling picture of double work for reasons that are hard (though perhaps not impossible) to identify.

Given Luke's distinctly different and more fragmented presentation, many Seminar scholars have hitherto supposed that Luke was working from an original source earlier and less developed than the more elaborate version in the known Matthew that we now have. Combining this reasonably plausible supposition with the newer (possible) discovery of the linguistic ties between Q and additional narrative material in Matthew yields two possible conclusions: A) the original Q was indeed earlier than the extant Matthew and has been preserved (to some extent) in Luke, but B) this line of argument also yields a possible conclusion that Q was in some sense intimately related to Matthew to a degree not hitherto guessed.

Do we need a solution of sorts for Luke's puzzling reasons for designing completely different structures (and smaller ones) for Q material? Maybe. If a careful analysis could show me some simple pathway to understanding Luke's reasons for actually breaking up(!) the Q material into small fragments, then I might see less objection to assuming that the original Q material is indeed original to Matthew -- and original to Matthew in the extant Matthew Gospel we have. But failing such a persuasive analysis, it seems plausible to suppose that Luke had access to a less elaborately developed version of Q material than what we find in the known Matthew. Furthermore, I remain in strong agreement with what many scholars have remarked about the uniform brilliance of the voice print behind Q.

I propose -- with huge grains of salt -- this possible explanation for both the (possible) closeness in linguistic thumb print between Q and the bulk of Matthew, and, at the same time, the possible earliness of the Q format(s) in Luke. Could we surmise that Q did exist but that it was an early form of the Gospel of Matthew? In other words, Q does indeed go right back to Jesus's original voice print, but the one to have first put down that voice print on paper was indeed the writer of Matthew, possibly many years before writing the Matthew Gospel that everyone knows today. Then Luke would take the Gospel of Mark and the early form of Matthew that had only the Q sayings and combine those (using some additional material as well) to make his own Gospel.

The idea that, at one point, a Matthew Gospel comprised only sayings may also be buttressed -- although this may be a stretch -- by something Papias apparently said in reference to Matthew: he viewed Matthew as strictly "logia". Now, what might "logia" mean in this context? Could it mean purely sayings, and could he be pointing to an early version of Matthew that was only the original sayings? Or is that really far out? Does "logia" mean something entirely different?

One thing's for sure: I'd very much love to read a careful linguistic analysis of all this by someone who has absolutely no axe to grind whatsoever -- VERY hard to find that! -- and I'd love to hear some really experienced and knowledgeable and unbiased take on what precisely Papias might mean in referring to Matthew as "logia".

Primarily by double or triple attestation, although that is not all. Since Mark is first, and since Matt. and Luke derive partly from Mark, that means that double or even triple attestation means pretty little in such cases, since each is most likely copying from the former. No, the kind of multiple attestation that could count more would be instances where we see the same remark in textually unrelated First Tier material, both canonical and non-canonical, or where slightly different remarks are found in First Tier material that all seem to point to the same general point of view coming from Jesus.

A superb online resource is the parallels table at

http://www.utoronto.ca/religion/synopsis/meta-5g.htm

There, it is possible to see, by using the Find throughout all five Gospels (thus including Thomas), any instance of parallel passages that one wishes to study. A clear example of the first type of multiple attestation could entail looking at possible parallels between Mark and Q, since Mark does not appear to depend on Q for any of its text. That would mean that attestation of a given remark in both Mark and in an apparent Q passage would constitute real double attestation as opposed to one text merely copying the other. And in fact, if the two versions of the given remark happen to differ slightly, that could actually strengthen the case for Jesus having made a remark something like it at least, since the slight variant would indicate some likelihood for the remark having independently ended up in two different sources. Such an instance is somewhat more likely if Jesus himself said such-or-such a remark in the first place than if he didn't.

We have such a case (among a small number) with the saying in Mark 8:35:

"For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it."

This is paralleled in Matt. and Luke in not two but four "Q" passages. In Matt., 10:39:

"He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it."

In Matt.: 16:25:

"For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."

In Luke 9:24:

"For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it."

In Luke, 17:33 (its simplest version and possibly its most accurate?):

"Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it."

In a few cases, even the textually independent Thomas joins Mark and a "Q" passage or two in a few parallels. When Mark reads, at 9:35:

"And he sat down and called the twelve; and he said to them, "If any one would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all." "

and at 10:31:

"But many that are first will be last, and the last first."

Matt. reads at 19:30:

"But many that are first will be last, and the last first."

and at 20:16:

"So the last will be first, and the first last."

And Luke reads, at 13:30:

"And behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last." "

While Thomas reads, at 4:

Jesus said, "The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same."

An example of the second type of multiple attestation, where a general point of view is paralleled without such specific parallels, involves the way Jesus evidently viewed himself.

Key remarks by Jesus on who and what he thought himself to be is offered in Mark, "Q" and Thomas:


Luke (Q): 10:21-22 In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea, Father, for such was thy gracious will. All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."


Luke(Q): 22:28-30 Ye are they which have continued with me in my temptations. And I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father hath appointed unto me; That ye may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.


Mark: 14:61-62 But he was silent and made no answer. Again the high priest asked him, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?" 14.62And Jesus said, "I am; and you will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven."


Thomas: 61 Jesus said, "Two will rest on a bed: the one will die, and other will live." Salome said to him, "Who are You, man, that You, as though from the One, have come up on my couch and eaten from my table?" Jesus said to her, "I am He who exists from the Undivided. I was given some of the things of my Father." <Salome said,> "I am Your disciple." <Jesus said to her,> "Therefore I say, if he is <undivided>, he will be filled with light, but if he is divided, he will be filled with darkness."


Thomas: 99 The disciples said to Him, "Your brothers and Your mother are standing outside." He said to them, "Those here who do the will of My Father are My brothers and My mother. It is they who will enter the Kingdom of My Father."


For what it's worth, these examples do not show in any conclusive way that Jesus was the son of God, but they do indicate some likelihood that Jesus may have viewed himself that way. Some have suggested that these parallel passages may suggest that Jesus was merely alluding to some kind of father of us all and that the constant implied or explicit "My" behind a number of such passages could just as well be "Our". Further analysis of Jesus's use of "Our" for God or "the father" seems to show, though, that he only implies or uses "Our" when addressing a whole group of people and speaking explicitly of some Deity who has the same relationship to all (such as "Our father" in the Lord's Prayer verses, which do happen to be "Q" verses and are present, in slightly variant form, in both Matt. and Luke). So the implied "My" probably means that, historically, he did view himself as having, at least, a special relationship to Deity that others didn't have, after all.

Only Josephus's Antiq. 20, which speaks of a contemporary of Josephus's, James. That's among secular non-Scriptural texts. Beyond that, there are the earliest authentic seven among the Pauline letters, also written by a contemporary of James. One text, which I, personally, put more stock in than most of the Scriptural Pauline letters, though, is the letter of James, even though it too is Scriptural. This is because I can't help wondering if the James letter inadvertently slipped through the cracks and was never meant to be canonized. It stands -- in many respects -- in the starkest contradiction with 100% of the Pauline letters and with much in subsequent Church doctrine. Philosophically, much that is in the more noxious and less inclusive and less ethical mold of the mainstream church reflects much of what we see in the Pauline letters, while much that is of precisely that unpleasant nature in Paul is directly contradicted in the letter of James. Just as one example, even reading between the lines in the extrapolated earliest strata in the Jesus accounts, canonical and non-canonical, I see a strong emphasis on good works. Yet a central tenet in Paul involves the slating of faith over good works. Here, James could not stand in starker contrast, with his slating of good works over faith. This a blatant elephant in the living room, IMO, a line that divides those whose altruism strikes me, frankly, as wholly genuine and those who couldn't care less, ultimately, about an ethical code. No question that, philosophically, Paul won out over James on this one during the subsequent centuries, with hideously tragic consequences that are felt to this day. James does not conform with subsequent church doctrine, and moreover, a number of those modern scholars who don't even share my disgust with Paul do seem to concur with the supposition that this is a text that is fully as early as the authentic seven Pauline letters. If any Scriptural text could even remotely be seen as having even 50% of the probity that the secular Antiq. 20 seems to have, this early letter of James would probably be it.

(continued)

Chaucer

When it comes to the Gospel of John, perhaps not. But since I view most of John in almost the same fictional light as the mythicists view the whole NT, I guess that's not surprising, though regrettable. I don't even prize John as great literature (well, maybe the opening verses on the Logus have a certain rolling grandeur), whereas something like Luke I sincerely view as an example of great literature. It's both superbly wrought in its overall structure, and its writing in individual episodes is always crisp and evocative, a rare combination. As to what I have to say on the rest of the NT, the justice of your claim here will have to await the board's general response to this current post.

Whatever some here have said, there still remains a huge difference between saying that someone was the Christ versus saying he was called the Christ. Both believers and secularists sometimes say "called Christ". But only believers say he was the Christ. It is "was" that makes me suspicious of Antiq. 18, not "Christ".

I can only repeat what I previously wrote about similar passages elsewhere in Josephus.



"And on the other, a frequent reason given by mythicists why we should look askance at this reference is the odd word order. But the word order in "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ [tou legomenou Christou], whose name was James" is characteristic of Josephus:


"Wars 2.21.1
a man of Gischala, the son of Levi, whose name was Johnâ;

"Ant. 5.8.1
but he had also one that was spurious, by his concubine Drumah, whose
name was Abimelech;

"Ant. 11.5.1
Now about this time a son of Jeshua, whose name was Joacim, was the
high priest.

"This is a good example of why one should be steeped in the writing style before plunging in with both feet."





Actually, your protestations of neutrality to the contrary, you are the one who's now starting to sound doctrinaire.


Actually, I didn't ignore it. I refer you to remarks I made in another thread (http://www.freeratio.org//showthread...60#post6030260).


I have never said that any of the passages we've discussed so far in this thread amount to anything like proof. This is historical study, not scientific study. Proof in historical study is in short supply. I learned that from my father. All we have here is varying degrees of evidence. That's all. If aa declines to address the difference between evidence versus proof, will you? Evidence and an understanding of evidence's place in this discussion is critical to our going forward here. I repeat, I appreciate the point that judge made here:



"Jesus Mythers seem to have more in common with creationists. Creationists, seldom if ever come up with any actual evidence. They rather spend time desperately explaining away evidence.
This is what Jesus Mythers do, desperately explain away evidence, and propose vague improbable theories instead."



I don't know if Judge is an orthodox believer or more of a general skeptic (small "s") like myself, but he has been far less intemperate and outspoken than I have been here, particularly in my earlier posts in this thread. Indeed, I would hardly question my being suspended here for a brief while at all. It would be quite understandable, considering. I find the fact that judge has been suspended on far less intemperate behavior than mine quite chilling. Surely, if the moderators are generous enough to let my previous tirades go by with a mild rebuke, it seems especially unfair that judge's far milder behavior should result in suspension. I fail to see the reason for standards that let my previous outspokenness go by with a mild rebuke, while judge's behavior should result in a downright suspension. It seems to me that judge's "infraction" was as much due to a difference in opinion as to any insult offered personally to anyone on the board. Surely, on a board dedicated to freedom of discussion, mine was a far more serious infraction than his.

Perhaps a more careful assessment as to the justice of your claim here is only possible after my submission of this post. Others here can only judge your accuracy in assessing me this way after reading my newest multi-part post here. I believe I've provided here both a rough precis of certain aspects of the prevailing academic consensus and also one or two tentative reflections of my own.

And BTW, I was a Drama and English major in college, an English and Textual Bibliography major in graduate school, earning my M.A. in Textual Bibliography and English, and I earned a Master in Library Service soon after that. None of that necessarily qualifies me as a specialist in ancient texts, but letting you know some of my background at least lets you know the answer to your question.

Sincerely,

Chaucer

Toto

I have no idea why judge's account is marked suspended. I think it is a technical glitch of some sort. I will check into it.