aa5874

In any event, ALL witnesses MUST give the SAME date, the approximate time and the SAME place of the accident so that the police can know when the accident and where the accident occurred so that they can go and investigate.

It would appear to me that there are NO witnesses for Jesus Christ except perhaps the Holy Ghost, his supposed mother and the angel Gabriel.

In the NT, not even the supposed husband of Mary, Joseph, can say WHEN and WHERE this One time bizarre ACCIDENT, the birth of Jesus, happened.

Joseph appears to have LEARNED about the Jesus accident or was COACHED by an angel.

Toto

I think you mean conception, not birth. Joseph was present at the birth

Little Dot

I've always understood the difference to mean that each gospel writer was presenting Jesus in different aspects.

Matthew as the prophesied coming King.
Mark as a servant
Luke as a man
John as God.

spin

There is no reason to think that a gospel was written by one person. Bother gospels Matthew and Luke depend on the gospel of Mark, but they also share common material, which points to at least two written sources for the 1st and 3rd gospels. They have very different birth accounts that are related in basic content, suggesting a story that has been handed down and developed in two different communities. Single writers with single viewpoints is certainly not an option--other than for priests and preachers who know the rule "simple is better for an audience".

gupwalla

As another poster pointed out, if the gospels all agreed word for word then there wouldn't be four (or more) of them. There would just be one.

So, the presence of multiple, differing accounts is not merely important to skeptics -- it's important for Christian apologists as well, otherwise there would be no justification for "multiple independent attestations."

For me personally, the differences between gospel accounts are important because they are interesting -- it is the differences between Mark and Matthew and Luke and John (and Thomas and Peter and Barnabas and Whomever) that tell us something about the flowering of different beliefs and traditions within the nascent Christian movement. And standard harmonizations of those different traditions tells us something yet again about the movement to catholicise those traditions into an orthodox statement of beliefs (as much, anyway, as such an orthodoxy has ever existed).

The similarities are much less interesting, really, aside from the Synoptic Problem and how that relates to the dating of the canon texts.

Little Dot

From what we know about Jewish oral tradition and memorization that could account for the commonalities.

Matthew traces Jesus' genealogy back to David through Solomon, and Luke traces Jesus' genealogy to David through Nathan. It's a little more complicated than that but I seriously doubt that you are interested in the full meaning, so I won't bore you with it.

avi

Hi Little Dot,

I am unlearned, so please take my comments with a grain of salt.

You wrote:

and I interpret this phrase as suggesting that you believe that the gospel according to Matthew praises Jesus as the coming King.

I disagree.

I acknowledge that I lack skill searching Hort & Westcott with Esword, but I have not found even one instance of

ρήγας

in the text of Matthew.

I think you confound "King", with "Messiah", which is the English version of the Greek transliteration "Cristou", representing the Hebrew word for messiah.

Messiah, i.e. "cristou" in the Greek New Testament, does NOT mean KING. It means "saviour", or "deliverer", or "rescuer"

Perhaps I err, and you do intend to suggest that Matthew presents JC as a King. If so, can you offer a passage from Matthew, in support of this view?

Thanks,

avi

spin

No it cannot. The issue is visible specifically through the Greek. It has nothing to do with Jewish oral tradition. One can analyze the Greek text and see how the Greek has been changed, often improved language-wise as well as story-wise. You need to read about the Synoptic Gospels.

Under normal circumstances most people would understand the impossibility of having two different male lineages from David to Jesus. You can see that something has gone wrong, although you get dull responses trying to account for the basic problem.

You are not thinking about other people knowing anything about the subject. Do not be naive.

I was not talking about genealogies in my previous post, but about the birth stories themselves. We find Mary taken into Joseph's house in Bethlehem in Matt (they only go to Nazareth after Egypt) and the couple going from Nazareth to Bethlehem in Luke. We find the angel talking to Joseph in one and Mary in the other. There's the story of the kings in Matt and shepherds in Luke, and many other differences. What they have in common is the same cast of characters and a birth in Bethlehem. The differences far outweigh the similarities, but those similarities are the backbone, suggesting a long development of both versions of the story.

A similar phenomenon can be seen in the two feeding stories in Mark. They are obviously in origin the same story of a crowd fed with fish and bread, but they have diversified through telling until there are two stories. The writer of Mark presents them so. That helps us to understand that the main construction of the Marcan gospel involved collecting different traditions about Jesus. That's why he can be seen at home in Capernaum in Mk 2:1, but have an unnamed home territory in Mk 6:1. Interestingly though, Mark was written in a Greek speaking Roman community, because the reading audience sometimes got its explanations in Roman ideas (a hall is a praetorium 15:16, Greek coins, leptas, as a Roman coin, quadrans, 14:42) and there are Roman language idioms translated into a strange Greek representation that's not functional in normal Greek, but a Roman Greek audience would easily understand.

Both the gospels of Matthew and Luke are better Greek and convert the Marcan rough Greek into better constructed language.

The relationship between the gospels is a complex one that shows that written texts were manipulated based on a few early collections of traditions, Mark being the larger one.

Juststeve

For purposes of clarification the Hebrew word for Messiah means anointed. Anointing is the method for crowing of a king in Hebrew custom. Those modern Jews who still await the coming of the Messiah often refer to him as King Messiah since he will rule over Israel as a King, if you believe in that sort of thing.

Tradition has it that Rabbi Akiva anointed Bar Kochba as King in the belief he was the Messiah. As it turns out he was mistaken.

Steve

Little Dot

The reason Matthew's geneaology traces Jesus' lineage back to David through Solomon is becasue that was the kingly line. So Matthew was very much saying that Jesus was destined to be a King.