aa5874

But, I differ. I know absolutely that I can see, hear, talk walk, and respond to your post. And, also some things can be logically true or false and others we can know to be absolutely true by being directly witnessed ourselves.

So, with respect to gMark, some parts have a high probability of falsehood, using indirect evidence, and some parts are logically false by deduction.

Jane H

Some interesting and original thinking going on in this thread.

IMHO Mark thought he was writing history. Whether he was actually writing history is a rather longer debate.

The message from Mark’s Gospel is clear. The story of Israel has reached a historical climax. The turning point of the world’s history was reached, and the reader is encouraged to engage with a worldview under which a person had fulfilled the hope of Israel, in a very subversive, different way to what had been believed. That was what Mark was saying. And it makes no sense that he was saying it unless he believed it happened.

Now writings between the testaments such as Judith and Tobit were quite able to be ahistorical. They sustained the Jewish hope. But anyone saying to a Jew in AD75 that a known fiction described how the long hope of Israel had been fulfilled, would have been called a liar and told how the C1 Jewish worldview actually worked. For Mark’s inner theological dynamic to make sense, it mattered that the events he was describing really did take place.

aa5874

But, did any Jew see gMark in AD75?

Josephus wrote up to about AD92 and appeared not to have heard about this Jesus of gMark. Philo of Alexander wrote about events that happened during and after Pilate but did not mention neither Jesus, his disciples nor his followers anywhere, as described in gMark.

Now, the miracles, the resurrection and the 3hr darkness as described by the author of Mark are most likely not true, so even if the author wrote in AD75, he probably would have been confirmed to be a liar. No Jew, or any one on planet earth, has ever experienced a 3hr darkness, at noon, in the 1st century

So, the Jews probably came in contact with gMark very late, probably the 2nd century or later, since it was about that time when the Jews began to question the veracity of the gospels. See Dialogue with Trypho by Justin Martyr, written in the 2nd century and Against Celsus by Origen, written in the third.

patcleaver

You might be just a simulation in a matrix.

God might have just created the universe and all your memories are false.

You might be an accident victim in a comma and just think your seeing or hearing or walking.

You might be dreaming all this stuff.

If you could explain quantum mechanics to a scientist before 1900, then he would have said that its impossible.

The laws of logic might be incorrect just like Newton's laws of motion were incorrect at least in certain circumstances. After all, the laws of logic, like all human knowledge, are just derived by inference from experience.

I believe this is all incredibly low probability stuff, but still, you can never know anything absolutely.

The fact that I am conscious of perceiving something, indicates that something exists that I am perceiving, and that I exist at least as something that perceives something, and that I am conscious since consciousness is the ability to perceive something. However, I have been wrong about philosophical matters before - so I can not be absolutely sure even of this basic stuff.

It is a common "trick" of apologists for inerrancy, that some explanation is "possible", when the real answer is that it is irrational to believe in anything unless its probably true, and inerrancy is almost certainly a lie.

patcleaver

Mark was writing fiction and he knew he was writing fiction and I am confident that his original audience knew that they were hearing or reading fiction. He almost certainly read or showed it to his family or friends and explained to them how he derived it all from the OT and other sources, and I am confident that they were thoroughly entertained and impressed by his skills. Mark is just another fictional book just like Star Wars or Harry Potter.

Most of the stories in the world are fiction. There were dozens of Gospels at this time that you believe are fiction, such as Gospel of Judas. Gospels in the first few centuries seem to be an entire genre of fiction. There are thousands of other religious stories found throughout the world that are fiction. There is lots of evidence that Mark is fiction. You have no evidence at all that Mark is not fiction.

aa5874

Absolutely not.

Are you absolutely sure that it would have been impossible?


But, you are absolutely sure that you can never know anything absolutely. Or are you really not sure about anything?

patcleaver

[QUOTE=Ben C Smith;5079217]The Catholic Church claims that Eusebius the liar (c. 330) wrote a book that said Irenaeus the apologist (c. 180) wrote some mysterious document, that nobody else ever heard of, and Eusebius claims that Irenaeus' document said that Papias the apologist (c. 165) wrote five documents, that nobody else ever heard of, and that Irenaeus' document said that one of Papias' mysterious documents said:

"Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord's sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements. Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could." -- Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History Book III

First: Papias could not have been referring to our Matthew because our Matthew is a narrative and not a sayings gospel (e.g. the gospel of Thomas is a sayings gospel). We know that Matthew could not have been written in Hebrew and then translated to Greek because translation leaves indications that can be discovered by textual analysis. He could not have been referring to our Mark because Mark is certainly in chronological order. Papias may have been claiming that someone named Mark wrote the Kerygmata Petrou which is a lost work.

Second: Papias is just repeating an urban legends that he allegedly heard from a mysterious group called the Presbyters. He does not provide a specific source and it is highly unlikely that someone who lived in 165 CE could have met someone who accompanied Peter or even someone who knew someone who accompanied Peter.

Third: I do not believe the Catholic Church they are know forgers. I do not believe Eusebius because he is a known forger. I do not believe Irenaeus or Papias or the Presbyters or Mark or Peter because politicians and apologists lie all the time to support their emotion based beliefs.

patcleaver

There are aspects of quantum mechanics that would have been believed to be logically impossible before its discovery. There are uncaused effects, such as generation of matter in empty space and the timing of all sorts of phenomena, and cause and effect going backwards in time, and generation of matter from black holes.

Are we just arguing semantics?

I am sure about lots of things, but not absolutely sure about anything. I am much more sure there is no creator then that the sun will rise tomorrow because it is logically impossible to make something out of nothing. I am much more sure there is no magical beings such as god then that the sun will rise tomorrow, because magic is logically impossible.

The problem is that all human knowledge is based on past experience. Even the laws of logic are derived from experience. We can never be absolutely certain that we will not discover something new that will change our beliefs.

Does that mean that no belief is irrational? Of course not.
If you believe that something is not supported by reasonable evidence, then it is irrational to believe it.

Billions of people have searched for any sign of magic for ten thousand years of recorded history, and there have been thousands of scientific investigations into alleged magic, and there has never been a verifiable case of magic. What is the probability that some phenomena that is not yet explained by science, is the result of magic - practically zero. Thus, what is the probability that the universe was created by magic or that the universe was magically fine tuned - practically zero.

Is is irrational to believe in magical beings? of course its irrational.

patcleaver

There is no evidence that the Jesus Christ in Paul is related to Joshua ben Joseph from Nazareth. Since there were hundreds or even thousands of pagan religions in the Roman Empire, and millions of pagans, and no evidence that anyone belived in any Joshua ben Joseph from Nazareth in the first century, and Paul was a pagan who tried to convert to Judism, and Paul is not specific, then it is much more likely that Paul is referring to some pagan god called Jesus Christ.

In addition, Paul claims that he got everyting he is preaching directly from god and not from anyone else, so he is denying that his Jesus Christ is historical (known from history).

Peter, James, and John and the churches that Paul mentioned probably belonged to the same pagan cult that Paul belonged to and had no knowlege of any Joshua ben Joseph from Nazareth. It is very unlikely that there could be Churches all over Asia Minor by 40 CE that belived in any Joshua ben Joseph from Nazareth.

Mark may have gotten the idea of a hanged saviour from Paul.

gurugeorge

I think it's true that when you put the canonical gospels side-by-side with the apocryphal and non-canonical writings (e.g. if you read Ehrman's book that has lots of translations from the non-canonical stuff), they're all of a piece, and it becomes rather obvious that the canonical four, including "Mark", are of the same genre of whateveritis, but it's a genre we don't really have a modern day equivalent of. Mark and the other 3 clearly became canon simply because they're more like each other than any of the other "gospels" were like each other, and this relative consistency appealed to the down-to-earth people in charge of the Roman Church.

So what is that genre? I don't think fiction is quite right, unless one means that in the blandest, most abstract sense - the characters are not meant as totally imaginary and they're not meant solely as entertainment.

What they are is like a cross between purported history, pseudo-historical myth (like William Tell or Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan), theological tract and superhero fanzine.

i.e. you have a set "stable" of characters (like "the DC Universe", with Superman, The Green Lantern, etc., etc.), and every writer is riffing off the characters, saying "here's my take on what Jesus Christ/Paul/Peter/ [read: The Green Lantern, Superman, Zatanna] did" - it's as if the various gospels, canonical and non-canonical, offer so many permutations of these peoples favourite (religious) characters.

But the plain and obvious difference between what we think of as superheroes nowadays and the characters in the Christian material (and lots of other religious material too, for that matter) is that those ancient people really believed their (religious) "superheroes" existed.

So in one sense of course GMark was meant as historical. Unlike a pure novel or historical romance like Rob Roy, its main character didn't exist, but like William Tell or Don Juan, it's meant to be taken as history by its readers, as what actually happened. It has pseudo-historical details, pseudo-geographical details, etc., just like the story of William Tell or Don Juan. Plus also, it's what the author(s) think happened, or must have happened, for their particular theology to be justified - like "retroconning" in the comics world, you have an end state (in comics, some peculiar state of affairs some dumb-ass previous writers landed the character in, in religion, some theology) and you have to make the prior history fit that outcome.