aa5874

Your own stats are arguing against you. The Synoptics actually show that HALF of gMark was DUMPED by gLuke and when we reach to the Johanine gospel virtually ALL of gMark is discarded.

Why do we see this devastating trend in the very NT?

It is because gMark was NOT history in the first place.

The author of gMatthew may have believed gMark was history but subsequent writers literally DUMPED gMark.

Incredibly, the author of gJohn made the Synoptics look like Myth.

JoeWallack

JW:
It... was...meeeee! It was MEEEEE! See how fast witness testimony gets confused.

JW:
It tells us that they knew they had no access to historical witness. In evaluating historicity of the Gospels, this is a more important observation than if they believed "Mark" was history. Don't ignore superior observations in favor of inferior ones.

JW:
Not limiting it that much, is it. "Mark" knew what he was writing. "Matthew"/"Luke" did not. So what they thought about "Mark" is secondary. "Mark" could have written Greek Tragedy and "Matthew"/"Luke" tried to convert it to history. Form Criticism supports this. We lack the Source Criticism evidence to know for sure.

Your determination to conclude that "Matthew"/"Luke" thought they were writing history is also secondary to the observation that most of "Mark" is Impossible/Improbable (fiction). I've demonstrated this here many times as has the Legendary Vorkosigan. Pick a story in "Mark" that does not have a significant dose of it.



Joseph

ErrancyWiki

Doug Shaver

What Toto said. Plus: They were not "simply playing around." They had ideas they wanted to propagate.

Solo

What's the evidence that Marcion used Luke at all ? Principally, the patristic 'evidence' rests on a single sentence of Irenaeus (A.H. 1.27.3) and the opinion of Tertullian that the gospel Marcion seemed to have used was Luke. See here. But the latter apparently associates Marcion with Luke on the basis of patristic legend that Luke was the physician of Paul !!! Don't be duped, Joe !

Best,
Jiri

Doug Shaver

I take it you haven't studied modern apologetics very much. When you have a dogma to sell, the line between truth and fiction can get very fuzzy.

PhilosopherJay

Hi GakuseilDon,

What about the writers of the Gospels of Mary and Phillip. Was it Fraud, Fiction, Fact or Mistaken?
What about the writer of the epistles of Jesus Christ and King Abgaras? Fraud, fiction, fact or mistaken?
What about the writer of the letters between Seneca and Paul? Fraud, fiction, fact or mistaken?
What about Virgil when he wrote the Aenead? Fraud, fiction, fact or mistaken?

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

TedM

You can't say how much was discarded without knowing what those authors had to work with--ie they may not have had all of gMark, but just the portions that they actually included..ie very little was actually discarded. In any case this still doesn't address why they kept what they kept.

It tells us no such thing. All it tells us is they found the material compelling enough to use. And the fact that they included OTHER historical-sounding information would not preclude the possibility that such information came from OTHER historical witnesses.



Your definition of 'significant' differs from mine. I responded to a number of Vork's 'pattern-finding' speculations in the past, finding many of them wanting.

Regarding Matthew and Luke converting Mark or Mark's source to history, you seem to be agreeing that Luke and Matthew thought they were writing history--and that is why they copied word for word. Am I correct on this point?

To address Jays point, what strikes me as meaningful is not the existence of a bunch of gospels that have different information, but the fact that so many of them share a lot of the same information. Despite attempts by people here to paint GJohn as being completely unlike the synoptics, the accounts in GJohn are actually very similar to the synoptics on many points. GPeter also has similarities. The similarities suggest a core historical basis. Especially when they were copied word for word. It is the folks that wrote the infant Gospel and the Gospel of Philip that we can be pretty sure were making things up (and knew it), while those that repeated the same stories believed they were copying real history and to some extent really were.

DCHindley

Such negative waves, man. It's just a joke, for goodness sake. Don't you have a sense of humor? Stephan does, to his credit, despite his habit of going off on hypothetical tangents, name dropping and introducing usually irrelevant sexual innuendos.

Rather than imply that I belong with the lunatic fringe (no offense Stephan) because I don't treat many of these threads as seriously as you believe they should be, you can, like Gurugeorge, have a little fun with it.

Besides, I have many times expressed my opinion that arguments that the Gospels are entirely fictional, like modern of historical novels, are uninformed and are usually employed for no other reason than justifying an individual's desire to render them moot.

In fact, all narratives (of which historical reconstructions and fiction are both subsets) employ elements of plot, trope, argumentive strategy, and ideological implication. For this, I would refer interested parties to the first 40 pages of Hayden V. White's Metahistory (or via: amazon.co.uk), (1973 and about $20, so there is no excuse). So, plot elements alone prove nothing of the writings genre.

My personal opinion, expressed here and on academic lists, is that the gospels served as apologies for Christianity, directed originally towards the pagan subjects of the Roman empire, to "explain" why the founder of Christianity was crucified, which was the form of execution reserved for rebels and subversives. Apologies can be fashioned using various genres, which in these cases is a form of a Bios.

But the real reason you don't see much of me in discuussions like this one is that I am not personally an apologist. Most of those who post on this particular board are apologists, either for Mythicism or for Christianity in some form (from moderate/liberal to extreme fundamentalism). I've been a member since 2007 (so almost 5 years), yet I've posted only 1,674 messages (about 1 a day). Probably 2/3 or more of them were IMHO "meaty" and, yes, "highly nuanced" (meaning I say exactly what I mean, and explain what I mean somewhere in the thread or post).

You, on the other hand, have been a member since July 2011 (about 3 months) and already have posted 1,146 times (12-13/day). Just what is your agenda here, that requires such prolific posting? If there is one thing I've noted about apologists, they loooove to argue for argument's sake alone. It is no secret that we had a recent influx of Christian oriented "apologists" starting, oh, right around the time you arrived.

FWIW, the issue of the "sources" that have influenced a particular writer's POV is known among secular historians and postmodernists as "intertextuality". In other words, any particular author is influenced by every narrative or imagery (called "texts" although they may be oral or pictoral) they have been exposed to. Anyone who feels the irrestable urge to explain why so much of Mark is found in Matt & Luke (and the explanations range from plaigerism, to fiction based on previous published history, to the traditional 2 source hypothesis, to the alternatives that insist that because the early christian fathers were unanimous in the opinion that Matthew was the first to write his gospel, that somehow Mark is an epitome of Matt and Luke borrowed from both Mark and Matthew), is engaging in apology. This is much different than carefully comparing and contrasting the evidence just to establish commonly agreed facts or coming up with an explanatory framework for how it came about.

DCH

aa5874

Again, your own stats show that by the time gLuke was written the author DUMPED 50 % of gMark and later we see that the author of gJohn DISCARDED virtually all of gMark.

As you may know gMARK contains ONLY 16 chapters and gMatthew has 28 but what is extremely significant is that the author of gMatthew has similar events as gMark but EXPANDED the events with TOTAL FICTION not history.

For example, in gMark it is claimed Jesus was TEMPTED by SATAN in a wilderness however the author of gMark used ONE SINGLE verse for the fictitious Temptation event.

Mark 1.13.

Now the author of gMatthew will EXPAND the very fictitious Temptation story and supply TEN verses of TOTAL FICTION not history

Please read the temptation story in Matthew 4.1-11

1. In Matt. 4.5, Jesus was with Satan on the Pinnacle of the Temple.

2. In Matt.4.8, Jesus was with Satan on a high mountain looking at ALL the kingdoms of the earth

It MUST be clear that the similarities in gMark and gMatthew have NO bearing on actual history just a repetition and expansion of FICTION.

TedM

Why do I bother? Must be bored....:

Your response shows that you don't understand what I said when I said this:


Since you don't understand the above, maybe I can help you: What part of the above are you having trouble understanding?

Not at all. gMatthew expanded the story but that doesn't mean he made it up. He may have heard additional details from others if not from Jesus himself, and so he added them into the historical account he already had.

Regardless (your welcome, Stephan), the issue of EXPANSION is different from the issue of EXACT ADOPTION word for word. Why, in your opinion, did the authors think so much of the parts that they KEPT? Why didn't they just start over with their own COMPLETE fiction aa? Why are so many of the earliest gospel accounts so similar with only the later accounts diverging so widely? Were people early on less capable of invention than those that came later? Of course not! Why then?