Mandelbrot

Neutral on Christianity? No such animal. The closest you will come to neutrality on Church history is Henry Chadwick (not the baseball guy).

aa5874

Justin Martyr EXPOSES the Big Lie that "Nobody questioned Jesus's existence in the 1st century or the 2nd century or the 3rd century".

Dialogue with Trypho CX The Jews did QUESTION the existence of Jesus.

Duvduv

You seem to prefer to say what you think the GMark is NOT rather than what it IS. And since it was not a part of a holy writ canon until a few centuries after the events in the story allegedly happened, you should want to infer or explore what the purpose of the book was, before and after Christians adopted it according to your view.

lpetrich

This issue brings to mind a rather interesting assessment of the historical-Jesus literature. Vladimir_M wrote Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong

Vladimir_M proposed whether there are lots of feasible research problems and whether there is any ideological or commercial bias. Commenter lukeprog posted
I think that he's very right about that.

Vladimir_M responded:
For the most part, that seems reasonable. There have been numerous very different proposals of what the historical Jesus Christ had been like, and this suggests that we don't have good enough data to force convergence onto some theory. Richard Carrier has the right idea about improving methodology, but we'll have to see what he comes up with. One does not need fancy data-analysis techniques when one can easily draw conclusions from one's data. It's only in the hard cases that one has to be careful.

lukeprog responded to that:
I think that he's right about that. The closest thing to recently-discovered data has been the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi codices. The Dead Sea Scrolls are fairly close in space, but mostly before the time of Jesus Christ's career, about 30 - 33 CE. The Nag Hammadi documents date to the decades around 300 CE, and are too far off in both space and time.

It might possibly be that someone will discover some documents that describe court proceedings in Jerusalem around 30 - 33 CE, for example, but one has to be VERY careful to check that it is not a hoax.

Kapyong

Thanks for your comments.

I don't know how to use Wiki, if someone wanst to add my list, that would be great :-) Maybe I'll look into it.

K.

Kapyong

In fact I did explain why, you just don't agree, then claimed I avoid explaining.

K.

aa5874

It is the WRITTEN statements in the short-ending gMark that show what it is. Once you see what the short-ending gMark is then it is rather a simple exercise to deduce what it is NOT.

There is NOTHING difficult about such an exercise.

1. The short-ending gMark states Jesus spoke in parables because he did NOT want the outsiders to be converted.

2. The short-ending gMark states Jesus did NOT want the Populace to know he was Christ.

3. The short-ending gMark shows that Jesus did NOT tell his own disciples he was Christ until Peter made the claim.

4. The short-ending gMark Jesus did NOT teach his disciples that he would DIE for their Sins and the Sins of all Mankind.

5. The short-ending gMark Jesus did NOT authorise the disciples to preach the Jesus story.

The short-ending gMark is NOT about Universal SALVATION by the crucifixion and resurrection of the supposed Jesus.

Duvduv

I don't see what importance the GMark would have been for any sect. Simply a story of a martyred holy man. And that singular text would be the focal point of a whole sect?!
Even Hare Krishnas work with more than that. And Mormons certainly do!

mountainman

I agree. Perhaps the best approach is to try and read a spectrum of positions and therefore cover the landscape of such books. My advice to you is to make sure you read Edward Gibbon's The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire . The two Chapters, Chapter 15 and Chapter 16, should be taken as standard reading for the epoch which saw the rise of the imperially supported state religion.

aa5874

That makes your 4th century claims even worse. It make no sense at all for the short-ending gMark to have been written without the Great Commission in the 4th century and then to be added later.