outhouse

nothing in luke suggest he didnt believe the package he put together was fiction.

Facts are he never met or knew jesus so he could have just put together what he thought was relevant based on oral tradition floating around.



fiction cannot be proved, one way or the other.

Adam

Thanks, outhouse,
For stating the obvious and saving me from being the one to challenge Vork here.
By the way, I see you live just 60 miles from me.
You're new here, so let me mention that in my thread "Gospel eyewitnesses" I show that there are seven written eyewitness records in the gospels. I detail "L" in my post #132 there.
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=306983&page=6

My main argument is in Posts #1, !8,#38, #52, #74, #132, and #144, but see also #170, 230, 335, 450, 482,, 526, 534, and 555.

aa5874

It is just amusing for you to claim that the author of gLuke was a rabid HJer when the author was the one who STATED and described exactly how Jesus became the Son of a Ghost.

The author of gLuke went into details of the Holy Ghost conception that FOREVER destroys the Historical Jesus. See Luke 1. 26-35

The author of gLuke SHOWS without any reasonable doubt that there was NO records, NO tradition, No Sources, No witnesses of a human Jesus with a human father.

gLuke was supposedly a Publicly circulated document and should have been seen and known by the Heretics and Skeptics yet we have gLuke with the most detailed Ghost story in the Entire Canon.

How was it possible for such a Ghost story to have survived supposedly BEFORE Constantine??

The answer is rather simple.

gLuke's Son of a Ghost story could NOT be proven to be false.

Jesus of the NT was always BELIEVED to be the Son of a Ghost.

LegionOnomaMoi

Which is pretty standard from Herodotus onwards. Hence Loveday's chapters 2 and 3 in Acts in its Ancient Literary Context: A Classicist Looks at the Acts of the Apostles. The preface to each is consistent with greco-roman historical works. The divide between history and "myth" simply wasn't so clear in that time. The application of modern conventions of genre don't apply so readily.

Tommy

The passage destroys the notion that the author of gLuke believed there was some regular guy upon which the gospel stories were hung not that there actually was some guy. Jesus was a common name in first century Palestine, Messiahs were common, having disciples was not unknown, aggravating the Romans was common... if the gospels aren't literally true then either Jesus was a fairly unimaginative invention or someone did provide the inspiration for most or all of his non-supernatural biography.

Tommy

If Luke is trying to appear informed by eyewitnesses then why does he write the story in a continual narrative including episodes where there couldn't have been any eyewitnesses such as the events surrounding his birth or temptation near Jericoh?

Doug Shaver

Doesn't that assume fraudulent intent? If he was writing fiction, then he intended nothing of the sort.

Doug Shaver

Not in the mathematical sense of "proved."

That doesn't mean we can't be justified in believing one way or the other.

PhilosopherJay

Hi barre,

I think the writer is assuming and claiming his sources are historical. He is claiming to be putting his source text in a correct chronological order.

Lets analyze each sentence.

Many people have "compiled" an account. What kind of an account have many people compiled? They have compiled an account "of the things that have been fulfilled among us. Things fulfilled would be prophesies fulfilled. The writer tells us that there are many different accounts of the prophesies fulfilled among Christians. He is not the first person to do it.
These compiled accounts are like the accounts that have been passed on by "eyewitnesses and servants of the word from the beginning." Since the prophesies started to be fulfilled people have been compiling accounts of the prophesies fulfilled. The servants of the word are not actual eyewitnesses but people who were faithful to words they heard.

We actually have three different types of compilations:
1) compilations made by eyewitnesses since the prophesies started to be fulfilled
2) compilations made those who were not eyewitnesses but were faithful to the word (stories they heard).
3) compilations made by others who came later that are like the compilations made by the first two.

The writer is in the third generation of compilers of accounts.

He says, "It seemed good to me." What seemed good to him? It seemed good to write an orderly account for Theophilus so that he would know for sure the things he was taught. He was obviously taught that prophesies had been fulfilled among Christians.

The tricky phrase in the sentence is "I have followed all things carefully from the beginning." Does it mean that he was an eyewitness from the beginning, or does it just mean that he has read everything all the eyewitnesses said from the beginning. Since he has distinguished three generations of writers, I think we have to take it in the sense of him simply having read everything written by the eyewitnesses and others from the beginning. I don't think he is claiming to have been there from the beginning. That is why he says "followed from the beginning" rather than "since I was there from the beginning.

The key is the idea of an "orderly account." This implies that the other three types of accounts (by eyewitnesses, servants of the word, and later account writers) are not orderly accounts. They are in disorder. For Luke the numerous gospels and other Jesus literature floating around is in no kind of believable order.

Apparently because the previous accounts do not follow any order, Theophilus does not believe what he has been taught. The writer thinks that by putting the accounts together in this orderly fashion it will make Theophilus believe in the fulfillment of prophesies that is Christianity.

The writer is making the accounts of prophesies fulfilled more believable by putting prior compiled accounts in a logical chronological order.

In this sense he believes himself to be acting like an historian and is not lying that he was an eyewitness. He believes that some of his sources are by eyewitnesses and the rest are trustworthy (servants of the word). He is doing what many others have done before him.

Since he chose certain passages from Mark and Matthew and rejected others, he apparently thought there were mistakes in Mark and Matthew and he was correcting those mistakes.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

aa5874

The author of gLuke did document in his findings that people of antiquity did BELIEVE that entities described as Ghosts and Sons of Ghosts were accepted as ACTUAL figures of history and that people of antiquity did ACCEPT that these Ghost-like entities could act EXACTLY like human beings and could have lived among people in the Roman Empire.

It was NOT Only the illiterate that accepted gLuke's Ghost story , even the Emperor of Rome, the very Constantine , did DELIGHT in gLuke's Ghost story and made the Son of a Ghost the NEW GOD of Rome.