GakuseiDon

That reminds me of a comment I heard: People say that an infinite number of monkeys typing on typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know that this is not true.

No Robots

Oh, momma! I'm gonna be usin' that one!

teamonger

Good idea for a poll...

This atheist would put the probability at 98%, based on the prima facie evidence of the NT. There's simply nothing improbable about the existence of a charismatic cult leader who impressed people, and pissed other people off. I agree with E. P. Sanders: that through historical criteria, "we know a lot about Jesus".
t

spin

Read Wuthering Heights.

Is this slavish adherence to Sanders' conjectures? You don't know anything about the relationship between gospel and the am ha-aretz. We know that the gospels were written in Greek, which makes the conjecture improbable. But heck, why not assume it because it's in some book?


spin

show_no_mercy

Jesus is the love child of Moses and Plato. Any time you mix Jewish theology with Greek philosophy, you're going to end up with a beast that looks like Christianity. From Philo the Jew to Superman. No "genius" required. The writers of the gospels were obviously educated Greeks who had some knowledge of Judaism, albeit superficial. If they weren't educated Greeks, then they wouldn't have been able to write in the first place.

No Robots

We also know that the gospels as we have them are derived from earlier oral literature of the ammé haaretz.

mountainman

Dear No Robots,

I dont think that anyone would want to argue against those statements. The problem remains however the precise chronology at which these events commenced on the planet Earth. On this matter, I suggest the following introductory remark by Arnaldo Momigliano, perhaps the foremost of ancient historians in the 20th century, might serve as a starting place for discussion:



Best wishes,


Pete

No Robots

I looked up a paper on its narrative strategies. Again, we have here an example of an exceptional writer using strategies that no simple Galilean could possibly have imagined; and yet the impact of the Galileans' work is far greater than that of Wuthering Heights.

No. My inspiration comes from Constantin Brunner, who writes:

How could [contemporary Jewish writers] know that [Christ] would acquire power, world power, through an entirely unexpected literary master-stroke, namely, through the occasional writings of a previously nonexistent ammé haaretz literature?--Constantin Brunner, Our Christ, p. 275.

You suffer from the typical Kantian delusion that every man is fit to think for himself, whereas I am a thoroughgoing determinist: We are spiritual automata, and our thoughts are as determined as the collision of billiard balls. Our thought exists in a cultural matrix and we can no more escape this than we can change our genetic makeup. We are what we are, and pedagogy fails wherever it attempts to change a thing into something it is not. I cannot claim to have discovered that the Gospels are derived from the ammé haaretz, but I can claim that this is the only explanation that makes any rational sense.

spamandham

You said that before, but I don't see any validity in that claim at all, and you haven't supported it. It's a naked assertion that I find absurd at face value.

Anything that a human being could actually say or do, an author could invent.

(not interested in discussing the 'spirit of genius' business, but don't take that as agreement)

spamandham

If that's true, it undermines rather than promotes arguments for a historical core. Oral storytelling has lower fidelity than written.