Toto

I don't see a problem here. If the gospels were written as allegories around 132 CE, that would correspond to some "higher truth" in the thinking of the time. That gives you several decades before the church fathers start to insist that they are factual.

If the gospels were written in the last part of the first century, as Doherty contends, there is even less of a problem.

ApostateAbe

The date of Doherty makes more sense. You say it is even less of a problem, which means that you acknowledge that the proposal that the gospels were composed after 132 CE is at least a little of a problem. For good reason, because it is actually a big problem. You don't have drastic changes in theologies in the space of two decades that go almost completely unacknowledged by a large handful of apologists writing against heretics. But, I'll put that hypothesis aside unless someone wants to defend it.

Toto

I don't think it is a real problem, although you seem to. Do you have some problem with English idiom?

It may look like a drastic change in theology to you, but it might not have been in the first few centuries.

The deep thinkers of the time thought that there were various levels of reading texts; the highest level was symbolic. Mere literal facts were suitable for children or the unenlightened who could not deal with higher truth.

I think we've been through this before on this board, although I don't remember if you were part of the discussion.

ApostateAbe

OK, cool, I don't think I was part of that.

spamandham

1000 years ago, what was the alternative to the assumption that life was animated by a mysterious life force? There was no alternative, and yet it was the wrong assumption nonetheless. It is not necessary to have a detailed roadmap of another alternative in order to view a particular proposition as implausible on its own merits.

I seem to recall that you favor a timeline for the Gospels that has all four penned within a span of a few decades? Looking then at the Gospels, we see evolution among them. A birth naarrative is added, an empty tomb story is tacked on to Mark. A complete respin of theology is evidenced in John. All these changes within a very brief time indicate 2 things:

1. It is unlikely that we have the original Jesus gospel. Say you decide Mark is primary, it is unlikely that Mark is a substantially original work based on the existence of the other 3 copycat gospels.

2. Since such marked changes in short time are evidenced within the canonical set of gospels, it is unreasonable to conclude that this was a theologically static period.

The ancients did not distinguish between history and mere story telling the way we do. For these reasons, there is nothing unusual with the proposition that myth turned into history very rapidly, with fervent apologists willing to die for what they believed to be real a few short decades after the stories were concocted. We see that sort of thing even in modern doomsday cults, and the ancients did not have access to information the way we do, and early Christianity was most certainly a doomsday cult.

ApostateAbe

For me, it is about choosing the conclusions that are most plausible out of all of the explanations available. That may be why I have always had the view that the creationists had an acceptable intellectual position before Lyell and Darwin, but we can ignore that for now. The objection from Doug Shaver and Philosopher Jay seemed to be that there is an unproven assumption that the gospels were meant to be interpreted as truth. You seem to be spinning it into something stronger: that it is implausible. Do you really think it is implausible? If so, then go ahead and explain why. Pointing out the uncertainty of the position is not nearly the same as showing it to be implausible.
Yes, that's right.
I think that is a good set of counterpoints, so you win this one.

spamandham

You and I have already gone through various lists of difficulties with common HJ scenarios, including your proposed scenario, so it doesn't seem productive to keep dancing that dance over and over. But for completeness, here's one of the many lists of difficulties I've posted here with common "Jesus of Nazareth" style proposals:

http://www.freeratio.org/showpost.ph...&postcount=172

Although this particular post lays out reasons to accept mysticism, the same points that support mysticism are also difficulties for common HJ proposals.


Yay for me! :Cheeky:


findme

show_no_mercy

Ah, ok - now I know where you're coming from.

I don't know if this is a standard "mythicist" dating, but it does provide the terminus ante quem date for the gospels. As in, the first witness[es] that we seem to have for knowledge of narrative gospel material come from this time period. There's no de facto reason why the gospels couldn't have been written in this time period, but it is towards the tail end of the historiographal (I just made up that word!) "bell curve".

Doug Shaver

I have no idea how many ahistoricists go for that hypothesis. I know that Doherty's dating, last I heard, is only somewhat later than the consensus dating. My own suspicion is that the documents as we now have them are from the early second century, though an early version of Mark might go back to the late first.

Composition after Bar Kochba wouldn't surprise me much, but the only argument I've heard for that sounds rather tenuous to me. And, as SNM has noted, it's pushing the terminus ante quem mighty hard.

spamandham

This is a key point that tends to get lost in these discussions. When we are discussing the dating of texts, we are discussing the dating of the texts as we know them. The dating does not apply to possible earlier versions that we don't have access to and have no way of knowing the content therein.