Ted Hoffman

Modern Christians have intentions now because they desire to believe what is written to be true. But these authors were the first ones to pen these stories, they did not need or desire to believe something really happened because they were presumably in a position to know what happened from what did not. They could ask people and other sources and clear doubts. Modern Christians cannot.

Ted Hoffman

Why dont we stick to Mark and avoid clouding the issue? Matthew obviously received a tradition (if you want to call Mark "a tradition"). What about Mark?

spin

And your reaction to that?

You assume the authors were the first ones. My understanding is that these stories have been through many mouths and many hands. There are signs within individual gospels and the fact that gospels share fragments of different tradition bases indicates that they have a long history by the time they have ended up in their canonical forms.

If this is the case, then the ancient writers, being just the final voice in a chain of chinese whispers, can easily be just like your modern christians above.


spin

spin

As a kneejerk reaction, I think of the sequences of traditions around the two miracle feedings, which to me are surefire evidence of arrangements of preceding traditions. Where did the Nazarene reference come from, if it wasn't a received tradition? Did the Marcan writer make it up already obscure?


spin

Ben C Smith

If you think ancient Christian authors did not desire to believe that what was written (the OT) was true, I think you are simply mistaken at a very fundamental level.

Ben.

andrewcriddle

I agree that when JB says that Jesus will baptize with Holy Spirit that this is a metaphor for people receiving the Spirit through Jesus, but to say this is not literal seems a very literalistic meaning of literal. (Like saying that the injunction to be wise as serpents is not meant literally.)

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

Hi Spin

Since the Gospel writers are unlikely to have been eyewitnesses, there is a sense in which they can only tell it as they believed it really hapened; hence I would in one sense accept the change.

However we would differ as to how far the beliefs of the Gospel writers about what happened are likely to have differed from what really happened.

(One issue is the date of the Gospels; if Mark was written c 70 CE then its author's beliefs about what happened are likely to be closer to what really happened than if Mark was written after 100 CE.)

Andrew Criddle

Amaleq13

:huh: I have difficulty believing you missed my point so completely.

You need to be a mythicist intent on reframing the discussion in order to offer the questions you asked but others have noted, apparently better than I, where you have gone astray from Andrew's OP.

That is precisely what I was asking you to do. :banghead:

That would, rather obviously, continue to beg the question of Andrew's OP, continue to ignore the point of my post as well as your apparent agreement with that point. Either you don't understand the point or you don't actually agree with it.

Except you when you asked Andrew to establish historicity and when you asserted greater parsimony for mythicism and when you asserted there was no reason to think any of it happened and you continue to do so while simultaneously saying otherwise.

spin

Of this I can be certain. I would think you've closed the door on the possibility that there is no history at all (ETA: or a history so obscured that it is radically different from the resultant tradition) behind the central events of the gospel. I haven't got that luxury. I can see no way of extracting any underlying history from the traditions collected in these texts. The methodologies employed by those interested in a historical Jesus can at best produce reasonable interpretations rather than anything one could call history. There seems to be a fundamental epistemological problem implied in these positions. (They have an ontology that they have no empirical way of supporting.)


spin

Solo

...that might work, except you see the people were also receiving (or witnessing or knowing or believing in) Jesus through the Spirit, so right here you have likely an example of not a historical event - even mildly literal - but Mark's playful allegorical inversion of a Pauline maxim (1 Cr 12:3)

Jiri