Adam

Answering my own question....
Almost as soon as I devised my Gospel According to the Atheists, I also refined my Q source in my Gospel Eyewitnesses Post #561 to set aside a Q2 that shared a common Greek text underlying Matthew and Luke.
[To agree with my Post #230, from all the above subtract Q2 material from Q (identified by too much identity between Matthew and Luke). A separate later Q2 in Greek makes better sense to explain about a dozen sequences. These include Lk. 3:7-9, 16-17; 6:36-42, 7:18-23; 9:57-10:24; 11:1-4, 9-32; 12:2-7; 12:22-31,39-46; 13:34-35; 17:1-2. These passages are disproportionately about John the Baptist and apocalypticism.]

Perhaps some here perceived this as a trick to shear Jesus from apocalyptic predictions of the immediate end of the world. Jesus Seminar types might welcome this, but the mind-set here at FRDB seems more determined to insulate us from anything that might make Christianity acceptable in any form. Anyone hostile to my case might retitle my stripped-down project as "The Gospel Acceptable to the Jesus Seminar". This revival of Liberal Protestantism must be slain before birth!

However, I did not have such a nefarious scheme. I was simply more carefully delineating my eyewitness sources in a consistent fashion, just as I stated above in my Post #561. FRDB is a forum in which any change is perceived as weakness which must be pilloried, so that would be a second reason that I should not have made that adjustment at that time. I'm just looking for the truth, and I'm sorry that upsets everyone else so much. I realize that for most of us here there is not point in me saying this, but for some who are encountering my ideas for the first time, I feel you deserve a less biassed view of me than you get from spin, Vork, Atheos, and Shesh.

But onward. I'm thinking of opening a new thread on whether textual criticism can fairly free Jesus from failing as a predictor of the immediate end of the world. The alternative is to revive my Gospel Eyewitnesses thread to mine it regarding the same question, with all the materials close to hand in my posts #526 through #616. (Or continue right here, as we're heading in that direction, but the thread title does not fit.)

Atheos

Adam, I'm more than willing to give credit where credit is due. The presentation of your arguments is well written and well thought out.

In fact it's obvious that you have put considerable thought into them.

However the only reason I don't find your arguments compelling is because you lack foundational support for them. Appealing to scholars who think this or that is all well and good, but at some point one needs to bring forth actual evidence that provides the foundation and support for the points being made. Your methodology fails for me because it takes a gigantic shortcut by making the following assumptions:

• Jesus was an actual historical character
• Portions of the canonical gospels contain identifiable eyewitness testimony
• Intervention of a supernatural agent was in part responsible for ensuring that this material was assembled, filtered from conflicting / false material and preserved.

Thought isn't evidence. Speculation isn't evidence. Popular opinion isn't evidence. Scholarly opinion isn't evidence. Wishful thinking isn't evidence. Sooner or later the evidence needs to be produced and thus far it hasn't.

Everything you produced in the "Gospel Eyewitnesses" thread was the product of speculation, opinion and imagination. You put lots of intelligent thought into it, and many hours of study, I'll grant you. But you failed to provide evidential support for your claims. More importantly you failed to provide the foundational support for the following:

• There is independent historical evidence of an individual named Jesus living in the time period in question who busied himself as an itinerant preacher / philosopher, gathered a number of followers, made trouble with Jewish leaders and got himself crucified for his efforts. Whether or not his body went missing after the crucifixion is another matter.
• There is independent historical evidence of various individuals who can be identified who could have been eyewitnesses to Jesus
• There is an independent and falsifiable methodology whereby these eyewitnesses can be identified reliably
• Some methodology exists whereby these eyewitnesses can be determined to be reliable

Your entire series of posts brushes all this aside with a wave of the hand, yet these are the very foundation upon which your entire argument rests. You can't build your skyscraper until you've laid the foundation and so far you've failed to do so. Appealing to popular opinion is not a substitute for laying the foundation.

In short your entire case is one gigantic circular argument that assumes the story is true because there are eyewitnesses and assumes there are eyewitnesses because the story is true.

I'm not a mythicist, but I'm not a historicist either. I'm one of those who is more than willing to be convinced either way provided a compelling case with evidence is presented.

Solo

May I suggest something, not to be mean or anything, but simply to assure you are not unwittingly misleading people ? You would not want that, I am sure. Would it be possible for you to revise the title of your project ?

How about Gospel According to those Atheists Who Think the World Of Me Despite the Majority Who Take Me for A Self-Obssessed Loon ?

That would be fair, would you not say ? :huh:

Best,
Jiri

TedM

OP link:

But it seems to me inconsistent with the Jewish culture's expectations. A PERSON was expected as Messiah. Maybe they began to allow for a different kind of Messiah, but one would expect plenty of objections within the culture. Yet, we don't see it, and we have enough documents to expect it. I don't have the time to argue/discuss much further, but feel free to address. More info found here:http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....37#post7157137

outhouse

these are common knowledge

wiki the kingdom of god and learn both sides if you dont know

Toto

That's why Jesus was historicized.

There were Jewish objections to Christianity, were there not? Christian legend/literature preserves the fact that there was conflict, but I would not expect a fair description of the reasons.

We only have the documents that the orthodox church preserved, plus a few others that survived randomly.

Rick Sumner

Several points.

First, the sentiment isn't entirely true. The stock example is 11QMelch, where Melchizedek seems to be playing a Messianic role.

Secondly, surely we can allow room for innovation? Even if the point is true, there is enough evidence to suggest that such an innovation would not be met with immediate and outright scorn.

Finally, even if it is true (which I doubt), it still doesn't address the paragraph you've cited.

Remember, I allow the possibility of a "real" Jesus, just that if one existed, he's lost. So if your assessment is unequivocally accurate (which it isn't), it still doesn't follow that there is any link between the real figure and the gospels (which is the portion you cite).

Alice in Wonderland is not about Alice Liddell. Moriarity is not a biography of Adam Worth. Using either of these stories as historical evidence is comically misguided.

In similar fashion, while it is possible that the gospels are, in fact, historically based biographies, we have no requirement that they be so. Without that, we have to treat them as though they are not.

Adam

Thanks for your kind words and thoughtful presentation.
However, I make none of the above assumptions. (I even argue against the third.) I present evidence that Nicodemus would need to have written the Johannine Discourses while Jesus was still preaching. I show that the original Passion Narrative was so simple that no one would have made up that later, or if later it would have been focused on only one week only if the writer had eyewitness information about only that week. Q1 most likely goes back to Jesus's own words because no later apocalypticism nor churchy doctrine is in it. With these sources identified by source-criticism, internal evidence can identify the writer or his eyewitness standpoint.

More broadly I devised the Alpha&Omega Principle (Bauckham's inclusio) to show that each of seven eyewitnesses can be identified at the start and end of the sections attributable to each.
See Post #450 in Gospel Eyewitnesses
I presented that after spin had already disengaged.

TedM

I'm not sure why you conclude this. Innovation in the religious world usually is met with scorn. Yet none of the writings we have that discuss opposition to Christianity even mention this 'innovation' as problematic.

And if the theme of a non-human Messiah was acceptable and not subject to scorn by that time, we would expect resistance among the 'traditional' believers when the Messiah then became humanized. We don't see that.


The HJ I am referring to is a human religious leader whose life and death were the genesis of Christianity. I'm not trying to substantiate the gospels.

Rick Sumner

Where do you get that idea? On the contrary, innovation, so long as it follows a curve (as it does here), is generally accepted by some and ignored by others while it gradually works its way into the milieu. Look for example at the hellenization of Judea prior to the Maccabees. It was moving along swimmingly until the changes became too dramatic, too quickly.

Should we expect to find conflict wherever there are different ideas? I find this assumption to be specious.

We can apply the same reasoning to ask why there is no conflict between the high christology of Paul and the low christology of Mark, and then conclude that one of them can't exist since there is no conflict between the two recorded.

Except they both do exist.

One could also deal with your question by simply assuming a divide between the movements, one attested in the early epistolary record, the other, narrative based, attested in the gospels. Little overlap would provide little reason for conflict.

You're going to score some points for Earl and the Galilean vs. Jerusalem movements if you're not careful (as an aside, I'm of the opinion that this is the most undervalued strength of Earl's argument--it makes sense of the striking difference between the early epistles and the gospels).

I was careful to point out that it was ill-equipped to deal with the paragraph you quoted. If you are addressing the HJ generally you quoted the wrong portion.