yalla

Gidday Gamera,
Good points made above.
But its all "if" JC et al were presumed historical.
And when I [and others] look at the characters in this and related episodes we can see no reason to separate them out as based on real persons with dramatic aspects added by the author for doctinal reasons as opposed to characters created for that purpose.
In the case of real historical characters for whom we have independent witness [Pilate et al] then the suspicion is exacerbated by the author treating them in the same manner as otherwise unknown persons.
That is, all are treated as characters whose function is used to move the plot along and make doctrinal points as desired by the author.
In some cases, Pilate and Caiaphas for example, the details in the gospels are at odds with the other historical sources.

The description of Pilate as a caring just person responsive to the feelings of the Jews is contradicrory to the way he is described in Philo and Josephus.
Orthodox interpretion I thought.
And that is just considering this one section of the gospel[s].
We might not conclude that there is strong evidence in this one section based on one, lets call it "case study'.
But when several others show the same treatment by the author then suspicion is inreased incrementally.
Walk on water.
Some of the healings.
Feeding 5000 [x2].
Entry into Jerusalem.
All are events [there are lots more] which are described in such a manner as to reinforce the suspicion from Joe and the sanhedrin and the tomb etc episode, that they have been concocted by the author to make doctrinal points often/usually based on a Tanakh stimulus.
Which led one scholar to point out that if you remove Tanakh allusions, direct and indirect, from "Mark's passion scenes, then there is very little, if anything, left.

The trouble is we often focus on one small area and from that scene conclude that we cannot make positive statements cos there are competing plausible explanations.
But when we are faced with the same thing repeatedly then the case for historicity is incrementally weakened.
Did walk on water really occur or is "Mark" using the Tanakh to make literary doctrinal points about his character JC?
Similarly for "feeding 5000, did it really happen or is Elijah[?] being mined to show that anything he can do JC can do...better?
Similarly for entry into Jerusalem.
Did JC really enter Jerusalem in the manner described in Jewish scriptures or is the copying of those elements [embellished by later writers] just a writer making a series of points about his character?
Prohecy fulfilled [by the author]?

And that is without considering the supernatural and the instances where it is clearly impossible for "Mark" to have an witness as his basis [temptation scene].

And so on.
cheers
yalla

Gamera

The obvious problem of this, yalla, is Philo and Josephus had their own axes to grind. In Josephus' case a really big axe.

So you've essentially accepted the historicity of Philo's and Josephus's accounts and then compared it with the gospel account and found the latter wanting. Let me suggest this is tendentious to the extreme.

I can just as easily assume the gospel account is historical and discount Josephus's narrative, because after all the guy was in the hire of the Emperor and subject to all kinds of political pressure, not to mention his own ambiguous personal agenda, being a Jew in the court of the Roman power that destroyed his country.

As between the gospel authors and Josephus, I could easily conclude that Josephus is much less reliable, and thus your entire analysis is reversed.

My postmodern preference is to suspend these kind of invidious comparisons, to accept the fact that we have several accounts of Pilate, all of them "historical" in the broad sense, and all of them of equal validity. Ultimately we have no means to privilege one text over the other without being circular. And so I'm happy the leave the historical Pilate in limbo, a character whose essence we'll never fathom, and who's actions in each text appear equally "valid" and hence historical.

Applying that approach, I return to the argument that there appears nothing extraordinary in the actions of Joseph of Arimathea, and he seems like a likely historical personage, not a fictive device.

Regarding the "miracles", I simply bracket that off of historical analysis. No historian can accept miracles as historical events. But again, I think your assumption is that somehow the gospels are unique in this. They are not. The writings of Heroditus, and every historian of the classic period, are filled with fantastical nonsense. Does that mean Heroditus wasn't purporting to do history? I can't agree with that. It's been a while but I bet even Tacitus has his share of nonsense. What constituted fact to a classic period historian is categorically different from what we think of as fact today.

So, I think this blunts your argument. Or at least, if you apply it to the gospels, you must apply it to all of the historiography of the period, and basically we're left without any real history until the early modern period. I doubt you want to go there.

Gamera

We're obviously on the same wavelength on this. Genre is one issue; reliability is another. Questioning the reliability of the NT narratives is of course totally legitimate. Questioning their intended reliability, by putting them into the genre of religious fiction or some such category, as Crossan does, seems a real stretch to me.

yalla

Nope can't agree.
I think you missed my point, maybe it was not well expressed.
See its not just that the gospel[s] disagree with P@J's versions of Pilate [which tend to broadly corrobarate each other], a point that I thought was commonly accepted by many Christian scholars and therefore hardly tendentious in that you seem to imply that I alone claim this. Its simply that it must raise some doubt, some suspicion.

It's that the gospel[s] also have other elements that cause me to be suspicious of their alleged historicity in other ways as well, in addition, also, repeatedly etc.

The supernatural.
You can't just bracket them off. They are there.
Fact or fiction?
And you can't just excuse their presence on the grounds that others did the same. If others were recording miracles were they 'purportedly" or actually writing history when they did so? Were the gospels when they did so?

The impossible witness [to the Satanic temptation for example].

The "plagiarism" of plot and words from the Tanakh [feeding 5000 for example] frequently. The forced fulfilment of prophecy.

The internal contradictions in plot elements eg the believing Joe of A. having previously been a party to the alleged condemnation of JC by whichever council.
Which is then "corrected' by "Mark"'s later copiers who add or delete or modify elements than they perceive as wrong or wish to portray differently.
The baptism of JC by John the B. for example.

If stories can be so altered so frequently then it should make us wonder about their veracity.
Particularly when the common element in all of the above is that there is a theological axe to grind [I reckon you made a good point there], a major one common to all [JC is SOG etc] and variations on that theme individual to each which necessitates altering the cut of the cloth.

To get back to the Joe of A. scenario I think there are several elements which are ground for being suspicious there.
Such as those I, and others, have outlined. The constant use of literary devices, for example JW's "i ony".
And these grounds for suspicion are repeated throughout the gospels in multiple ways.
They are not isolated to one incident.
cheers
yalla

Doug Shaver

You can say that all day long, but that won't make it true. No assumptions need to be applied to all ancient documents except that they were all produced by fallible human beings. None is perfectly reliable, but some are more reliable than others and we can make reasonable judgments (or, in your terminology, "invidious comparisons") about which ones those are.

OK, if that is your preference, then go ahead and indulge it.

If I indulge my preference for exercising judgment, I will sometimes be wrong. But a refusal to exercise judgment does not keep anyone from being wrong. It instead practically guarantees that they will usually be wrong.

I have never thought of credibility as any kind of privilege. I cannot bestow it on any writer. He will either have it or he won't, with respect to any particular claim he makes.

Whatever it could mean to fathom his essence, I see no need to do it in order to form a rationally defensible opinion about whether he was a real person.

That is no evidence for or against his historicity. There is nothing extraordinary in the actions of Scarlett O'Hara, either.

No, because all it takes to purport to do history is simply to assert that one is doing history. It is trivially easy to purport to do history while writing pure fiction.

Your rhetorical question should have been (assuming you were trying to make a logical point): "Does that mean Herodotus was not doing history?" or perhaps "Does that mean Herodotus was not attempting to do history?"
I have never known anyone but a few fundamentalists, and a few secularists who think like fundamentalists, claim that any writing must be believed either in its entirety or not at all. Even books that are incontrovertibly fiction can contain real history. Gone With the Wind not a work of history and nobody says it is, but the American Civil War did happen, the city of Atlanta was burned during that war, and the war did bring about the end of slavery in the United States.

The opposite holds, too. If a writer claims to be writing history, and if it is confirmed that his work is in fact a work of history, this does not imply that his every assertion must be taken as factual. No historian, however reliable, is infallible, and none should be treated as if they were.

The postmodern concept of equal validity is nonsense. It is nonsense when applied to all documents, ancient or modern. It is nonsense when applied to all writers, ancient or modern. It is nonsense when applied to everything written by any particular writer. Any statement of purported historical fact must be judged separately by the totality of evidence for or against that particular statement. Context can count as evidence, but it cannot be conclusive. Statements of fact can appear in a work of fiction, and statements of fiction can appear in a work of history.

Of course it can take a bit of intellectual work to sort them out, and perhaps that is why some people prefer not to even try.

Gamera

You can argue all day that history is some solid thing that you can discern through the power of your reason. But it is all an epistomological illusion. History is texts and texts aren't facts but interpretations and narratives told by authors and redactors with an agenda.

Your approach leds to this king of nonsense (Florida passing a law stating that American history is a "fact" that isn't constructed and should be taught as absolutely true. What naive nonsense.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0717-22.htm

This is the irony of your position. You purport to support critical thinking, but your acceptance of naive modernism thought (that there is a discernable absolute truth to history that can be understood), actually undermines critical thought, which realized that texts are history and texts aren't facts.

Doug Shaver

I suppose I could, but I'm not. Your apparent need to persist in rebutting arguments that I'm not making says a lot about the cogency of your own arguments.

Texts exist. That is a fact. History is an explanation of that fact.

Yes, and it is not always easy to figure out how much of those interpretations and narratives are true. But difficulty does not imply futility.

Do you want to debate history or politics? If the latter, I'm not interested.

spin

You validate your witnesses before you use them. You don't cite any tom dick or hairy.


spin

darstec

If there is confusion it rests entirely with you. I was referring to your comment: But on closer inspection I think you might have a point even though you do not realize it. Hence when you write:

You are really saying that the Lazarus story is a fictional genera within another fictional genera, the gospel.

You are right. I am sorry for the error. I thought that you thought the gospel was of the historical genera rather than the fictional genera. That would have violated your edict that the two never mixed. I see now that I was mistaken and that you understand them both to be similar in that they are not a mixture but rather of the same genera.

Now I see. The confusion is on your part. Didn't god himself relate the account as historical? Didn't god himself consider Jonah to be historical? Funny that god himself would make two mistakes in the same paragraph.

God thought that man could live in the belly of a big fish for three days? Amazing!! Perhaps that picture in one of my bibles with Jonah sitting on a stool with a candle on a little table inside the belly of the whale was an accurate representation of history after all. But wait, doesn't the supposition in your first paragraph fictional genera (parable) within a fictional genera (gospel) [otherwise it would have to mix fictional within historical] contradict this paradigm you just laid out, i.e., historical genera (historical Jonah) within a fictional genera (gospel)?

What hstorical evidence is there of Jonah? What historical evidence is there of any man living in the belly of a great fish for three days? What evidence is there that the writer of the gospel believed anyone could live in the belly of a big fish for three days? What evidence is there that god himself believed that?

We seem to have a mixing of the genera here unless you maintain that Jonah was fictional, his living in the belly of the big fish was fictional, and the gospel was fictional.

Damn! Is this forum great or what! One learns new things here every day. I never knew that the first century CE was considered part of The Middle Ages or part of "the mediaeval period."
Proportedly in the first century CE, Clement wrote in Chapter 25:

JoeWallack

JW:
As always I wonder where the hell Jeff is when you really need him. I Am sure you know what False Dichotomy means (what Jeff mistakenly refers to as bifurcation). Could the Gospels belong to a genera known as Gospels? Brown thought so. Since you don't know who Mark's audience was (it sure as hell was not "Matthew" or "Luke") you don't know "Mark's" intent.

Origen was probably the outstanding Early Church Father of all time. He probably did a Commentary on "Mark" and the Church probably destroyed/didn't copy it (God, i'd even turn schmad to see it). He was a Christian intellectual for the time like our own Bede so his opinion here was probably unusual but here it is in all its Glory:

http://www.earlychristianwritings.co...en-john10.html

"2. THE DISCREPANCY BETWEEN JOHN AND THE FIRST THREE GOSPELS AT THIS PART OF THE NARRATIVE, LITERALLY READ, THE NARRATIVES CANNOT BE HARMONIZED: THEY MUST BE INTERPRETED SPIRITUALLY.

The truth of these matters must lie in that which is seen by the mind. If the discrepancy between the Gospels is not solved, we must give up our trust in the Gospels, as being true and written by a divine spirit, or as records worthy of credence, for both these characters are held to belong to these works. Those who accept the four Gospels, and who do not consider that their apparent discrepancy is to be solved anagogically (by mystical interpretation), will have to clear up the difficulty, raised above, about the forty days of the temptation, a period for which no room can be found in any way in John's narrative; and they will also have to tell us when it was that the Lord came to Capernaum. If it was after the six days of the period of His baptism, the sixth being that of the marriage at Cans of Galilee, then it is clear that the temptation never took place, and that He never was at Nazara, and that John was not yet delivered up. Now, after Capernaum, where He abode not many days, the passover of the Jews was at hand, and He went up to Jerusalem, where He cast the sheep and oxen out of the temple, and poured out the small change of the bankers. In Jerusalem, too, it appears that Nicodemus, the ruler and Pharisee, first came to Him by night, and heard what we may read in the Gospel. "After these things, Jesus came, and His disciples, into the land of Judaea, and there He tarried with them and baptized, at the same time at which John also was baptizing in AEnon near Salim, because there were many waters there, and they came and were baptized; for John was not yet cast into prison." On this occasion, too, there was a questioning on the part of John's disciples with the Jews about purification, and they came to John, saying of the Saviour. "Behold, He baptizeth, and all come to Him." They had heard words from the Baptist, the exact tenor of which it is better to take from Scripture itself. Now, if we ask when Christ was first in Capernaum, our respondents, if they follow the words of Matthew, and of the other two, will say, After the temptation, when, "leaving Nazareth, He came and dwelt in Capernaum by the sea." But how can they show both the statements to be true, that of Matthew and Mark, that it was because He heard that John was delivered up that He departed into Galilee, and that of John, found there, after a number of other transactions, subsequent to His stay at Capernaum, after His going to Jerusalem, and His journey from there to Judaea, that John was not yet cast into prison, but was baptizing in AEnon near Salim? There are many other points on which the careful student of the Gospels will find that their narratives do not agree; and these we shall place before the reader, according to our power, as they occur. The student, staggered at the consideration of these things, will either renounce the attempt to find all the Gospels true, and not venturing to conclude that all our information about our Lord is untrustworthy, will choose at random one of them to be his guide; or he will accept the four, and will consider that their truth is not to be sought for in the outward and material letter.

3. WHAT WEARE TO THINK OF THE DISCREPANCIES BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT GOSPELS.

We must, however, try to obtain some notion of the intention of the Evangelists in such matters, and we direct ourselves to this. Suppose there are several men who, by the spirit, see God, and know His words addressed to His saints, and His presence which He vouchsafes to them, appearing to them at chosen times for their advancement. There are several such men, and they are in different places, and the benefits they receive from above vary in shape and character. And let these men report, each of them separately, what he sees in spirit about God and His words, and His appearances to His saints, so that one of them speaks of God's appearances and words and acts to one righteous man in such a place, and another about other oracles and great works of the Lord, and a third of something else than what the former two have dealt with. And let there be a fourth, doing with regard to some particular matter something of the same kind as these three. And let the four agree with each other about something the Spirit has suggested to them all, and let them also make brief reports of other matters besides that one; then their narratives will fall out something on this wise: God appeared to such a one at such a time and in such a place, and did to him thus and thus; as if He had appeared to him in such a form, and had led him by the hand to such a place, and then done to him thus and thus. The second will report that God appeared at the very time of the foresaid occurrences, in a certain town, to a person who is named, a second person, and in a place far removed from that of the former account, and he will report a different set of words spoken at the same time to this second person. And let the same be supposed to be the case with the third and with the fourth. And let them, as we said, agree, these witnesses who report true things about God, and about His benefits conferred on certain men, let them agree with each other in some of the narratives they report. He, then, who takes the writings of these men for history, or for a representation of real things by a historical image, and who supposes God to be within certain limits in space, and to be unable to present to several persons in different places several visions of Himself at the same time, or to be making several speeches at the same moment, he will deem it impossible that our four writers are all speaking truth. To him it is impossible that God, who is in certain limits in space, could at the same set time be saying one thing to one man and another to another, and that He should be doing a thing and the opposite thing as well, and, to put it bluntly, that He should be both sitting and standing, should one of the writers represent Him as standing at the time, and making a certain speech in such a place to such a man, while a second writer speaks of Him as sitting.

4. SCRIPTURE CONTAINS MANY CONTRADICTIONS, AND MANY STATEMENTS WHICH ARE NOT LITERALLY TRUE, BUT MUST BE READ SPIRITUALLY AND MYSTICALLY.

In the case I have supposed where the historians desire to teach us by an image what they have seen in their mind, their meaning would be found, if the four were wise, to exhibit no disagreement; and we must understand that with the four Evangelists it is not otherwise. They made full use for their purpose of things done by Jesus in the exercise of His wonderful and extraordinary power; they use in the same way His sayings, and in some places they tack on to their writing, with language apparently implying things of sense, things made manifest to them in a purely intellectual way. I do not condemn them if they even sometimes dealt freely with things which to the eye of history happened differently, and changed them so as to subserve the mystical aims they had in view; so as to speak of a thing which happened in a certain place, as if it had happened in another, or of what took place at a certain time, as if it had taken place at another time, and to introduce into what was spoken in a certain way some changes of their own. They proposed to speak the truth where it was possible both materially and spiritually, and where this was not possible it was their intention to prefer the spiritual to the material. The spiritual truth was often preserved, as one might say, in the material falsehood. As, for example, we might judge of the story of Jacob and Esau. Jacob says to Isaac, "I am Esau thy firstborn son," and spiritually he spoke the truth, for he already partook of the rights of the first-born, which were perishing in his brother, and clothing himself with the goatskins he assumed the outward semblance of Esau, and was Esau all but the voice praising God, so that Esau might afterward find a place to receive a blessing. For if Jacob had not been blessed as Esau, neither would Esau perhaps have been able to receive a blessing of his own. And Jesus too is many things, according to the conceptions of Him, of which it is quite likely that the Evangelists took up different notions; while yet they were in agreement with each other in the different things they wrote. Statements which are verbally contrary to each other, are made about our Lord, namely, that He was descended from David and that He was not descended from David. The statement is true, "He was descended from David," as the Apostle says, "born of the seed of David according to the flesh," if we apply this to the bodily part of Him; but the self-same statement is untrue if we understand His being born of the seed of David of His diviner power; for He was declared to be the Son of God with power. And for this reason too, perhaps, the sacred prophecies speak of Him now as a servant, and now as a Son. They call Him a servant on account of the form of a servant which he wore, and because He was of the seed of David, but they call Him the Son of God according to His character as first-born. Thus it is true to call Him man and to call Him not man; man, because He was capable of death; not man, on account of His being diviner than man. Marcion, I suppose, took sound words in a wrong sense, when he rejected His birth from Mary, and declared that as to His divine nature He was not born of Mary, and hence made bold to delete from the Gospel the passages which have this effect. And a like fate seems to have overtaken those who make away with His humanity and receive His deity alone; and also those opposites of these who cancel His deity and confess Him as a man to be a holy man, and the most righteous of all men. And those who hold the doctrine of Dokesis, not remembering that He humbled Himself even unto death and became obedient even to the cross, but only imagining in Him the absence of suffering, the superiority to all such accidents, they do what they can to deprive us of the man who is more just than all men, and are left with a figure which cannot save them, for as by one man came death, so also by one man is the justification of life. We could not have received such benefit as we have from the Logos had He not assumed the man, had He remained such as He was from the beginning with God the Father, and had He DOt taken up man, the first man of all, the man more precious than all others, purer than all others and capable of receiving Him. But after that man we also shall be able to receive Him, to receive Him so great and of such nature as He was, if we prepare a place in proportion to Him in our soul. So much I have said of the apparent discrepancies in the Gospels, and of my desire to have them treated in the way of spiritual interpretation.

5. PAUL ALSO MAKES CONTRADICTORY STATEMENTS ABOUT HIMSELF, AND ACTS IN OPPOSITE WAYS AT DIFFERENT TIMES.

On the same passage one may also make use of such an example as that of Paul, who at one place says that he is carnal, sold under sin, and thus was not able to judge anything, while in another place he is the spiritual man who is able to judge all things and himself to be judged by no man. Of the carnal one are the words, "Not what I would that do I practise, but what I hate that do I." And he too who was caught up to the third heaven and heard unspeakable words is a different Paul from him who says. Of such an one I will glory, but of myself I will not glory. If he becomes to the Jews as a Jew that he may gain the Jews, and to those under the law as under the law that he may gain those under the law, and to them that are without law as without law, not being without law to God, but under law to Christ, that he may gain those without law, and if to the weak he becomes weak that he may gain the weak, it is clear that these statements must be examined each by itself, that he becomes a Jew, and that sometimes he is under the law and at another time without law, and that sometimes he is weak. Where, for example, he says something by way of permission and not by commandment,there we may recognize that he is weak; for who, he says, is weak, and I am not weak?

When he shaves his head and makes an offering, or when he circumcises Timothy, he is a Jew; but when he says to the Athenians, "I found an altar with the inscription, To the unknown God. That, then, which ye worship not knowing it, that declare I unto you," and, "As also some of your own poets have said, For we also are His offspring," then he becomes to those without the law as without the law, adjuring the least religious of men to espouse religion, and turning to his own purpose the saying of the poet, "From Love do we begin; his race are we." And instances might perhaps be found where, to men not Jews and yet under the law, he is under the law."


JW:
"There are many other points on which the careful student of the Gospels will find that their narratives do not agree"

So According to Origen there was much of the Gospels that was not Historical. And there was much of Paul that was not Historical. As an added bonus this includes Origen's testimony that Marcion lacked born of a
woman and other references to Jesus as a man. This is all Doherty needs here.

So what genre did Origen think the Gospels were?



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page