No Robots

The point is that the scholarly consensus is that the content of the Gospels derives from primarily oral sources that predate the letters of Paul.

Toto

Not the current well informed scholarly consensus.

No Robots

No true Scotsman, other than Richard "Highlander" Carrier?

Toto

Try reading Dale Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (or via: amazon.co.uk)

No Robots

I always feel a little sorry for you guys when you are pressed to give out the name of a respectable scholar to lend support to your views. Here is Allison:

Jesus, like Francis of Assisi, was a popular holy man and no doubt well on his way into legend in his own time. A miracle-worker with an apocalyptic message that generates enthusiasm is immediately going to be the center of stories both true and apocryphal. Anyone who has read Gershom Scholem’s work on Sabbatai Sevi probably has a feel for the kinds of tales and rumors that must have trailed Jesus wherever he went.--Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet, p. 70.

It just seems crazy to keep insisting that the Gospels as we have them did not originate from earlier and mostly oral antecedents.

Toto

You quoted from a book that he wrote for a popular audience.

You need to read more of Allison, in the particular book I cited, on the difficulties of the hypothesis of orality.

Then you need to read the scholars who have written about the literary sources of the gospels, which I do not have the time to dig up right now, but you could look at Michael Turton's website.

Then try to tell me that any respectable scholar says that we have any idea of the stories about Jesus, or that we can tell that any part of the gospels can be traced back to an oral legend.

Yes, you can find an older generation of scholars who claimed that the gospels were based on oral legends going back to the time of Jesus. But what was the basis of this statement? They believed in their hearts that there was a historical Jesus, and oral legends were the only way they could posit for the gospels to reflect any history.

In other words, they made up the idea.

Grog

Yes, too similar. Josephus's example, by the way, also includes a trial of sort before Jewish officials. Mark's story is reliant upon Josephus's story. It has the same structure, sequence, and particular details.

No Robots

I wish, throughout this book, to explicate my conviction that we can learn some important things about the historical Jesus without resorting to the standard criteria and without, for the most part, trying to decide whether he authored this or that saying or whether this or that particular event actually happened as narrated.— Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History, p. 10.

There is nothing here to suggest that the problems of interpretation are beyond solution.

aa5874

Again, your claim is not substantiated. It is NOT credible that Pilate would have crucified Jesus when he did NOT know what he did.

Sinaiticus Mark 15 Secondly, even Bart Ehrman claimed that there was NO tradition of releasing criminals as stated in gMark.

Thirdly, based on Josephus, it is more likely that Pilate would have asked the Jews to disperse and release Jesus.

See Antiquities of the Jews 18.3.

The crucifixion of Jesus in gMark is NOT credible.

No Robots

And here is Allison in Constructing Jesus, p. 29, specifically on the question of oral antecedents:

Even though the status of the oral Jesus tradition in the first century cannot be equated with the status of Scripture in the fourth century, surely public rehearsals of sayings assigned to Jesus and of stories about him must have bestowed some stability upon the transmission of the tradition.