Ben C Smith

I agree that there is much in the gospels that is not historical. In fact, I probably find less historical in them than Origen did.

I do not think you can seriously contemplate that Origen regarded the gospels as Hellenistic fictions. He was frequently driven to allegorical and symbolic interpretations, but he just as frequently accepted the basic historicity of the pericope before him. When, for example, he writes about Matthew 13.53-58 in book 10 of his commentary on Matthew, he lists the brothers of Jesus and links them to Josephus, Paul, and the catholic epistles in a quite historicist fashion. He takes the saying in Matthew 16.28 very seriously, even having to explain how the word until does not imply that some will die after the kingdom of God has come.

In the long run, I do not think Origen is all that far off in principle from how many modern liberal commentators treat the gospels, which are viewed as historical in the broad sense (and I think that even you would agree that Origen took them as historical in the broad sense) but legendary, symbolic, or allegorical in many of the details.

Origen is a remedy for those who would take the gospels as inerrant, but he does not take the gospels as outright fiction, which is the topic at hand.

The all he needs is an exaggeration, but I agree that Doherty would be better off arguing that such Pauline references are later insertions rather than his current position that they .

I am arguing to the probabilities, like Peter Kirby does. It is always possible that Mark was written as a secret fiction for a very select readership whose secret decoder rings have been lost to history, but it is probable that Matthew, Luke, Papias, Justin, et alii, as contemporaries or near contemporaries, got it right: Mark was intended as history.

Ben.