mountainman

Good point Clivedurdle. We do not need to define which gospels unless we want to think about the far side of christian origins. Many people work with the blinkers of the default standard issue tetrarchy. They are the insiders, the one's who know the importance of the gospels of the canonical tetrarchy over the myriad literary inventions of those vile dispicable gnostic heretics. How in the name of Jesus Christ could his flock of heretics have anything worthwhile to say?

spin

I notice that there were a few complaints about my linking HJ to eye-witness accounts regarding the way that the gospels began to be written. A number of HJ analyses refer to what can be learned from Papias, who talks of a gospel writer getting information from eye-witnesses or people who knew eye-witnesses.

It should be obvious that if the gospels were based on oral traditions, there is simply no way to extract any history from them. There is no way to verify any content of a purely oral tradition. No hope there for a historical Jesus.


spin

andrewcriddle

I may have misunderstood how you defined your terms.

As I understood the question:
It was based on first hand accounts of real events. meant that the authors obtained their information directly from eye witnesses (or were eyewitnesses themselves).
It was based on the developing oral traditions of the nascent religion would include the case where the authors obtained their information from people who knew eye-witnesses but who were not eye-witnesses themselves.


Andrew Criddle

spin

You seem to have seen the first as I did, but, when you deal with the second, you seem to have jumped from oral tradition to secondhand tradition from eye-witness. Oral tradition is about information our writer received from a spoken source. Can you think of any way the reader can test the received information in order to know how long the oral chain was?


spin

andrewcriddle

I'm not sure there is a sharp division between oral tradition and secondhand tradition from eye-witness, both are formally information the writer received from a spoken source.

I think the length of time between the original events and their writing down gives at least some indication as to the likely length of the oral chain.

Andrew Criddle

aa5874

But, this is the exact problem.

What was first? And were there any eyewitness accounts? When did the Jesus stories really BEGIN?

If one assumes that they know all the answers then there is really no need to investigate.

Now, the stories about Jesus are uncorroborated external of the Gospels and no supposed contemporary of the so-called Jesus in the NT Canon wrote that they ever SAW Jesus alive. And the stories about Jesus appear to be fully fictionalised.

And further, no writer outside the NT and Church can account for the Pauline Messiah who was supposedly worshiped as a God by Jews and who was believed to have the ability to REMIT their sins BEFORE the Fall of the Temple.

The Gospels appear to have been written in response or a was a proposed solution to the Fall of the Temple where the Jews were NO longer able to have Temple worship or sacrifices.

Before the Fall of the Temple it is extremely unlikely that the Pauline Jesus Messiah would have made any theological sense and that Roman citizens all over the Roman Empire would have worshiped a Jewish man as a God instead of the Roman Emperors before the Fall of the Temple.

No Roman writer wrote about Roman citizens worshiping a Jewish Messiah as a God who was believed to be the creator of heaven and earth before the Fall of the Temple.

No Jewish writer claimed Roman citizens worshiped a Jewish Messiah as a God throughout the Roman Empire as the Pauline writers would have us believe.

In the writings of Philo, the Emperor Gaius claimed ONLY the Jews did not worship as a God implying that the Pauline writings are non-historical.

The Pauline writings are ANACHRONISTIC and do not at all represent the history of belief in the character called Jesus the Messiah.

There is just no external evidence that the gospels began before the Fall of the Temple c 70 CE.

Elena

Well, I voted "none of the above" although Cartago delenda est could have been a very good choice too.

The question is rigged, for the gospel was not meant to be "christian", was not meant to "create" a religion, but was messianist, that is, it began as a political manifest.

spin

I missed this statement:
That is the problem I have signaled elsewhere. There is no way to distinguish between non-real and real information once it has been absorbed into an oral tradition.

The reason I have mentioned urban legends elsewhere is that the length of time between the purported events and the latest reception of them is specifically not supposed to be long. The first problem is to find a means of separating real from non-real in an oral tradition. The length of transmission is secondary, for it only says how unreliable the transmission of the tradition can be (longer being more unreliable), not how real or non-real it is to start with. I don't know how anyone can make the distinction based purely on oral tradition.


spin

andrewcriddle

The account as we have it in Mark does not appear to resemble an urban legend, there are too many prima facie identifiable details.Someone called Jesus being crucified by Pontius Pilate at Passover just outside Jerusalem etc, this being witnessed by variuos named individuals.

You could reply that these are elements that were added to the tradition as it developed, but this does bring us back to the issue of reliability of transmission and the length of time required for a tradition to be radically altered.

Andrew Criddle

spin

First, I used the urban legend to show that the amount of time is irrelevant. I wasn't asking you to use it as an analysis of Mark. Then, you are making assumptions about details that are unwarranted. Third, you have no way of knowing how long it would take to generate tradition.

We've already got someone named Jesus being crucified in Paul. Where else could he be crucified for the Jews if not in Jerusalem? When is the sacrifice made for god to pass over the people's sins? If you think about the details that you are considering, many aren't really meaningful details, except maybe Pilate, who had such a bad reputation with the local population that he eventually got himself removed from the post. (It's like why Nero got picked by christians as the first persecutor, bad reputation with the Jews. Herod and the innocents, Richard II and the princes. It's apocrypha.) You're a believer in this matter and convincing isn't necessary for you. I feel you need to step out and consider from an independent position.

I think you are making unfounded assumptions as to how long it takes for things to happen that you have no yardstick for.

I have consistently put forward the notion that the traditions were evolving. Consider "Nazarene" -> "Nazara" -> "Nazareth" along with the ditching of Capernaum. The gospels themselves are strong indicators of developing tradition.


spin