ApostateAbe

I am not saying that the author had read any of the gospels. But, the myth was certainly common among Christians that Jesus claimed that he would return within his own generation, and the existence of that myth is reflected in John's gospel (John 21:20-23), presumably belonging to the same Christian community as the Book of Revelation.

ApostateAbe

That is good to hear, and I apologize that I got the wrong idea. My methodology for belief-decision-making of any sort is "Reciprocal Expectations," with the criteria of plausibility and explanatory power, as I have described in the OP and in the first post responding to Toto. Do you agree with that methodology? If not, what methodology would you support? Thanks, Doug Shaver.

Toto

There is no evidence that this myth was common among Christians, as opposed to being Mark's literary invention.

What ties John's gospel to the Revelation of John of Patmos? Why do you assume a community around this?

ApostateAbe

Almost all of the early Christian sources either contain or reflect the myth that Jesus would return in his own lifetime, and John 21:20-23 plainly affirms that the "rumor" was attributable to the disciples of Jesus. I really don't know whether or not the Gospel of John belonged to the same community as the Book of Revelation. Now that I think about it, it would make more sense if they were not the same community, because of the seeming differences in doomsday doctrines.

aa5874

I ALREADY realize long ago that people HATE to ADMIT I am right.

Well, now that you have gotten over your "hatred" why don't you admit that you are wrong about trusting the very gospels that you have DISCREDITED?

Are you now willing to ADMIT that gMark's Jesus was a PHANTOM and has ZERO historical value?

The Gospels, as found, NEED external corroboration from Non-apologetic sources and so far these are the characters that appear to have been corroborated as figures of history.

1. Herod the Great.

2. Herod, tetrarch.

3. Philip, tetrarch.

4. Tiberius, Emperor.

5. Pilate, Governor.

6. Caiaphas, High Priest.

These are some characters that are described as Myths or acting as Myths in the Gospels but were described as characters that did EXIST. Jesus interacted and dialogued with the God of the Jews, Satan, Evil Spirits and the Holy Ghost but NONE of these characters have been shown to have any historical value.

1. The God of the Jews.

2. Satan

3. Jesus, the Child of a Ghost, God and Creator.

4. The angel Gabriel.

5. Evil Spirits.

6. The Holy Ghost.

There is NO NEED to trust the Gospels we just NEED external corroboration from non-apologetic sources for Jesus.

That is all.

But, there is NONE.

ApostateAbe

I think both the dates and the contexts are somewhat irrelevant, since they are about the fitting to cult patterns, but I would be happy to hear further explanation. When we talk about the patterns of beliefs among cults, these are the type of "facts" that are most relevant, in my opinion. Such beliefs require explanation the same as the facts that concern material realities.
Wonderful. I should explain my own perspective of cults in more detail. I do define the word, "cult," more narrowly than how society in general defines the word. You before said that the "Checklist of Cult Characteristics" represents "characteristics of modern personality cults of the sort that prompt the parents of converts to send deprogrammers to rescue their kids." I agree, and, if you are with me on that point, then I this constitutes a sociological pattern. We can call such cults "personality cults." The anti-cult societies tend to call them "dangerous cults," but I like "personality cults" better, because their defining characteristic really is a human being at the focus of the group who actively controls the members.

I don't think they are purely modern, and maybe that is where we can differ, because I think they exist across diverse cultures in the modern world, and the essences of those characteristics have little or no dependency on the surrounding culture. There seems to be no reason why personality cults can not be as equally capable in the ancient world as in the modern world. Therefore, the pattern would be expected to extend backward in time.
OK, you must have a good reason for thinking that. The passage about John the Baptist in Josephus seeems to be contextually credible, and there is nothing about miracles or anything like that in it, though it must have been sourced from myth among adherents of the Baptist cult, one way or the other. The only reason I would suspect that the account is "highly mythologized" is because of the time gap and lack of written sources, but it seems otherwise like other normal accounts of historical characters in the writing of Josephus.
Well, OK, but you did have me convinced that the reputed letter written by Apollonius serves as proper evidence, at least equally among the other evidences, that would serve the conclusion that Apollonius really did exist. Do you suppose we can at least find it probable that Apollonius existed? This is where I would once again propose my methodology of Reciprocal Expectations to infer historical conclusions from unreliable myth. Do you that methodology can be applied in this case to at least potentially infer that Apollonius probably existed?
My argument was that my model of Christianity's origins can be falsified with a reversal of the Christologies. You claimed that Paul's Christology should falsify my model by this standard. I said that Paul's Christology roughly matches that of Matthew, because both sources portray Jesus as both Earthly and heavenly. You said that Paul's Christology was purely heavenly, and the Earthly elements are scribal insertions. I said that is ad hoc speculation. You just now said that speculation about scribal interpolations is well developed and not ad hoc.

Your speculation was specific. If you present a claim about Paul's Christology to counter my model of Paul's Christology, then the claim needs to be a probability, not a mere possibility. My model of Paul's Christology is inferred directly from the texts. If we know that scribal insertions happened elsewhere, it does not follow that the proposition that scribal insertions happened in this particular case is non-ad-hoc.

If the only evidence for any particular claim of interpolation is that interpolations have happened elsewhere, then the particular claim is ad hoc, because it remains implausible. Why? Because the lack of specific evidence for the particular claim of interpolation means that the texts in question come off as belonging within the context, seemingly expected to be written by the same author as the surrounding work, we have no parallel or prior copies of the texts that contain an omission or edit expected by the hypothesis, and most of such writings are expected to be composed by the original author. The evidence does not expect the hypothesis of interpolation, so it is ad hoc.
Right, that's fine. I only gave those two external reasons to date the gospel of John late because you seemed to be saying that I had a circular argument going on. It is cool if you take that back.
Well, not to pick at too many straws, but I actually think that you lost track of my original assertion, because I anticipated and addressed your objection when I first presented my claim, but you snipped that part out when you quoted it. I will quote my original claim in full for you, placing in bold the part you cut out:
Freke's and Gandy's claim seems to have barely any probability, but I think Doherty's proposal is worth consideration. The main problem seems to be that it lacks explanatory power in comparison to the common scholarly view that docetism was a way to reconcile two conflicting Christologies (divine vs. human). This common scholarly view has considerable explanatory power, because there are not a lot of ways to make the reconciliation, but docetism would be one of them. However, for Doherty's theory to work, it is simply not clear that any gradual transition in Christology needs to happen between explcitly-mythical Jesus and historical Jesus, so I don't see the explanatory power in that. Is the jump from explicitly-mythical to fully-human any less sudden than the jump from explicitly-mythical to docetist? Since Doherty's starting point of an explicitly-mythical character of cult adherence seems implausible in its own right, maybe I am a long way off from understanding the argument.

The account in Mark is the account we expect if Mark were attempting to spin the baptism positively from an otherwise-seemingly-embarrassing reality. It is otherwise difficult to explain how John the Baptist is so excessively deferential toward Jesus: "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals." It also explains, with explanatory power, why the baptism event was chosen for God to "adopt" Jesus (if indeed it was an adoption). The adoptionist theory by itself does not expect Jesus to be baptized by John the Baptist. It would be more easily expected to happen after Jesus faces down Satan's temptations, or at the Transfiguration event, or at the resurrection. So, the adoptionist theory does not serve to explain why Jesus was baptized with explanatory power.
OK, that's a good point.
Your argument was that a case can be made that the passages in the gospels quoting Jesus encouraging adherence to Jewish law were anti-Marcionite additions to the texts of the gospels, because Paul or Pseudo-Paul seems to be explicit in rejecting the necessity of following the Jewish law in any form. I made my case for how we know exactly why Paul had the position he did with respect to Jewish law, because the evangelical problems are made abundantly clear in the epistle to the Galatians. They had nothing to do with Marcion. We can make perfect sense of what is going on with Paul if we leave anything from the second century out of it. If you want to explain the Judaism of Jesus in the gospels, then I think it is best done with the Judaism of the historical Jesus, not with either Marcionism or anti-Marcionism.
Yes, you are right.
Maybe you should explain further. You think that the written silences of Jesus and his disciples is the reason why the theory was developed that Jesus was poor? It wasn't because almost everyone was poor? It wasn't because Jesus' father was a tekton? It wasn't because Jesus was reputedly from a town nobody heard about in rural Galilee? It wasn't because Jesus elevated the status of the poor? It wasn't because Jesus reputedly had his disciples depend on charitable hosts? It wasn't because the disciples were reputedly uneducated lower-class men? No, you think the theory that the community of Jesus was poor and illiterate was devised as a way to explain why we have no direct written attestation of Jesus. Agree or disagree?
It wasn't sudden. It took decades, but the religion spread beyond its initial demographics, and such development is generally what happens when a religion grows.

aa5874

Why does God need to adopt an ORDINARY man? Your explanation does NOT make sense if you propose that Jesus was just MERELY human.

Jesus was a NOBODY from Nazareth, a Sinner like any other man and was baptized by John.

John probably BAPTIZED hundreds of human beings.

There is ZERO records that Jesus did anything of note in Nazareth BEFORE he was Baptized. John did NOT even know who Jesus was.

Once you remove the Hocus-Pocus from the Baptism then we are left with NOTHING of historical or Theological value.

Mark 1:9-11 - That is all. Jesus as human has No theological or historical value.

Jesus was a NOBODY in gMark on the day he was supposedly baptized by John if you PRESUME that Jesus was HUMAN.

Doug Shaver

I don't know what you mean by "reciprocal expectations." Maybe you have explained it elsewhere in this thread, but I'm not going to re-read 60-plus posts to check on that, sorry.

I cannot give a complete account of my methodology in one post, but I will say that it boils down to the application of the scientific method to historical questions. We have questions about what happened in the past. We have a body of evidence pertinent to those questions. Our answers should explain the entirety of that evidence as parsimoniously as possible.

I would also insist that up to some point, reasonable people can disagree about whose answer really is the most parsimonious. That is, among other reasons, because nobody has yet come up with an uncontroversial metric for gauging parsimony.

andrewcriddle

He appears to have been initially concerned about being crushed. (He landed after the crowd moved back to a safe distance)

The facts about Archbishop_Abuna_Yesehaq and his ministry in Jamaica seem disputed. (The wiki page has a history of being written and rewritted on behalf of various agendas.)

Andrew Criddle

ApostateAbe

OK, that's cool, so here is what I told Toto:

So, you may have noticed that I narrowed my set of criteria to only two: plausibility and explanatory power, and those criteria are drawn from among the five criteria so-called Argument (or Inference) to the Best Explanation. Those two criteria, in my opinion, are most important, and the other three can be incorporated into that simplification.

I will call this formulation the methodology of Reciprocal Expectations. Simply stated:

For a theory to be most probable, the evidence should expect the theory (plausibility) and the theory should expect the evidence (explanatory power). If, for a given theory, both criteria are fulfilled significantly more than for all competing theories, then the given theory is probable.

What is your opinion on that?