Amaleq13

I've read what I understand to be the primary arguments for before, during or shortly after the war and I've found "shortly after" more compelling.

Unfortunately useless, I'm afraid.

And I don't know what to make of the short reference, either, given the uncertainty of the TF.

So any argument that depends on a particular interpretation suffers from it, IMO.

It seems like another rorschach ink blot mess to me. I've never relied upon the contents for any conclusion. Do you think it will be relevant?

What do you mean by "circulation"?

rlogan

ok so that gets us 70's-80ish Mark.

I am thinking you have Matthew in the first century? Luke?


Fine. Then discarded.

There is a chapter on "sects of the Jews". That Christianity is not in there could mean a number of things and I do not wish to suggest one thing or another.

Have you a position on that? Why isn't a dicussion of Christianity in the "Sects of the Jews"? Not interested in arguing. It is a historical marker that needs to be addressed, that's all.



It does in my case, and for one thing the catalogue of forgeries in christianity are important to assemble within an argument about its history. IMHO the concerted effort to establish a fraudulent history of Christian origins is important.

Prior to the Christians doing it in the Bible we have the Hebrews doing it with a completely fabricated history of Adam and Eve, right through Moses and exile into and deliverance from Egypt, wandering in the desert, etc. All myth.


More on this in a moment.

Somebody wrote them. Somebody was using them. I do not know the extent but I have an extremely reasonable suggestion that the more Christian documents are in circulation, the more likely it is that such documents will come to the attention of authorities looking for information on Christians.

The word "circulation" is also I think a very reasonable one in capturing the clear intent of these documents. The purpose of Mark is not to cover up a secret the Christians do not want revealed. The entire purpose is to put the story quite literally into circulation - to spread that gospel far and wide.

Likewise the Pauline material is not produced with the intention of keeping the Pauline version of Christ a tightly guarded secret. These are instead used as liturgical devices, and are composed as such.

Do you disagree?

If the full body of Ignatia exist and all manner of other alleged early Christian documents, and if there are great martyrs going through spectacular public sufferings, then the proposition that all of this is going to be noted by either historians or in official correspondence is more than reasonable.

If there are two or three short, obscure Christian documents in one geographic area then you can more easily argue nothing would be noticed.

But when you have fifty of them spread all over the known world, with many of them alleging to act as correspondence between groups, great persecutions, investigations of them with torture, etc - then the lack of contemporary extrabiblical notice becomes untenable.

One has to deal with all of the evidence. The material either has to be accepted as genuine and placed in a timeline, or judged as fabrication and assigned to Eusebius or Marcion or whomever. It can't just be ignored. It exists and has a reason for existing. That reason is either consistent or inconsistent with the working hypothesis.

Cheers.

Amaleq13

Matthew is after Mark but before Luke and the final version of John at the end of the century.

Mark - 70's; Matthew - 80's; Luke - 90's; John - turn of the century?

Agreed. I'm not sure that what came to be Christianity would have registered to outsiders as a separate sect at the time. I think it is possible that, when Josephus wrote, they were just starting to ping the radar as different enough from other Jews to be called something unique.

Agreed. It is one of the main reasons I consider the evidence to be insufficient for a conclusive resolution. If not read aloud during services, I think it is safe to assume he intended for the message to be conveyed.

I'm not sure about the extent, either. It seems possible that while Paul's letters, for example, were read in the churches to which they were sent but not copied and distributed to members. I see no evidence that Paul assumed any of his letter recipients were familiar with his other churches or the contents of his letters to them.

I accept that Matthew and Luke knew Mark but I'm not sure that is true of their audiences.

What makes you think Mark is a proselytizing tool rather than an in-house reinforcement of the groups' beliefs?

Paul seems to me to be responding to specific issues raised within "his" churches and writes in an effort to correct. I don't know if that constitutes a disagreement or not.

I think this is closer to what I imagine but with more than just two or three.

I disagree. When all one really knows for sure is that what we have has been worked over by somebody but we can't be sure how much, you simply cannot claim to have any sort of reliable conclusion about it and cannot derive a reliable conclusion with it as a basis.

Or it is a fuzzy gray that could go either way.

I reject the notion that the issue is so easily resolved. The evidence is too much of a mess.

rlogan

Thank you. A little surprised with John, but just trying to nail things down.


I didn't want to suggest, but was more interested in seeing in whether you viewed Christianity as springing from within Judaism or whether it was decisively non-Judaic and merely using Hebrew literature as a credentialing facade. Seems you are saying it came from within Judaism.


OK, so a very reluctant agreement that biblical material was meant to be conveyed to other people.



Well as a technical matter the congregations are on the order of 98% illiterate.

The second comment has two ways of approach. I think them all fabricated and in Marcionite circles, so they are evaluated in that context for me. They have superficial pretexts not requiring much detail in establishing some kind of church heirarchy. There isn't one.

Not argument. Just happily working through the evidence, very willing to listen to an alternative point of view.

My keen interest is in fleshing out what your view is in a historical jesus context, so I think I am gathering so far that you think the letters genuine correspondences, yes? In which case we see Paul acting as a central authority over the Churches he wrote to, but the letters not showing the churches interacting laterally amongst themselves much.


Do you have an idea about these audiences being from different geographical areas? Or are they like denominations? I see it a little differently in terms of Matthew coming later and at a time when this business of credentialling with HB prophecy became important. But my view is not important. Just happy to share.


Mark 16:15 Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature

Geez, I can post boatloads more, but I think if one does not already have the impression that spreading the gospel is an inherent objective - essentially a mandate from Jesus himself - then I am not sure what to say really. It is so clear to me with the glorifying of martyrs, giving up all your property and family and etc. for the sake of spreading the gospel - how could there be any question about this?

But again I am just trying to understand what this version of the historical jesus approach is. And I am seeing that spreading the gospel is not really a part of it. That a good deal of this Christian literature exists, but is not circulating in any way that causes notice. There is instead for you a great deal of reluctance to cast Christianity and these works in any kind of proselytizing way - no real outreach effort or proud gladness in being Christian.

I don't want to put words in your mouth but this reluctance is evident to me at present. Happy to change my understanding though.


I don't think this a productive point of inquiry but am surprised you do not take 1 Corinthians as responding to a Church disagreement. That is precisely what Paul says he is writing about at the outset:


I want to be fair and just understand your position. We have on the order of 50 things to contend with - that is what I mean. We have to make decisions about them. Do we take them at face value, are they inventions that came later, or as in the case of the TF you have made the decision that it cannot be used.

That is all I am saying. A person can't arbitirarily ignore these 50 or so items and just choose which ones to bring into the analysis. I asked specifically about the TF and you had a reason for not using it. But you considered it and did not tell me out of hand we should just ignore it for no reason.

So now we have a huge mass of other material to contend with. Dozens of things. And if you just have not considered them yet because you have not gotten around to it, that is fine. Just asking. But we have to consider them, don't we?

I think the number of books in circulation, to what extent is not at issue for the moment, is more than a dozen in your version, is it not? By the time of Pliny-Trajan?

Four gospels, and a group of Paul's works (not sure what you take as genuine). I would throw in the Didache and actually agree to that (but not the others!)

But I think (correct me if I am wrong) you accept a dozen or so in circulation and most of the rest of it on Peter's site has not actually been "ruled on" in your mind - right?



I am not trying to have hypotheses compete with one another at this moment. Please set aside the notion we are fighting over HJ/MJ approaches. I am really trying to see how things fit into the HJ approach.

I am trying to take these pieces of literature and fit them into a working hypothesis, which seems really reasonable to me. And if we encounter things that seem inconsistent with whatever the working hypothesis is, then the working hypothesis has to be revised, but it does not mean wholesale rejection of an entire thesis. It might mean dating Mark post-70 instead of pre-70 or whatever but I think you are just assuming I am waiting here to pounce on any little thing to say ha ha see how myth is right and HJ is wrong.

Obviously I am making commentary along the way but it is by nature not an argument - just sharing with you. And I am not defensive about having anything inconsistent pointed out in how I view things. Quite interested, actually in honing my views to be better capable of explaining the data.

cheers

mountainman

Didn't Buddha do the same thing 500 years before?
Wasn't he supposed to have sent out emmissaries to the world?

And in response to your quote from Mark, it might be argued that
the author of the Acts of Paul used this phrase as the basis for
his narrative concerning "Eyebrows" Paul's baptising a lion.

andrewcriddle

Probably not part of the original text of Mark.

Andrew Criddle

maryhelena

I just looked over this thread and see that I did not respond to this post.....apologies...

Yes, I agree that the HJ camp want to retain the normal man they assume is under the mythological coating - and, at the same time, like to think their position is more rational than the Biblical Jesus position. Both camps assume a historical Jesus - they only disagree on what he did. The HJ camp is, in essence, only a variation on the Biblical Jesus position....

For anyone who wants to retain a 'real' Jesus of Nazareth, a flesh and blood Jesus, it seems the choice is between The Magic Man and The Phantom Everyman....

With such irrational conclusions it is truly amazing that people in these two camps don't think it might be a good idea to check their premises.....

aa5874

It would appear then that the HJ camp will have to discredit the authors of the NT and church writers as writers of fiction which will in turn deprive them of any credible sources to show that Jesus was not a god/man.

It is very clear that the authors of the NT and the church writers presented Jesus as both God and man, they presented a myth.

This is an excerpt of the preface of De Principiis by Origen. This passage truly is representative of a mythical/fictional Jesus.

The search for an HJ, a Jesus not found in the NT, is an admission that the Jesus of the NT was not historical at all, but was framed as myth.

But from where can HJers get credible information about their Jesus?

It was the incredibilty of the NT and church writers that caused them to start their search. Every "peel" removed from their "onion" signifies a rejection of the evidence presented, their "onion" is actually supplied by the church writers and the NT.

HJers will soon realise that they do not have an "onion" but a phantom, the very "peels" are not even real but fiction.

Amaleq13

It seems fundamentally Jewish to me. I'm "reluctant" to assume that Paul intended for his letters to go beyond the specific community to which they were sent because I know of no evidence to suggest this to be the case. The standard ones, yes. He is trying to act as a central authority but with limited success, I think. Not really. I've read some interesting speculations but nothing particularly compelling other than spin arguing for Mark in Rome. That seems analogous. First, I agree with Andrew regarding the authenticity of this passage but, second, a desire to spread "the gospel" of Jesus Christ does not necessarily entail retelling "the Gospel story". Paul spread "the gospel" but not the story. Spreading the good news precedes the story as told by Mark. No, I'm just questioning whether we can assume Mark's story was created to be part of that proselytizing effort as opposed to being created in response to a need of the community for more information about Jesus than Paul's good news provides. The man became a myth but later myth believers needed a man. Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant that I didn't know if that constituted a disagreement with you. Yes. That sounds about right. They are out there but I would think that those who knew about all of them would have been few. Yes. I don't know if it matters to you but my "non-preposterous" MJ thesis uses the same body of evidence. The only thing that changes, I think, is how one interprets Paul. Nope, I'm just trying to be as precise as possible to reduce confusion.

rlogan

Yes, I anticipated this response, but you see my companion seems to have located Mark so early in the 1st century, along with all the other dating, so as to make this a moot point for discussion about what extrabiblical markers in the 90's through the early first century mean.

Moreover, it is hardly alone in its urging.