outhouse

No you have been refuted


just because there may have been earlier oral tradition in a johanine community, possibly based on existing scripture and then redacted to meet johanine wants and needs, doesnt mean your even close to correct.

like usual your way out there bud, wrong.

Diogenes the Cynic

It is at least theoretically possible that GJohn contains material that goes back to a witness, but "theoretically possible" is a long way away from being demonstrable as true or even likely.

aa5874

Surely, you do not understand the difference between Speculation and Theory.

A theory is developed from Data.

In gJohn it is claimed that Jesus was BEFORE all things and was God the Creator that was RAISED from the dead and ATE Fish after his resurrection.

The DATA from gJohn support FICTION.

It is NOT theoretically possible that anyone of antiquity was a witness of gJohn's Jesus.

Johnn 1:1-3 KJV No-one could have been a WITNESS to the Word called Jesus--NO-ONE--NOBODY.

gJohn's Jesus was NOT theoretically possible.

spin

This may have been a response to my previous post, Diogenes, but if so it doesn't seem to have answered my questions, except for one. I made no reference to midrash or lying. I asked what fiction entailed, if it mapped to anything in your understanding that isn't included in reality, ie not your historical1.

I see notions such as "fiction" and "forgery" as intentioned acts, the first aimed at creating non-reality, with the second at deception for gain. There is a loose use of "fiction" to mean "things not real", but then the switch to intended non-reality is too easy, when analyzing the literature that concerns us. It is too easy to engage in certain failure either at analysis or to communicate because information is negated inadvertently through one's use of loose language. Imagine how many people equate fiction with myth, as you equate history with past reality.

stephan huller

But isn't it curious that Mark and John are also the names of a particular disciple (or 'hearer of the disciples'). No one has ever adequately explained what a 'John Mark' is. He is often identified as a gospel writer - but which one? Usually Mark of course. But John is a strange gospel. Could it exist as a self-standing gospel? I don't think so. So too especially with respect to Mark. Mark on its own is bizarre. Christianity could have developed from 'the gospel according to Mark.' There really is no religious use for the text (this is what makes it appealing to moderns - it seems 'historical' because it lacks the overt mysticism of John.

The only gospels which could work as stand alone gospels are Matthew and Luke and no one heard of Luke before Irenaeus. So we're stuck with just Matthew and we hear communities that only used Matthew. What then are Mark and John?

Diogenes the Cynic

I tried to answer your question as best I could. Let's put it this way, I think the Gospels are akin to the bullshit "reenactments" of ghost stories and UFO abductions that you see on the (risibly named) History Channel. A staged and contrived presentation of an urban legend which may or may not have had some base level of truth, or been rooted in some genuinely historical event.

The Gospel writers, in my opinion were not writing myth or fiction intended to be understood as fiction. They thought they were writing history, albeit "history" in the loose sense that the ancients regarded written history. The emphasis was on the story and the lesson (or the aggrandizement of kings), not so much on accuracy.

As for my definition of "history," well that IS the definition of history. If a Jesus existed, you can't make him disappear by trying to impose a specious qualification of the word "historical." That's just sophistry.

outhouse

because fiction and myth go together, and miles vary from one scribe to the next.


written literature didnt not carry the importance of oral tradition, this comes into context when remembering legends of importance and how much artistic freedom was used in its creation and compilation.

spin

Sorry, it must then be my fault in not being clear enough in my questions. I wasn't asking about midrash, lies, gospels--I indicated no interest in the first two; I should, I guess, have done so with gospels, the church fathers, the founding fathers, the god fathers, the Upanishads, the Kalevala, the Elder Eddas, the Mabinogion, Jack Chick tracts, or the pages of Rolling Stone. I was trying to get to the heart of a weaselly term, "fiction", so often used and so unknowingly abused.

If I hadn't got here via the route I did, I'd ask where "urban legends" fit into the gamut of problematic terms we have before us, "fiction", "myth", or some other beast.

Somewhere in "not... fiction intended to be understood as fiction" there is the glimmer of a notion that might be important.

According to the Bantam Junior Dictionary perhaps.

I don't know why you actually said this. It makes little sense and is unrelated to anything we are presently talking about or anything that I have said elsewhere. I have often stated that it is possible Jesus existed. I have also stated that, given my understanding of history (which is so different from yours), that Jesus certainly isn't historical. This in no way is an effort to "make him disappear". You either simply don't, or refuse to, understand the notion of Jesus not being historical with its entailed view of history, or you are just pissing into the wind talking about sophistry.

A major problem in this forum is the lack of communication between members based on fluid or shifting understandings of key terms. It seems to me often to be people not understanding what is being said by someone else because either they don't share the same meanings or that there is a shift in meaning from loose use and specific use, which makes important meanings disappear in the mismapping of meanings, eg if someone uses "fiction" to mean "stuff that is not real", but then jumps to fiction being "stuff intentionally made up for ulterior motives", we lose a lot of the "stuff that is not real" that is not "stuff intentionally made up for ulterior motives". Communication fails. Thoughts fail. You know the way it goes: "if it's not real, it's made up, false, fake, forgery."

Many of the terms we are trying to deal with have these complications. I'm coming to the view that there is almost no hope for a lot of the communication here because it is just so sloppy.

Sorry, I don't have any problem with you. None at all. Just with the dulling of our language and at the inevitable communication failure. So much of what we all talk about just peters out into nothing, like a river that flows into the desert.

Diogenes the Cynic

I still have no idea what you're trying to ask me. "Fiction" means, not non-fiction. How about that? I described what I think their genre is to the best of my ability. I don't know how I could be any more specific or what you think I'm trying to "weasel" out of.

Yes, communication is a problem, as my multiple attempts to find a consensus on a definition for "Historical Jesus" have shown.

Iskander

If the man known to us as Jesus was ever on this earth then he is part of the history of mankind whatever some people might say about him.