aa5874

I am claiming that the 70 year number symbolism is based on fiction and has no real significance. The author of Matthew and gLuke's date of birth are not consistent and the year of the supposed death of the so-called Jesus is really unknown.

aa5874

And what year was that?

The year when the sun went dark for three hours on the 14th day of Nissan.

According to NASA such a year is yet to come.

Mark 15:33 - There was never ever a year with such a day on the 14th day of Nissan at 3.00 pm in the 1st century.

spamandham

I don't know why you seem to think of the canon as a cohesive single book. It's a collection of books, by different authors, each with their own motives.

maryhelena

Not at all, that is your take on things, not mine.

You might choose to view the gospels as ‘fiction’ - I don’t.

The gospel writers were not writing with the intent to entertain or amuse. Luke says he wants to write an “orderly account” of “things that have been fulfilled among us”. Luke is compiling an account of how people have interpreted their historical experience. Now, you might well find that the interpretation so recorded, to your way of thinking, is nonsense. However, your assessment does not turn Luke' intent, that he is recording things that have been 'fulfilled among us", into 'fiction'. To disregard the intent of the writer is not a way in which one can begin to understand what has been recorded.

What most of us in these Biblical threads are after, I would imagine, is to understand the early beginnings of Christianity. For myself, my interest has nothing at all to do with theological ideas and how they may have developed. I am more interested in a political take on things. Primarily, to put theology back in its box by having it removed from the social/political environment. One approach to this is to demonstrate that the core belief of Christianity - the symbol of the historically crucified saviour is mythology. Theology needs to be exposed for what it is - human imaginings. All very well if kept in a box....but dangerous when allowed to infiltrate a social environment. Christianity, with its claimed historical core of Jesus of Nazareth, is the theology with an Achilles Heel - a very vulnerable weak spot.

To view the gospels as ‘fiction’ is to miss a very big opportunity. These gospels are the bedrock upon which the claim of a historical Jesus of Nazareth rests. Hence, the gospels need to be examined in the finest detail possible - and that includes looking out for the use of number symbolism. Particularly when it is a mythological Jesus that is deemed to be relevant to the storyline. A mythological man does not need, obviously, to just cruise along in some predetermined, historical, chronological time period. His beginnings and his end are free from such considerations. Not just one chronological time frame but multiple symbolic time frames - number symbolism used as a context, a framework within which to develop a mythological storyline.

Or, to refer back to the intent of Luke in regard to his gospel: an “orderly account” of “things that have been fulfilled among us”. Fiction is far too shallow a word to capture the real, true, experiences that Luke (or whoever is writing under that name) is endeavouring to relate. We can argue until the cows come home re the meaning of what some people experienced, or interpreted, from their historical time period - what we should not be doing is to seek to deny their reality by labelling it ‘fiction’.

Jayrok

:lol: I love Internet apologists. Cram it all together and make it fit, no matter what. Damn the logic as long as we can keep believers believing.

But you didn't address the original post's concern. 14th, 15th, 58th, 147th day of Nissan...fine, but what year?

aa5874

Now, this is so absurd.

Are you claiming that the Gospels are true?

Mathew 1.18, Luke 1.35 and Acts 1.9 must be fiction.

Are you claiming that your 70 year symbolism is based on truth?

But, do you not realise that you may also be writing fiction or non-sense when you claim that "LUKE wrote a gospel?

No author identified themselves as Luke in any Gospel.

Well, if you don't want to know how the theological ideas may have developped, you really don't want to know about the early beginnings of Christianity.

Perhaps you are only interested in your 70 year symbolism.

It is extremly critical and important to try to deduce how the theological ideas about Jesus Christ developped.

Then you may easily recognise that the Gospels were fiction and may not have been compatible with the theological ideas of the 1st century in Judaea.


But, to be interested in the politics, you must first ascertain historicity. There is a direct relationship with "politics" and "reality", so you cannot ignore the possibility that your politics may be based on fiction, in which case, you may only be spreading propaganda.

May I remind you that "politics" was inextricably tied to "theology" in antiquity. The Caesars were even regarded as Gods.


To view the Gospels as true is just absurd.

Matthew 1.18. Luke 1.35 and Acts 1.9 are all fiction. Jesus Christ came to earth as fiction and left the same way.


Once you admit that Jesus was a myth, you are admitting that the Gospels are fiction. Fine details actually then become irrelevant.


Again once you admit Jesus was a myth, your 70 year symbolism has no real significance. All your chronology are in the realm of the unreal, the unknown, your imagination and your take of things.

But, I can show you the Church's take of things. I can show Luke's take on things.

The theology of the Church was developped on fiction.

Lu 1:35 - Lu 24:51 - Now, please tell me when did these things really happen, please tell me about the chronological order?


Again, you cannot show that there was a writer that had real true experiences as found in gLuke. The author is unknown and even the time the author wrote is uncertain, but it is even more problematic when it is realised that the author may have simply copied his information from some other source and may have just made up the rest of the Jesus story by relying on the writings of Josephus, perhaps one of your supposed inventors.

maryhelena

By all means view the gospels as 'fiction' if that is your choice. I personally find such an attitude towards the gospels to be unwarranted and does nothing whatsoever for any attempt to understand their content. Which is a content that endeavors to capture, however inadequate, a people' interpretation of their historical experience. A content that seeks to capture meaning within the often meaningless reality of human existence.

And quite frankly, I'm not in the least bit interested in what the Church, I presume you are referring to the Catholic Church, got up to.

Amaleq13

simplistic: characterized by extreme simplism; oversimplified

DCHindley

I am an insurance premium auditor by profession, and one of the things I have to do with my current employer is understand how an employer calculated the wages they reported to us (I work for a Workers Compensation Bureau in a monopoly state where employers report wages to us after they have paid it). We "back into" figures all the time. We also have to calculate the correct amount of wages that should have been reported to us, and when some of the tax records we need to do so are not available, or are reporting wages incorrectly, we also back into numbers we need using other tax reports that are correctly reported. The same thing can be done with dates.

Referring to Jack Finnigan's books on Biblical Chronology, from reading this it is clear later Christian chronographers like Julius Africanus, Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius did this sort of thing all the time. This is also the case when reading any work that attempts to decipher the chronological markers in Josephus' works. Sometimes they built on the work of their predecessors (including their mistakes, or with modifications they thought appropriate) and sometimes they used other sources to challenge the results of others.

Of course a whole range of issues enter into this sort of reconstructed chronologies: whether the sources they utilized counted regnal years using any one of approximately three different systems commonly used; or whether the calendar started the count in the spring or fall or some arbitrary point like January 1 or March 1st; were the months fixed (like the Roman, or arbitrary such as the modified 365 day Egyptian year used for astronomical calculations used by Ptolemy) or lunar (like most of the others); were lunar months determined by calculation or observation; were months of a lunar calendar arbitrarily equated with fixed Roman months; the list goes on and on. Dates calculated one way are often picked up and used as if calculated by another method.

When backing into a date, errors get introduced and calculations get built on the errors of their sources. The best you can get are approximations. In my case, if the wages we calculate differ from the wages the employer calculated, we don't even rebill the employer unless the amount of WC premium dollars is over $200. The difference in paid wages can be thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars off, before we reach that point.

That doesn't explain why the Christians who produced the NT, and other early and later Christian writers, didn't seem to have a firm understanding of the date Jesus was executed by Pilate. My personal opinion is that the faith of these Christians functioned like a Greek mystery religion, and thus operated almost exclusively on a symbolic level. If that symbolism was based on any kind of historical events, these authors (and their communities) were so far removed from those events that they had to guess when they actually occurred. Any folks who actually lived through those events were either dead (war, attrition, etc) or had gone in a completely different direction (like the "desposyni" relatives of Jesus led by his relatives, etc) and were no longer in communication with them. Early Christians weren't sure what happened in the key years following Jesus' death - look at the differing stories about James the Just and Judas. I'd date the point where their memory gets legendary to around the time of the Jewish rebellion.

DCH

aa5874

But, I understand the content of the Gospels, I understand that it is fiction.

Again, you may be propagating fiction when you claim that the Gospels represent people's interpretation of their historical experiences when the Gospels writers may have simply copied information from some other source and made up the rest from their imagination.


I have shown you Luke 1.35 and 24.51, these passages are obviously fiction, they do not represent the historical experiences of the author or his sources.

Well, the character called Luke is a product of the Church real or imagined.

You can't do politics without history, and you are not interested in the history of the Church.

You really don't know what you are interested in.

As soon as it is realised that the history of the Church was based on fiction then the fabrication of Paul's Jesus is no longer meaningless.