graymouser

If Greece were kinder to the preservation of ancient documents, much of the sighing done by antiquarians - and do not mistake me for a Biblical scholar, I am looking at it from a historical standpoint - would not happen.

I do see your point about a common time before which no extant Jesus writings speak, and I see that the time limit itself is quite appropriate.

I feel that this still leaves us with no more proof that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels lived than proof that Odysseus lived.

-Wayne

Vinnie

A harmonized four-fold Gospel Jesus is as mythological as Zues is. The "Jesus Christ" of the Gospels is a mythological chimera. I speak of "Jesus ben Joseph", the man underneath the embellished harmonized portrait of Jesus in the canon. I speak of the Jesus ultimately behind Q, Thomas. Pre-Markan traditions, the Jerusalem school, the original disciples and so on.

Vinnie

Vorkosigan

The reasons are well known to exegetes, Vinnie. The gospels are fictions and all relationships in them are fictions; where a "history" reproduces a fiction, it is itself a fiction (that applies to both the TF and the Antiquities 20.200 passage). Paul never refers to James as Jesus brother, but simply gives him a title or a position in a group. You can only get to authenticity for 20.200 if you backread the gospels into Paul.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

No gospel texts consist of "inherited" movable pericopes. The sources for these stories are in the OT or similarly in the general culture, or from creativity. Please demonstrate that any source in the gospels is "inherited" by transmission from an putative historical Jesus or anyone around him.

Vorkosigan

Vinnie

Lord have mercy.....

The crucifixion of Jesus in an "inheritided tradition". Embarrassment and multiple attestation.

Vinnie

Weltall

Actually the only sources we have for this event are the gospels and they contradict themselves on this rather important event.
If you have an extrabiblical attestation for the crucifixion I'd love to see it.

Doctor X

Looks over the field. Notes it did not take the hounds long. . . .

. . . instructs Seed to open a Midleton cask in honor of a truly religious holiday. . . .

--J. "Slainte!" D.

rlogan

Uh, exactly which disciples were in attendance at the crucifixion?

Doctor X

Uh . . . Fred, I think . . . you know the one who ran the projector after the Last Supper. . . .

--J.D.

Vorkosigan

No problem then. Just supply the independent line of evidence that some gospel text has been inherited from Jesus or those around him.

Please explain how you know the Crucifixion was embarrassing to early adherents. Also, there is no multiple attestation of an event that allegedly took place under Pilate in Jerusalem. That is known only from later fictional tales, all dependent on one another.

In other words, you have neither "embarrassment" nor "multiple attestation."

Vorkosigan