No Robots

Completely false. As one website puts it, "For almost a generation before our earliest written sources, in the period between A.D. 30 and 65, the gospel material circulated by word of mouth," or in the words of a scholarly source, "For it must not be forgotten that the materials of the Synoptic Gospels were in existence before they assumed a written form. Literary analysis is apt to forget this obvious fact, and to proceed by literary comparison alone."

No Robots

The Gospels were written by, for and about Jews. The anti-Jewish elements in them are part of intra-Jewish factional polemic.

No Robots

Whoa! Lay off the Acharya S., bro.

Toto

As far as I can tell, bible-history.com and the "International Standard Bible Encyclopedia" are apologetic Christian sources, not critical scholarship.

The whole idea that there were oral sources from the time of Jesus that fed into the gospels, making them virtually eyewitness testimony, is just Christian mythology. There is no evidence to support it, and you will not find any current scholar who finds any explanatory value in it.

Toto

I didn't get this from Acharya S. From Samson

No Robots

Wow! That's really putting yourself out there. Here goes:

In the last thirty years there have been significant developments in the application of orality studies to the Gospels. The objective of this article is to provide an overview of the field through a survey of its leading proponents, including Werner Kelber, Joanna Dewey, Paul Achtemeier, Peter Botha, Richard Horsley and Jonathan Draper, Kenneth Bailey, James Dunn, Richard Bauckham, David Rhoads and Whitney Shiner. The essay begins with a discussion of several foundational studies, before turning specifically to the reconception of orality and the implication of this research for the Gospels. The study concludes that, while an appreciation of orality has made inroads into certain segments of Gospels research, it remains a neglected and underexploited dimension of NT interpretation.--Orality and the Gospels: A Survey of Recent Research / Kelly R. Iverson. In Currents in Biblical Research October 2009 vol. 8 no. 1 71-106.

Thus the literary shift from unconnected anecdotes about Jesus, which resemble rabbinic material, to composing them together in the genre of an ancient biography is not just moving from a Jewish environment to Graeco- Roman literature. It is actually making an enormous Christological claim. Rabbinic biography is not possible, because no rabbi is that unique; each rabbi is only important in as much as he represents the Torah, which holds the central place. To write a biography is to replace the Torah by putting a human person in the centre of the stage. The literary genre makes a major theological shift which becomes an explicit Christological claim — that Jesus of Nazareth is Torah embodied.--What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography / Richard A. Burridge, p. 304.

It seems to me that the only people who do not acknowledge the oral origins of the Gospels are the fundies and the mythicists. Yet another point in common between these two groups.

No Robots

Seems like the usual mythicist hatchet job. Look at who is cited. And look at how the only other view mentioned is that of "traditional and conservative biblical scholars who consider Samson to be a literal historical figure and thus refute any connections to mythological heroes." Terrible.

Diogenes the Cynic

Only Mark's trial before the Sanhedrin is patently spurious and implausible. There was nothing unbelievable about an arrest, summary execution or even an intervening interrogation by the Roman Governor. Josephus describes an extremely similar scenario himself.

No Robots

For Constantin Brunner, Samson is the ultimate anarchist. He writes:

Samson was ever and always my hero, the humorous hero who behaves so heavenly in the surrounding hell. – Recently I read to Inge his story; she had only read the Iliad. Alas God, what is Achilles against Samson! Certainly, very beautiful, but more? No, Greece must always shut its mouth once Judea starts to speak.

Toto

How do you think anything that you posted supports your position?

Yes, Biblical scholars, after years of claiming that the gospels were based on oral legends, have started to look at anthropological studies of "orality." And guess what they have found? Oral legends are not reliable sources of history. People make things up (who would have imagined that??) People shape stories for their own purposes and don't let the facts get in the way.

At the same time, other Biblical scholars have traced every element of the gospel stories to previous literary sources - in particular the Septuagint.

Burridge has been critiqued here so often in the past that it's no use to cite him. Nothing that he wrote allows you to claim that there is a shred of history in the gospels.

There's no room left for these oral legends about Jesus. They have vanished without a trace, if they ever existed.