Originally Posted by No Robots

I would say, though, that the evangelists had a heck of time trying to fit Christ into Jewish expectations. I mean, this guy, the Messiah? Some schmuck running around stirring up the rabble rather than leading the nation to victory over the hated Kittim (Romans)?

Originally Posted by bacht

Well, by the 2nd C the Christian movement was dominated by Gentiles (after two Jewish revolts), so it was mostly OT quote-mining by then I suspect

Originally Posted by No Robots

Well, my only point here is that that Klausner does assert that the Gospels do present a single personality. That they present different aspects of this personality is true, yet nevertheless the one coherent personality of Christ is present in all four Gospels. In the same sense, Einstein says:

No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.

I will certainly have to look again at Klausner and at Montefiore in order to be certain that what you say is accurate. If it is, then I would disagree with them. I suspect, however, that it is more likely that they would say that John's presentation of Christ differs to some extent from that of the Synoptics, which is simply an obvious truism. But I think they would maintain that John simply takes a different approach in presenting the same personality. I mean, how many great men have biographers who take radically different approaches? Although there are differences, there is also a fundamental unity binding all four Gospels, as Brunner makes clear:

So far as the essential mystical characterization is concerned, the Gospels speak with four voices and yet in unison, but the Synoptics have pride of place. For it is precisely in the non-learned, uneducated Synoptics that the mystical self-awareness and the mystical foundation of Christ's entire life stands out. Here it is far more credible, fresh and magnificent than in John, who manifests his rabbinic and halakhic training and at the same time engages in Philonic and Gnostic religious philosophizing.

...

For the most part they are all Synoptics, and all four of them present the same synoptic reality. Whether one has more or less passages than another is neither here nor there, it is simply due to the particular agents of transmission, the scribes, the redactors. But this mystical, synoptic reality must be there, without any gradation in its essence, as the centre of the personality, the centre of the whole range of ideas. And this is the case, both with the Synoptics and in John.

You can read the above in context here.

I am myself in pursuit of the answer to this question. While Brunner's book on Christ was published in 1921, only one year before Klausner's book was published, Brunner had been writing outspokenly about Christ since 1893. One of the things that intrigues me most is the extent to which Brunner's work, and in particular his book on Christ, meets with silence. There are notable exceptions, of course.

Originally Posted by PhilosopherJay

I tend to believe that Einstein's calling the Bible "primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish" does not really fit with the account by Vierick that he said, "No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life."

Originally Posted by No Robots

But the essential content of the Gospels was established prior to that and was wholly Jewish. See The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition by Birger Gerhardsson (chapter available here).

Originally Posted by bacht

The question for me is, "What was Mark trying to do?" If in fact his story is entirely midrash, put together from OT scriptures, then the issue of historical reliability is null. For example, was he a Syrian making a commentary on Judean Christianity after the fall of the Temple?

Originally Posted by No Robots

The Gospels are a fusion of Christ's meshalim with the midrashim of his interpreters. You would do well to take a look at Gerhardsson, who writes:

The primary characteristic of all of the books in the New Testament is undoubtedly the central role played in them by the person of Jesus Christ. This is especially obvious in the four gospels. They were written exclusively in order to present Jesus. Other people of course appear in them too: Jesus has his followers; he soon has his bitter opponents; the masses respond to his activity, first receptively, only to turn against him at the end. The disciples, the opponents, and the masses all play distinctive roles, which the evangelists describe with consistency. But the spotlight is always on Jesus. The purpose of the Gospels is to describe him and no one else: his appearance in Israel, what he said, what he did, what happened to him. It is true that there are traditions which deal with John the Baptist, but this is the case simply because his fate becomes intertwined with that of Jesus.--The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition, p. 27-8.

Originally Posted by bacht

I don't see anything here that doesn't follow the usual apologetic treatment - you're saying that the Gospels are history, I say no - stalemate?

Originally Posted by No Robots

I think we can both agree that the Gospels are historical, that they are literature originating within a particular cultural framework. This cultural framework has certain properties that provide crucial guidance in our understanding of the documents. What is possible and what is impossible in the literature of first-century Judaism? Knowledge of the literary and cultural context in which the Gospels were produced provides sufficient insight to draw some firm conclusions about their content.

Originally Posted by bacht

What is not possible imo is that a supernatural being like the one described in the Gospels actually walked the earth without anyone noticing

Sorry, I tried to believe the traditional interpretation of these stories, but I can't